Net zero means 120m trees to be burnt a year
Experts question science behind Government’s ambitious pledge to cut all emissions by 2050
The Government’s plan to reach net zero will rely on burning the equivalent of the New Forest every five months. Net zero climate targets rely partly on proposals to capture the smoke from power plants that burn wood and pipe it under the North Sea using a system known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Under the proposals, the power plants will burn the equivalent of 120million trees a year, an analysis of government modelling by The Telegraph has found.
THE GOVERNMENT’S plan to reach net zero relies on burning the equivalent of the New Forest every five months, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
Ministers plan to use technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere to compensate for sectors such as aviation, agriculture and heavy industry and meet their 2050 net zero climate targets.
The proposals rely largely on capturing the smoke from power plants which burn wood to create electricity and piping it under the North Sea using a system known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (Beccs).
These biomass plants are considered to be carbon neutral because the trees they burn are replanted, so emissions captured and stored count as negative.
To create enough emissions to reach net zero, the power plants will need to burn the equivalent of 120 million trees a year, an analysis of government modelling by this newspaper has found. The New Forest has around 46 million trees.
This analysis comes just days after the announcement of a food strategy promising to use huge swathes of the countryside to grow crops, with scientists warning there is not enough land to deliver on all the competing pledges.
Concerns have been raised over how the technology will work at scale and whether burning wood for electricity is a genuine renewable energy source.
The European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC), the association of National Academies across Europe including the Royal Society, has now called on policymakers to “suspend expectations” that they can use Beccs to reach net zero. Their analysis found “that there are substantial risks of it failing to achieve net removals at all” or that the removals will not happen quickly enough to meet climate targets.
Dr Michael Norton of the EASAC said belief in Beccs is based on “flawed assumptions”, adding: “Our conclusion is that it is a bit of a castle built on sand.”
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) says the plans are not final, and that it is necessary to look at other waste products that can be used as biomass and other carbon capture technologies.
Biomass is a renewable energy under international carbon accounting rules and is seen as sustainable on the basis that the trees grow back.
But leading scientists warn that if trees are replanted the system creates “carbon debt” that will take decades, if not a century, to pay back.
While classed as carbon neutral, the UK’S largest biomass station, Drax, is the country’s biggest single emitter of carbon dioxide and last year burnt the equivalent of 27 million trees.
It received £932m million in green subsidies from consumer bills last year and is expected to receive more than £31 billion over the next 25 years for its development of Beccs.
The Beccs industry, including Drax, says that all its wood pellets come from sustainable sources and they are made not of whole trees but the offcuts from other industries.
An investigation by The Daily Telegraph last year raised questions over the sustainability of the wood used and the impact on biodiversity.
Following that, more than 50 MPS wrote to Greg Hands, the energy minister, demanding that he end the “scandal” of burning wood for electricity. The minister has so far refused to meet MPS and it can now be revealed that the Government has been quietly planning to expand the industry to create more than four times the current emissions.
The net zero strategy notes that “to compensate residual emissions” technology will need to remove up to 81 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2E) a year. Buried in the strategy, released in October, is a plan to capture two thirds of those emissions, up to 58 MTCO2E, from the burning of biomass.
An analysis based on current emissions and the number of wood pellets burnt by biomass shows that in order to increase the emissions by this scale would require the equivalent of almost 120 million trees – more than twice the number in the New Forest – a year.
Dr David Joffe, from the Climate Change Committee, has told MPS it is “really important” that the “vast majority” comes from the UK so they can be certain it is sustainable.
But scientists warn that this would take a “huge amount of land” and would compete with Government pledges including on food, rewilding and tree planting to combat climate change.
A spokesman for Beis said that they “do not recognise this characterisation” of the number of trees being burnt.
“We need to generate more homegrown power in Britain and sustainable biomass is widely considered a renewable, low carbon energy source,” he said.
Benedict Mcaleenan, an advisor to the Association for Renewable Energy and Clean Technology, said that the science behind Beccs was backed by world-leading climate scientists at the UN’S Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“Bioenergy is using what would effectively waste material from the forestry sector,” he said. “The IPCC has said that carbon dioxide removal technologies are necessary to limit global warming and Beccs is one of the biggest of all of these.”