Campaigners say the UK government is gambling with its own climate targets over claims the Drax power plant will produce “negative emissions” because new rules could hand carbon savings to the US.
North Yorkshire power plant bosses have promised ministers that a major project to capture carbon emissions produced by burning imported biomass wood pellets from US forests will count as negative emissions in Britain’s carbon accounts.
However, a working group convened by the United Nations climate authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has begun meetings to draft rules for national greenhouse gas accounting, starting from 2027 at the earliest. Removal” technologies.
Campaigners from Biofuelwatch, a green group, have warned that there is “a strong argument” that so-called negative emissions from bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, known as BEX, “should be attributed to that country Where the wood comes from” not where it is burned to generate electricity.
Biofuelwatch co-director Almuth Ernsting said: “We can’t second-guess what the IPCC expert group will decide, but neither can the UK government.”
The government is considering whether to extend a subsidy scheme paying around £500m a year to Drax until the end of the decade beyond the 2027 deadline. The FTSE 250 company, which earlier this year agreed to pay a £25m fine for misrepresenting its wood pellet sourcing, has already been operating since work began in 2012 to convert a former coal power plant to run on biomass. It has earned more than £7bn in subsidies.
Ernsting said: “It is therefore entirely possible that, if the UK government gives billions of pounds of new subsidies to Drax to help it develop Bex, this could lead to the export of pellets to the United States, Canada and Drax. “The greenhouse gas accounts of other countries will benefit – and not the UK.”
Drax has in the past claimed that its biomass generation is “carbon neutral” because the emissions produced by its chimney stacks are offset by emissions absorbed by trees grown in North America to produce the pellets.
It quietly stopped using the term last year after its own independent advisory board warned against repeating the claims. The company still insists that it will become a carbon-negative power plant after fitting carbon capture technology to its flues in the 2030s because this is the “widely accepted scientific view”, according to a company spokesperson.
This view has been controversial in recent years due to an increasing number of scientific studies by European academics. They fear that the lag between when emissions come out of power plant chimneys and when new trees are able to absorb carbon will create a “carbon debt” that could accelerate the climate crisis in the near term.
A spokesperson for Drax said the company did not expect the IPCC expert group to amend the rules on BEX projects because their work would focus on new carbon capture technologies, such as direct air capture. But in the minutes of the first meeting, seen by the Guardian, there was a presentation on the feasibility of developing new or updated carbon accounting methods for technologies including Bex.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “We follow the agreed international approach to estimating and reporting greenhouse gas emissions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, and we expect the CO2 The occupying country will continue to benefit.” Negative emissions.
“Subsidies for large-scale biomass generators will end in 2027 and we are reviewing the evidence on potential support beyond this,” the spokesperson said.