Drax announces biofuel project

The largest power station in the UK, Drax, recently signed an agreement with Alstom Power, a French company, to build a biomass fuel processing plant. The £50 million plant could replace as much as 10 per cent of the plant’s coal with biomass materials such as nut shells, sunflower husks, grasses and woodchips.

The agreement signifies the intention to build the largest biomass plant on the planet which would be capable of burning 1.5 million tones of organic material annually. The aim of the project is to decrease the amount of carbon emissions emitted by the power station in North Yorkshire by 15 per cent by 2012.

Chief Executive of Drax, Dorothy Thompson said:  “Delivering significant fuel diversification and carbon abatement is central to our business strategy. Meeting our 10% co-firing target is key to achieving our goal of 15% carbon abatement and this contract represents a major milestone in the execution of our co-firing project.”

Thompson explained that co-firing, the process of burning coal together with biomass, could enable the plant to increase its revenue through the Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) scheme. The scheme assigns income to companies for every megawatt of energy produced through renewable energy sources. In addition, using biomass would enable Drax to operate with fewer CO2 emission permits from the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme.

Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace, said: “This is better than nothing, but it’s not really what biomass should be. Biomass was intended for highly efficient combined heat and power plants, not to provide ROCs to make big unabated coal-fired plants sustainable, because they are not.”