By Paul Homewood
h/t Robin Guenier
Harrabin is getting excited about the latest Mickey Mouse carbon capture project!
The giant Drax power station, near Selby in North Yorkshire, has become the first in Europe to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from wood-burning.
Drax burns seven million tonnes of wood chips each year to drive generators to make electricity.
The firm has now begun a pilot project to capture one tonne a day of CO2 from its wood combustion.
The technology effectively turns climate change into reverse on a tiny scale, but it's controversial.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47163840
Given that Drax burns 7m tonnes of wood chips every year, I don't think one tonne a day will make much of a dent.
According to Drax's press release, they have invested £400,000 in the project, but who ultimately has paid this bill remains unclear.
What we do know however is that Drax's partner in this project, C-Capture, a spin off from the University of Leeds, is backed by £2m of government funding. It seems pretty likely that this project is directly funded by government in one way or other.
Electricity from biomass at Drax costs £111.29/MWh, double the market price, under Contract for Difference. Any attempt to capture and store carbon will greatly add to this already exorbitant cost.
And as yet Drax have not even managed to work out what to do with the tiny amount of CO2 they have captured.
In a speech last year, Claire Perry claimed that the UK is already a world-leader in carbon capture. Has it not occurred to her that this is because the rest of the world sees no point in wasting money on a pointless exercise?
I'll leave the final word to Almuth Ernsting from the pressure group Biofuelwatch, as reported by the BBC:
"Burning biomass is absolutely the wrong option for so many reasons. Forests are vital for the health of the climate so we need to keep them not burn them.
"The Drax experiment is so ridiculously tiny it's hard to believe it's not 'greenwash'."
from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2SmKIJy
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