At war over biomass

As the government prepares to set out its sustainability criteria for biomass subsidies, environmental groups and the renewables industry are at loggerheads, reports Megan Darby

It’s a dispute the biomass lobby would rather not be airing in public. “One shouldn’t have to do this, it’s frustrating,” says Gaynor Hartnell, chief executive of the Renewable Energy Association (REA). “We should be natural allies.”

The environmental campaign groups to which she refers are simply not convinced the industry and government are taking their concerns seriously enough. “We would love not to be having this argument, but we feel duty-bound to,” says RSPB head of climate change Harry Huyton. They are standing alongside the makers of wood products, from furniture to paper, who are resistant to competing for supplies against subsidised power generators.

So what is it that is arousing such strong feelings on both sides? It’s the question of whether we should burn wood for power. The campaigners paint a picture of mighty oak forests being fed into the incinerator, destroying the environment and British businesses in the process. Industry figures, meanwhile, are aggrieved to find themselves under attack over an enterprise they see as part of the solution to climate change. They fear that carbon-saving projects will suffer in the fallout.

The debate is only intensifying as the government prepares to set out its sustainability criteria for biomass subsidies, promised “in the spring”. The NGOs’ message is gaining ground, garnering editorial support in The Times and The Economist as well as The Guardian. Their fingerprints are on a proposed amendment to the Energy Bill that would seriously restrict the kind of large-scale biomass projects that could claim support. The REA and its Back Biomass campaign has started to bite back, accusing the other side of “peddling pseudoscience” and “deliberately facilitating confusion”.

Environmental concerns around the sustainability of bioenergy have been brewing for years. The campaign has progressed from biofuels to bioliquids to biomass. The last kicked off in a big way in November, when Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the RSPB published a joint report making the headline-­grabbing claim that burning wood could be “dirtier than coal”. This was based on an analysis of Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) figures by ­Princeton academic Tim Searchinger.

The controversy centres on the accusation that “whole trees” – which would otherwise be used to make furniture and lock in carbon – are being used for power generation. The Forestry Commission’s Biomass Energy Centre (BEC) rejects the premise in no uncertain terms. Searchinger’s report “bases its main contention on the (rejected) worst-case scenario, and the ‘dirtier than coal’ report appears to base its fundamental arguments on this misleading and uninformed contribution”, it says.

Hartnell is sympathetic to the environmentalists’ aims, but is frustrated by their methods. “It is good to have NGOs pushing the boundaries to make sure these things are done well. They saw that sustainable standards were applied to the biofuels industry,” she says. “They think that the industry is not taking notice of the science, but we are firmly convinced that that is being taken care of… They don’t do themselves any credit when they do pick out science in this way and manipulate it.”

The economics of forest management are a better barrier to the alarming slash-and-burn scenario than regulations could ever be, according to the BEC. Biomass generators simply cannot afford to burn high-value sawlogs. Nor is the definition of a whole tree as clear-cut as it seems, with thinned-out saplings sometimes being thrown on the biomass pile. “We did have some discussions on reporting ‘whole trees’, because it would be nice to put this to bed,” says REA head of policy Paul Thompson. “But if you are getting into measuring the circumference…”

Rather than get out the callipers, Decc proposes requiring biomass generators to emit no more than 285g of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour in order to qualify for subsidies. That represents a saving of 60 per cent of greenhouse gas lifecycle emissions compared with the European Union fossil fuel electricity average. However, it is a moot point whether Decc’s methodology covers every possible puff of CO2.

Searchinger is not cited in the latest briefing from the NGO camp, but the line of argument persists. The campaigners are not buying assurances that the scenario Searchinger describes is unrealistic. Decc expects around 6GW of biomass power to come online by 2017, 12 times the current capacity. That will require up to 30 million tonnes of wood, says Huyton, and “we don’t think it’s credible that will all come from [forestry] residues”.

Decc recently invited representatives from the NGOs to review a prototype of the greenhouse gas emissions calculator it plans to release this summer. If the policymakers hoped to calm the debate, they were disappointed. Friends of the Earth’s Kenneth Richter seized on the preliminary results, blogging: “All scenarios that include the intensification of forest management resulted in higher emissions than the UK grid average… While Decc pointed out that these results are preliminary and will undergo further fine-tuning over the coming months, the overall picture from this is very clear.” Biomass consultant Stewart Boyle, a former campaigner for Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, furiously denounced the exercise as a “travesty” and “a massive own goal by Decc”. He counter-blogged: “If burning trees and other biomass really was worse than coal, then I’m sure a number of REA members would be horrified and have to pack up and go home. However, the Decc modelling exercise is built on sand and has been presented so far in a very unbalanced way.”

The spat sows doubt just when the industry could use a little certainty. “If you look at renewables policy in the UK, it has been fairly up and down – biomass probably more than any other technology,” says Ben Goh, biomass fuel developer at Eon. He cites the overnight cutting in half of subsidies for co-firing with coal, difficulties with grandfathering support and delay in getting crucial detail. “It’s frustrating that just as the policy is being finalised, these points are being made without any realistic alternatives being proposed,” he says.

Most people do not have time to engage with the factual debate and Thompson fears the row will tarnish the whole industry. “It has got to the point where it is potentially extremely damaging. If they do persuade the government to do a U-turn, it is going to undermine confidence in a whole range of projects, not just the kind of thing we are looking at now.”

Biomass is uniquely useful among renewable power options, offering as it does flexible or baseload generation to complement intermittent wind and solar, relatively cheaply. The alternative is more likely to be gas generation than the demand reduction or wind turbines the environmental lobby might wish to believe. The Energy Technologies Institute estimates that meeting the UK’s 2050 carbon target without bio­energy would cost an extra £200 billion.

“There will be a lot of collateral damage,” says Hartnell. Projects will suffer that would make “fantastic” carbon savings. “We really need these environmental NGOs to be supporting renewables against the alternatives and the perceived backlash, not fanning the flames of it.”

This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 17th May 2013.

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