This “we have lots of it!” attitude is why we have very little old growth left.
But the story here isn’t “company that makes power by burning wood burns wood” it’s a company that receives money from the uk gov for “sustainable practices” and says they only burn waste wood is actually burning old growth.
The article says that they only burned waste from logging process. This might be unclear, because the article is written in a (probably purposefully) confusing way, but they very much did not cut and ground up massive old growth timber for pellets.
Setting aside the issue of logging an old growth forest, in any logging operation you’ll always end up with some material that’s not practically usable for various reasons. Using it as fuel sounds to me like rather effective use of resources.
> The article says that they only burned waste from logging process. This might be unclear, because the article is written in a (probably purposefully) confusing way, but they very much did not cut and ground up massive old growth timber for pellets.
The article tells you what Drax claims, and then it explains the reality their investigators found, repeatedly contrasting what Drax says, then what they proved, then what Drax said about that, back and forth showing what desperate liars they are.
> Reporter Joe Crowley also followed a truck from a Drax mill to verify it was picking up whole logs from an area of precious forest
Drax tried insisting those weren't Drax trucks, it told the BBC third parties do the logging. This wasn't true, it's a matter of public record. So then Drax said ah, OK, well we do turn some logs into pellets, but only if there's a problem with them. Reporters showed it's whole forests. Drax said, ah, well those forests were the wrong sort of woood.
whole forests are waste according to Drax
> Drax later admitted that it did use logs from the forest to make wood pellets. The company said they were species the timber industry did not want, and they would often be burned anyway to reduce wildfire risks.
They did not. Again, the article doesn’t say that, though, as I said, it’s written in (likely deliberately) confusing way, so it’s not very surprising that you came out believing that after reading it.
Reporters filmed a logging truck, full of logs, going from these forests to Drax's pellet plant. That's all the plant does, it makes pellets for fuelling the vast power station.
There's no sign of other magical trucks, maybe taking logs to be milled for IKEA or for sale in US hardware stores, and unsurprisingly Drax doesn't try to pretend such trucks exist. Drax has the license, Drax does the logging, Drax is the exclusive consumer of these logs, all the logs are "waste".
According to the Canadian government 89% of the logs going into that plant were of a grade that a conventional timber mill would process for commercial use. Except no need, these logs are all "waste" turned into pellets to be burned for "green" credits.
It isn't just the UK government who were hoodwinked. The pellet plant itself is the same scam. It originally told the Canadian government it would convert waste from nearby mills into pellets. "At least 95%" of the pellets would be from sawmill waste, free money for the Canadian economy. Except oops, turns out that wasn't quite true. Almost immediately they needed to import waste from further afield, and then they found a much cheaper option, instead of paying to haul waste from other mills just buy whole trees. Soon the majority of the "waste" for the pellet plant was perfectly good logs.
>It isn't just the UK government who were hoodwinked. The pellet plant itself is the same scam. It originally told the Canadian government it would convert waste from nearby mills into pellets. "At least 95%" of the pellets would be from sawmill waste, free money for the Canadian economy. Except oops, turns out that wasn't quite true. Almost immediately they needed to import waste from further afield, and then they found a much cheaper option, instead of paying to haul waste from other mills just buy whole trees. Soon the majority of the "waste" for the pellet plant was perfectly good logs.
Citation please.
There are more economically fruitful things to do with "perfectly good" logs than sell them to the nearby chip plant let alone the one far away.
The Canadian company ("Pinnacle Pellets") which was set up to do this no longer exists. Guess which company bought them... Did you guess their main customer, Drax? Because that's correct.
What's left, at least on my first attempts is one lonely page of Drax's site:
> There are more economically fruitful things to do with "perfectly good" logs than sell them to the nearby chip plant let alone the one far away.
No need to "sell them" at all. Drax owns the logging outfit, the pellet company and the converted coal plant in the UK to burn the pellets. It is converting Canadian forests into cash in the UK, any "prices" which exist internally are notional and don't represent actual money anybody actually paid for anything.
Now, that UK plant gets paid market prices for electricity, which is currently a very reasonable (by recent standards) £115 per MWh, which is equivalent to if you were charged about 12¢ per kWh before anybody pays their overheads or makes a profit. But earlier today it was £439 per MWh. But, on top of those prices, it also get a green subsidy because it persuaded the British government that this is just waste you see, it's not chopping down perfectly good trees, they're waste and so this is carbon neutral, see ?
Somehow Drax was profitable when prices were about £45 per MWh. So, now their income from burning the same amount of wood is more than double, sometimes closer to ten times what it was, and yet you think there's no incentive for them to do the thing the documentary showed they are doing ? Why?
Edited to add: Here's a news release from the acquisition
> There are more economically fruitful things to do with "perfectly good"
at current energy prices in Europe? not necessarily.
but it should be easy enough for Canada and/or the UK & EU to get to the bottom of this. after all they have some customs enforcement, so they know what goes out and comes in on the ships.
Perfectly good according to whom, exactly? Expert journalists? I can scarcely believe that pellet plants are paying nearly as much for good logs as sawmills.
Sounds to me like subsidizing old growth logging. More of those trees would have stayed in the ground if someone wasn’t buying 11% of the logs they cut to burn.
Wood pellet is around 4 times cheaper than construction lumber per pound. That means that these 11% of the logs capture less than 5% of the revenue of the entire operation.
The economics of sawmilling are absolutely brutal, and everything is done for profit maximization on every tree harvested. Sometimes perverse incentives will drive things like eg the price of 7' studs surges so all the 14' 2x4 or 2x6s are cut in two, or in an extreme example if the price of chips surges enough then maybe perfectly good lumber would be chipped instead of sold as lumber (this happened briefly in the 80s if I recall correctly)
To go over how from seedling to end product every single part of the usable tree is used to maximum economic advantage would take more time than I have available, but suffice it to say that in Canadian lumber, plywood, osb and paper there is as close to zero waste as is humanly possible.
Also, as a footnote, there is a lot more thought given to future harvests, environmental concerns (carbon capture, riparian areas etc) and social license (work with first nations, community involvement, worker safety) than the average person would believe.
> It seems safe to assume they aren't burning valuable logs just to be cartoon villains.
Perhaps are they chopping down more wood than would be normally chopped because they are being paid above market rates for it and thus is becomes profitable to do so
If you scroll down, way past when most people give up reading, you’ll find that apparently 11% of the logs from that area is unusable for production lumber, ie. are a waste.
Every Summer, the State of Oregon seems to have at least one 50,000 acre fire, which is about 78 SQ miles. last few years have been more like 400,000-600,000 acres over a few very large fires.
Most of these fires are caused by lightning. Either way, its losing forests to fire, but at least the power plants the smoke is getting treated to remove particulates, filtered, etc, plus generating power.
You can’t justify clearcutting logs for power generation by citing forest fires.
Forest fires are happening in part because of forest management practices that support logging. Not to mention climate change causing more heat, and bringing invasive species that kill trees. This is a positive feedback loop that would have all of north america as treeless as ireland if we accept “it’s gonna burn anyway”
Forest fires are a natural part of the ecosystem - when the forest is managed well a fire can burn through quickly killing VERY few trees.
But the story here isn’t “company that makes power by burning wood burns wood” it’s a company that receives money from the uk gov for “sustainable practices” and says they only burn waste wood is actually burning old growth.