Quizzes & Puzzles21 mins ago
Up *** Creek With A Lng Paddle
So the "green" alternative is less green than previously claimed, who'd a thunk it:
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I think the answer is where a green option is tried and tested,including environmental impacts of production and end of life disposal as well as operation then there is no reason not to use it...
However It's obvious that some technologies are being brought to market too soon. It may be the larger scale means the ferry , on paper should have been better if assessed on a per passenger scale but they don't run full all the time so that saving can be lost quite quickly when it was not that great to begin with.
It does make you wonder if in the desire to decarbonise then some of the disadvantages of so-called greener technologies are ignored. Electric cars, lets pretend that the rare earth mineral essential to them don't come from corrupt African countries, exploited by China. Why not use wood chips to fuel our power stations, ignoring that they are shipped across the Atlantic from Canada. And so on.
Currently the whole thing is a con and is generally promoted by idealists rather than businesmen and the public.
We need to move forward but we need to slow the pace, there should be no need for punitive taxes if the product it right, the public will embrace it and away we go.
The other problem I have is that all this seems to be all fine and dandy for the upper middle chattering classes but not so fine for those futher down the scale. We need to be ALL on this journey hence it should be slower and finances in a better way(by business).
"This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time."
Aneurin Bevan
Since then we have abundant oilfields to the north which another organizing Labour genius Milliband prevents the use of.
Do they mean us? - they surely do !
“the judge will be along to talk about drax soon....”
Oh, alright then.
Assuming today is a normal working day, in the seven hours or so since his thread was started, five trains, each laden with 1,400 tons of “biomass” (aka freshly felled timber) will have arrived at Drax to disgorge their contents into the plant's hungry boilers. The sixth will be arriving shortly.
That’s one about every 75 minutes, 24/7. Each week 136 of these trains arrive laden with wood. Seventy-four arrive from Immingham (about 60 miles away), 38 from Liverpool (110 miles) and 24 from Tyne (105 miles). The routes to Drax are not electrified and the trains are hauled by 3,200hp diesel locomotives which consume about 2 gallons of fuel per mile. The wagons are assigned solely to Drax and they cannot be used elsewhere, meaning they have to get back from Drax to the ports. So they cover almost 45,000 miles each week between them, meaning 90,000 gallons of diesel fuel are consumed.
Drax opened in 1974 and – along with its sister stations at Ferrybridge and Eggborough - was built to take advantage of coal from the recently discovered Selby coalfield. Drax got much of its coal from Kellingley colliery, just eight miles away. After it was extended in 1986 it was fitted with flue-gas desulphurisation (FGD) equipment and was the cleanest coal fired power station in Europe and probably the world. Now it is undertaking wholesale deforestation (150 sq. miles per year), runs vast pellet plants and ships its fuel 5,000 miles (having transported some of it up to 400 miles from inland). And that, we are supposed to believe, is “greener” than burning coal from just up the road.
Having paid for the conversion of the far more efficient and less environmentally harmful coal-fired plant to burn wood, the government is now considering further £multi-billion subsidies for “biomass with carbon capture and storage” (BECCS). Drax has been researching the technology for seven years and has managed to construct two small pilot schemes within the plant which have showed that the technology might work. They hope to have a large scale installation operational by 2030. Progress (or rather lack of it) in other locations around the world have shown, however, that is rather more a hope than a certainty.
Drax is a confidence trick of epic proportions. It burns about 150 sq miles of mature forestry each year, but also burns taxpayers’ cash at an alarming rate. When its current subsidy scheme ends in 2027 it should be told to keep its hands out of other people's wallets.
"... oh and you forgot about the heavy plant used to harvest the wood and the ships to transport it here."
Indeed, Tora.
Drax owns and runs 18 pellet plants and four deep water ports in the southern USA (Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi) and Canada (Alberta and British Columbia). It has one pelle plant under construction in Washington State which is due to open in 2025 and has applied to construct two more in California. It is interesting to notte that none of the produce of all these plants is burnt in the USA. They have decided a far more sensible idea is to extract the shale gas which lies beneath their feet (ample supplies of which are said to exist in teh UK).
The processing of timber into pellets is intensive and energy consuming. The wood has to be chipped, dried and compressed. None of the emissions associated with that, or with transporting the stuff 5,000 miles in mainly diesel powered transport falls on Drax’s bottom line. Instead, fancy accounting provides Drax with “credits” for the amount of carbon the trees absorbed during their lifetime (skilfully neglecting to add that those trees would have continued their good work had they been left standing). Similar sleight-of-pen sees to it that the emissions resulting from actually burning the wood is counted against the harvest site rather than the site where it was consumed.
Drax is the single biggest emissions site in the UK. It emits four times as much as the next four highest sites combined. But to those emissions must be added those produced by the harvesting, processing and shipping of 7m tons of wood pellets from across the Atlantic, each and every year.
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