LONDON, UK — As Drax stakeholders gather for the giant biomass company’s annual general meeting on April 25 in London, community leaders, scientists, and activists on both sides of the Atlantic are calling for an end to the logging, wood-pellet making, and burning that is harming communities and forests in the U.S. and Canada, polluting the air in Europe and Asia, and contributing to climate change that affects the entire planet.
Adding insult to injury: from Washington to Westminster, government policies have helped spur the fast growth of the wood-pellet energy industry, and fresh incentives are being considered. According to Drax’s 2023 annual report, the company burned almost six million tonnes of wood and received hundreds of millions of pounds worth of subsidies from the British Government.
Environmental Justice
Drax sources much of the wood burned at its giant power station in North Yorkshire, England, from the American South, where wood pellet plants are disproportionately located in lower-income communities of color. Neighbors say the airborne wood dust and pollution are causing health problems, noise disturbs the usual peace of rural living, and industrial-scale logging robs communities of flood protection and other forest benefits.
To make sure Drax stakeholders know what the wood pellet biomass industry is doing to Southern communities, community representatives from Mississippi are coming to London for Drax’s annual meeting.
“We’re on a local-to-global mission bringing the same dire warnings of the harms to human health that we deliver within our own country,” said Kathy Egland, an environmental advocate with the NAACP. “Our message is the same whether we’re speaking to the U.S. government as it considers tax breaks, or to the manufacturers that supply the wood pellets, or to the U.K., whose great demand for wood pellets is enabled by massive government subsidies.”
“We want both the U.S. and the U.K. to hear our pleas to stop burning wood for energy. Transitioning to bioenergy is simply not clean, safe, or carbon neutral,” Egland added. “The manufacturing process of grinding our forests into wood pellets releases highly toxic pollution that disproportionately affects poor, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. We’re sacrificing people for profit at our planet’s expense.”
Drax has been fined for breaking pollution rules at wood-pellet mills in Mississippi and Louisiana.
“Drax’s wood pellet facilities release harmful pollution that can cause respiratory infections and asthma in nearby communities, which are often communities of color that are already overburdened with industrial pollution,” said Heather Hillaker, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “Even worse, Drax has a long record of exceeding air pollution permit limits, racking up more than $5 million in fines since 2020. Drax’s violations make these already-dirty facilities even more dangerous.”
CO2 Emissions
Drax claims to be leading the way to a zero-emission economy. But the Drax biomass plant in North Yorkshire, which burns wood pellets sourced from the U.S. and Canada, is the single largest carbon dioxide emitter in Britain’s power sector — even as it collects hundreds of millions of pounds annually for providing “renewable” energy. The U.K. government is engaged in a consultation to decide whether to extend these subsidies.
Another carbon cost comes from the fact that cutting down forests releases carbon from trees and soil. Drax claims this carbon is reabsorbed as forests grow back, but scientists say it doesn’t work that way: the new trees absorb only a small fraction of what mature forests absorb, and it takes decades for new growth to catch up – decades we don’t have when it comes to curbing climate change.
“With its global reach and continuing drive for government support, Drax is becoming one of the world’s most dangerous forest destroyers. And still, the company tries to frame its efforts as climate-friendly and good for the environment,” said Adam Colette of Dogwood Alliance. “The truth is that turning forests into tiny wood pellets and shipping them overseas to be burned to make electricity is bad for our forests, communities, and climate.”
Ecosystem effects
Researchers, the BBC and the CBC have all found that in Canada’s British Columbia, Drax is directly sourcing from primary forests – dense, ecologically important forests that have never been logged and that capture and store enormous amounts of carbon.
“Forest-burning biomass industry giant Drax is still sourcing wood from primary forests in British Columbia on a massive scale,” said Richard Robertson, forest campaigner at Stand.earth. “This degrades critical, high-carbon forests in Canada, weakening one of our best defenses against climate change, and releases vast carbon stocks. Burning forests for electricity has no place in a renewable energy future.”
Carbon Capture and Storage
Drax is betting big on an expensive and largely unproven technology called Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage, or BECCS. The company wants to try to capture carbon emissions from wood-pellet-burning plants and store it underground. But while forests are proven to capture and store carbon at a grand scale all around the world, BECCS has struggled to expand beyond a handful of demonstration and limited-purpose projects for economic reasons, and there are questions about whether the technology will ever work as advertised.
In the U.S., Drax has created a BECCS team headquartered in Houston and is looking at multiple potential sites. Drax is believed to be seeking federal tax breaks under the Inflation Reduction Act for new BECCS facilities in the South.
The British government is considering subsidizing Drax’s BECCS efforts and the company has just asked for stop-gap funding to give it more time to develop the technology, which many experts believe may never be viable.
“Drax’s claims about BECCS are at best optimistic, and at worst downright deceitful,” said Katy Brown, bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch UK. “Every large-scale coal and gas power plant equipped with carbon capture and storage has failed to meet its target for carbon capture performance, so it makes no sense to assume it will suddenly work for Drax’s wood-pellet-burning power station.”
”Believing in this madness allows fossil fuel burning to continue in the false expectation that emissions will be captured in the future,” Brown said. “It encourages the continued burning of millions of tons of imported wood, devastating forests and harming biodiversity and local communities. BECCS diverts money and attention from genuine climate solutions that are proven effective and are ready for deployment, including wind and solar energy and energy efficiency.”
“Time and time again, our polling tells us that British politicians don’t believe in bioenergy and the public don’t trust the bioenergy industry and don’t want to be propping up its profits through their energy bills,” said Matt Williams, senior forest advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council in the U.K. “Forest damage and pollution of Southern communities in the U.S. are the last thing that the UK’s low-carbon subsidies should be spent on.”
Drax Looks West
Drax, which already has 18 wood pellet plants in the U.S. and Canada, is now eyeing California and Washington state as part of its efforts to double its supply of pellets to Japan. Air pollution regulators with jurisdiction over Drax’s proposed wood pellet factory in Longview, Washington, say the company has already broken its rules by starting construction before an air discharge permit was issued.
“After logging unsustainably in the South and western Canada, Drax wants to ‘expand its fiber basket’ by building a new facility that uses trees from the Pacific Northwest,” said Brenna Bell, forest climate manager for 350PDX. “We know that Drax has been a bad neighbor to communities and forests where similar plants are located, and so we are taking a strong stand to keep this new facility out of Washington. And Drax is lending us a hand by flagrantly displaying its disregard for local permits and rules,” Bell said.
In California, Drax recently announced an agreement with Golden State Natural Resources, which is proposing one site in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and another in the far northeastern corner of the state. The company’s plans call for producing one million tons of wood pellets sourced from areas encompassing multiple National Forests, and exporting the pellets from the environmental justice community of Stockton, California.
“Golden State Natural Resources’ proposal of industrial-scale wood pellet production for overseas energy generation is a complete boondoggle that will undermine resilience against climate-driven wildfires,” said Rita Vaughan Frost, forest advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is a dangerous misuse of valuable time and resources that are needed for real solutions. Destructive wildfire is something we must address — but not by harming California’s vulnerable communities and forests.”
“Our community is in danger. If California buys into the GSNR scheme, South Stockton will get hit with even more harmful pollution, noise and traffic,” said Gloria Alonso Cruz, environmental justice coordinator at Little Manila Rising. “We are already overburdened with severe health risks from existing toxic air pollution. South Stockton understands the lasting trauma and sacrifices of the past, and we rise in opposition to this project because we deserve development that values our health, well-being, and is non-emissive. We deserve to not be treated as a sacrifice zone.”
“By joining forces with the California timber beasts from yesteryear, Drax is fanning the flames of wildfire hysteria in California while aggressively selling a false narrative about biomass as a global climate solution,” said Gary Hughes, Americas program coordinator with Biofuelwatch. “Drax shareholders must recognize the abundant evidence exposing how their company is putting forests and communities around the world on the chopping block.”
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Media contacts:
Carina Daniels
carina@storyandreach.com
Scot Quaranda, Dogwood Alliance
scot@dogwoodalliance.org
Kathryn Semogas, Stand.earth
Kathryn.semogas@stand.earth