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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Laura and in this episode I'm joined by Antonia and Jasmin to talk about importing wood for electricity production to the UK and whether it's really sustainable so Antonia you're a consultant in the energy industry so I guess you must know something about this yeah so something that came up a lot was um the
documentary that BBC Panorama recently released on Drax the the biggest biomass power plant in the UK there were some interesting points raised and I thought it would make a great discussion for the podcast yes I I saw that documentary as well and I have many questions about the information that was presented yeah Jasmin your background's a little bit different to Antonia's I think it's very relevant to some of the information presented in the documentary so do you
want to tell us a little bit about your background yeah so I did my PhD in life cycle sustainability so a lot of it involved collecting life cycle assessments or looking at the emissions across the various stages of the product or a service a lot of my research data in the energy sector so I know a little bit about biomass cool so one of the first questions I had about this so we're talking about biomass we're talking about it was importing wood chips that drugs have produced in Canada
and the documentary kind of opened with this statement of burning wood that has a higher greenhouse gas emissions than burning coal to produce electricity but they just sort of stated that and didn't seem to provide any evidence for it so is that true yeah so technically if you consider all carbon then yes it is when you see figures the greenhouse gas emissions for different electricity and end resources what CO2 particularly is accounted for and that is fossil or
anthropogenic CO2 so any biogenic CO2 so that would be any CO2 produced from burning any biological materials like wood or plants that's not counted towards the carbon footprint because it's part of the natural carbon cycle So in theory the carbon is stored in the trees and the plants it will get released into the atmosphere and then Resort when new plants grow because all the combustion CO2 isn't accounted for that's why when you look at figures comparing different energy sources
biomass is quite low especially comparison with coal but when you do consider the biogenic CO2 it's actually similar to a call if not a bit higher because wood chips as a fuel has similar if not a bit lower quality than coal in terms of like color value so it will produce similar amounts of CO2 when combusted right so I guess when you're talking about factoring the carbon cycle into that calculation are you kind of assuming that something will regrow somewhere to absorb the CO2
that's been emitted from burning the wood of the biomass yeah that's one of the big assumptions with biomass and bioenergy systems in general is that the carbon That You Do release when you use the fuel it gets reabsorbed when new plants grow all right so does that kind of assume that if you're taking the wood from a forest that is managed somehow you're expecting that Forest to be regrown yes cool is is that usually the case when you're cutting down forest to turn into
wood chip to burn in a power station if it's managed and done in a sustainable way then yes because the area that is cut down should be regenerated after a few years so after you've cut down the trees it will then be like regenerated so new trees will be planted there yeah yeah and you would think that would make business sense yeah because I think in the documentary they said that Jax bought these forests in Canada for the sole purpose of cutting the trees down
to turn it into wood chip to ship to the UK so you'd think it wouldn't make business sense for them to then not regrow anything yeah exactly but like uh don't work for drugs don't really know how that about that business plan so I can't really comment on that yes of course I'm telling you did you have any thoughts on that very bold statement that wasn't qualified in any way in the documentary yeah they did touch on it a bit actually was how sort of government figures for different
electricity sources they do say that biomass is lower and that's kind of I guess a point of contention is that we are excluding biogenic carbon so if we base our national plans to reach um Net Zero which is you know limiting global warming temperatures by 1.5 degrees C then you know we're kind of going on a basis that might not be true and you know when we consider if we rapidly decide to change everything to biomass we'd kind of burn way more carbon than we think we are so
yeah knowing what kind of wood we've got and where it's coming from will be really important yeah I don't know if we are always um replanting because if you think about the rate of deforestation it is still higher than we are replanting so how can we be sure I guess it's down to proper management and you know someone going to verify it yeah I'd have to agree so with the example of drugs they were cutting arteries in Canada so for that particular example be up to the
Canadian government to manage that because the UK government we don't really have that much power to be like hey Canada you can't do this plus Canada has way more land yeah the population density is so different from the UK that they probably don't miss the forest as much as the UK does yeah we could also just be that because Canada is such a big place with lots of forests like maybe it's something to do with just like more of a local regulation thing rather than like Federal because it is
more difficult because Canada is just so big like Federal Regulations don't necessarily always work just because it's just small holes or Loop or like Place different things to like go unnoticed just because the cat in the country is so massive and the population density is quite low especially in the rural areas where you do have a lot of the big forests so there could be a question of like how do you manage responsible forestry management of responsible cutting down of trees for
either for energy or for like wood products like furniture and there is something else they kept saying in the documentary that sort of Builds on this point they said several times that the land that Drax was logging met un definition of primary Forest given that you said that Canada is so big and there's probably a lot of forest has been there for a long time I suspect an awful lot of forest in Canada would probably meet that definition which apparently is naturally regenerated
Forest of native species where there are no clearly visible indications of human activities and the ecological processes and not significantly Disturbed which kind of suggests that maybe a human might have wandered through the forest occasionally maybe cut down the odd tree or maybe pick some plants and that was pretty much it but that Forest has been around for quite a long time it's interesting because I wasn't really sure what the meaning of primary forest was
from the documentary but it seemed to be a key point that we shouldn't be cutting down trees from a primary forest and I guess from a biodiversity point of view maybe that's really important because it's kind of maintaining what was naturally there but if you have an abundance of it I can see why you know the Canadian government might actually go okay let's give some people logging licenses for it say they're only taking sort of one percent of the total National coverage of trees yeah but then
that ecologist they had on there kept talking about Ancient Forest yeah I noticed that too the way the ecologist was presented in the entire documentary I did wonder what she thought about it because I imagine she had a lot to say about ecology and none of that dialogue made it into the documentaryology or the online she had was pretty much this is a terrible thing that's happening she must have had something to say about the wildlife yeah I wonder how long the
original common conversation was for her to kind of almost get cut down to a few sound bites there isn't a strict definition of it according to ancient forest.org it looks like there are different definitions in Canada and it depends on which tree species okay so you can look at the UN definition or you want but you don't have to have it written down that you will stick with that definition there's a very interesting point that it looked like a lot of these definitions
were reverse engineered to match the damaged remnants of forests that people saw looking around them so it's kind of like whatever's left that's what we're calling ancient the stuff that looks like it's been around for a while so yeah maybe as far as Canadian government is concerned we've got a lot of trees and we've always had a lot of trees and as long as we don't remove too many of them and we'll set a limit on that then maybe that's fine obviously like Canadian government are
aware that they do have like a really good Rich resource in their trees that is valuable both from an ecological environmental perspective but also from like Elementary perspective because obviously you can sell the trees for products to be able to like cut down trees from what could be divine as a primary Forest I would assume that the Canadian government would have gone through some kind of process of determining like okay which areas would we allow to be logged and which errors
are strictly off limits because not only are the trees like valuable from the ecological perspective but like they're also an important carbon sink in that they do remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but having said that like the rate of carbon dioxide removable for trees does slow down as you get older so to like basically make the carbon sink bigger it does make sense to like cut down all older trees and then plant new trees just because the level of CO2
removal would then go up because it does Plateau after about 100 years for hardwood trees yeah yeah I've heard this as well it makes me feel we've got some big trees in our garden and we have cut a few back for various reasons one of them was overshadowing an apple tree I'd rather be able to pick my own apples and have this tree that didn't seem to do much else but knowing that tree will regrow on the tree underneath it will also grow more vigorously did make me
feel a bit better that's like a perfect example of why would you keep an older tree just because it's old if you have an apple tree which is productive and provides you with something you want yeah but then again what I disliked about cutting down the tree was that a lot of the birds in our garden like sitting in it oh so it was interesting to watch how they reacted to suddenly this is tree gone there are two other trees we can use but we liked that one oh I hope it wasn't too disruptive but I
guess that's the point of why why deforestation is such a problem on a global scale not just on the Laura's Garden scale yeah and I imagine that is the point that the ecologist that was interviewed made in the interview that didn't make it into the documentary was that it does disrupt the wildlife and they have to adapt them and how much habitat is lost as a result yeah absolutely so like any kind of deforestation within like an area like that will have an impact
because you're basically removing like habitats that animals with the views for homes or like feeding but depending on how big the error impact it is like the animals will be able to adapt it's just weapon not like you're just cutting down a real big area and then whether or not it's just like one big area or whether or not you're making you're then fragmenting the forest that can be quite bad I don't think any of that was covered in the Panorama documentary so
it'd be interesting to like see like an aerial image of the forest that's been cut down to see whether or not it's actually like still relatively very green or if it's like you've got like bits of like Mosaic bits of like areas have been cut down the point that I think Jack's made against some of the allegations that were made by the documentary was that they particularly use waste wood and also some of their activities in the forest actually helped the forest be
healthier such as removing disease trees or thinning the forests so that trees have a bit more space to grow but then I think there was satellite imagery which sort of showed a whole area getting cut but you know it wasn't stated was that maybe an area that was full of disease trees so that was why they all had to get cut because then it wouldn't be doing this you know wasn't thinning as they kind of suggest yeah there's a lot of there was a lot of sort of points made and then it just left more
questions but I feel like they were trying to push a certain point you know I'm a trained scientist same as Jasmin you can assigned a bit with their PhD so I'm trying to sort of ask well where's your evidence does that evidence make sense to me is there any evidence against it what's the balance there uh that also like because the Panorama episode is only restricted to like a certain length that they can only fit in so much of like the content that they would have originally have scripted down
as well as like obviously interviews they've done with people so like the ecology Associated probably interviews with potentially other scientists or people with different opinions on the whole situation it seem of a shame that it's almost it's almost like they already knew what they what they want the outcome to be picking the information that matched that outcome but maybe they took all the evidence they had and just presented the bits that made the clearest point that
they'd seen from that evidence it's difficult to judge without seeing the rest of the um the data they collected yeah like I think some of that was highlighted in the drafts documentary was that like Antonia said the wood chips are supposed to be from wood like lower quality Woods I'm from like diseased trees or wood that's not high enough quality to be used in wood furniture but then it turned out that they were using that good quality wood for wood chips but then I can see the
argument that is it might be good quality but maybe it wasn't in demand because ultimately it's it's a bit of a market isn't it and to have such a quantity is also a problem if you let it get wet then it's not the same quality anymore so how do you store all of it and I guess maybe they you know that was why even though it was good quality they couldn't find a buyer for it so it could only go to making wood chips which at least it has a use again you know the
documentary kind of touched on it with some hard evidence of looking through the delivery notes and saying you know uh was it 11 of the logs from that particular place were graded as two poor qualities for Timber but then yeah we'd have to also understand the the market and supply and demand situation at the same time to know was that just because you know say no one was building houses so there was no demand but then I guess you'd have to question their choice to
cut an entire Forest down if only left percent of it was deemed as waste did they just say well we have no choice we need to make money off this so we're gonna have to turn it into wood chip or we've just made a really bad business decision or was there more to it than that I feel like I'm just putting words in Jax's spokesperson's mouth there and I probably shouldn't be doing that you know in the lack of our knowledge all we can do is sort of speculate what what
possibly could be happening I guess we're trying to be like generous to both sides of this we don't want badly presented evidence but also someone probably worked really hard on it so it just might not have made the cut which I always think is a bit sad if there was some really interesting evidence there but it just wasn't exciting enough for a documentary that's the point of documentary isn't it to present the evidence not to be exciting I have heard some people argue that the latest series
or Decades of Panorama aren't as robust as they used to be I remember when they used to be super Niche and you'd barely understand any of it they put them on during like science classes and you just be like I have no idea they're talking about like I don't know background microwave radiation in the Galaxy or the university you just kind of like I I don't understand I'm I'm not even doing GCSE Science yet I don't know what a microwave is apart from the one in my kitchen
no maybe they're trying to reach a broader audience so it is kind of trying to make it into a more of a store story rather than we've got some really specific science for you here story Story Taylor but there's also presenting the evidence accurately and if the evidence tells you there isn't an interesting story to tell you just can't tell it sometimes you've got to report the negatives haven't you say we did look at this and actually you know what it's all above board it's great
I thought you're getting those scientists don't report when they get a negative results such happens a lot in Academia you can only report when an experiment is successful yeah it's like no one writes papers about how I tried this and it didn't do what I thought but I feel like it's a very valid result you wouldn't do the experiment if you knew exactly what was going to happen sometimes saying it didn't work I'm just totally proved how not to do something it's very useful
yeah well actually maybe I shouldn't comment because I'm not I've not been in Academia for as long as you two it was just from the evidence of like okay this is anecdotal evidence so that's my problem I will stop here there is room for that too in Academia but one thing the documentary did make me wonder because we were talking about importing wood from Canada and on the face of it that kind of seemed like craziness you either wouldn't burn biomass in the UK
to produce electricity or you just use homegrown wood which made me wonder what percentage of UK's electricity does biomass produce and where else could the wood come from so in the UK's electric mix biomass is the biggest uh Source out of the renewable electricity options if you combine both on patrol and Australian I believe the amount of electricity would be similar to what is produced from biomass so it's an important source of electricity in the UK but in terms of the wood sourcing uh
it's a bit tricky to find exact details of where all the word chips come from the majority of it is imported because the amount of wood that you need to burn in the biomass power plant we just don't produce enough wood or these wood chips in the UK especially the kind of wood that you would need to burn in the power plants like drugs no I mean I guess if you look around any rural area it is mostly Fields there isn't a lot of Woodland there and if you think about where the really big
Woodlands are in the UK like they're primarily in like national parks uh there's one near me in Annandale um which is in the late District they were logging that very recently I think they they do that periodically doing it for a while it's also from the sounds of it quite well managed because this wild ennerdale project which is about increasing the biodiversity and making sure that things done as sustainably as possible without a sustainably obviously including not negatively affecting the
people that live in the valley yeah but where that goes and what they do with it I'm not entirely sure I would quite like to know I always pay for mill near us and the port near us does ship wood in and out quite a lot but this is why I'm so interested in this I think because I see these activities happening and I don't get a full picture maybe we can try asking them next time be like yeah why are you listening why are you sending all the trees to stop one of the
Lorry drivers okay I don't really know I just drive this thing but are you going to plant some more in its place as well uh increased diversity of trees in that Valley and have more native broadleaf species which will be interesting to see because I cycle through it the other week and it did look a little bit sad with these sort of bare areas um when you were used to sort of being completely enclosed by trees so I guess I'll see what happens in the next few
years or how long does it take for trees to grow a fair native broad leaves depends on what size you want to get to but like 10 plus years from like sapling to like a decent sized tree so in my lifetime easily hopefully Jasmin you were talking about the renewing yeah what are you defining as Renewables basically non-fossil fuel technically nuclear it can be classed as a renewable because in theory like the amount of uranium and other materials that we have uh because you don't need
that bigger quantity like in theory we just have we have a lot to like last us for a long time because it is a finite resource it's technically not renewable so I would have to like count renewable as like solar wind biomass because it can regenerate title so when you said that biomass was comparable to Total production from average across some time frame do you know roughly what proportionizes like eight percent of the UK's electricity generation so in most of the government
starts they tend to combine wind and solar together but I think it's it's between 10 and 20 percent I think it's similar to what nuclear is if not a bit higher nowadays it either combined Windows altogether because it's almost like a really small percentage but they have everything separated though okay so would you say that the burning of biomass which is not necessarily just wood pellets but you also said other organic forms that produce electricity when you think about a biomass power
bank you're burning solid fuel so that could be legit they can also be misgans pellets or other similar types of solid fuels in that from that family the other type of biomass power plant that you could however bioenergy power plant I should say would be like if you're burning biomethane or biogas in the CHP unit but they tend to be like much smaller and in capacity comparison with like the big biomass Bail Bonds chp's combin combine heat and Power yeah I give my healing power yeah I feel
like this is getting through too many things in too many definitions what I was wondering is if the UK is importing wood chips to burn in power stations to generate electricity is that going to make a significant difference to the UK If we stopped doing if we look uh power plants like drag so if we were to stop importing wood chips and it would have an impact just because the big biomass power plants they are used to meet what's known as base load which is when you look at graphs of
electricity demand and consumption throughout the day you'll see they like kind of like it has Peaks and crafts so Peak would be when everyone is using energy so in the mornings and evenings when you're like getting ready for having breakfast getting ready to go go to work or go to school and then in that's in the mornings and then in the evenings like when you're at home you're having dinner watching TV with your family and then like the low Point that's called the base load so that's
like the energy you need for like your fridge like lights in Office Buildings or in shops for security so like power plants like tracks or like any most really big thermal power plants including nuclear they are really important for meeting base load demand so if you were to remove like a really big IMS power plant light drugs but from stopping importing wood chips it would have an impact on whether or not we could meet base load demand I think I kind of touched on base load in the
episode about frequency of um the electricity grid yeah it's really interesting all the power plants are Instinct with each other they're like dancing with one another I wish I had come up with that analogy instead I was using like synchronous now I think it more like they're all like dancing and like spinning in the same direction at the same time we're like going around like a like group of dancers go around in circles yeah so it kind of sounds like burning this wood
that's imported is quite useful but we don't have a local replacement for it yeah it would be really tricky well if we focus entirely on like the Canadian Imports and that would be is it like 20 of tracks wood chips are imported from Canada or is it less I can't remember remember but it's a significant fraction of the wood chips at the input but it's not like in the majority so if you were to stop importing from like one country it wouldn't have like a detrimental impact
on whether or not the power plant could operate it would be worse if the here would just like stop importing wood chips from any country full stop because then there would be like very little Fuel and then all the biomass power plants they wouldn't be able to operate and it would also make generating literacy from biomass much more expensive just because there is much less fuel it does make me wonder then well I did the documentary she used to focus on Canada and why not one of the
other importers because you said drugs Imports wood from elsewhere but maybe doesn't log it there in cells like we can speculate on many reasons why they chose to focus on Canada like we don't know exactly where Drax gets all of their wood chips from but looking out starts on UK wood chip Imports a majority of it does come from outside the EU yeah so potentially traveling quite a long way yeah I think Canada and the USA are one of the other two bigger markets though wood wooden wood chip
Imports to the UK so does that make a difference to carbon emissions and calculations because intuitively the further you transport it the more the carbon emissions would increase yeah so if you are importing your word from further away then it would make an impact so the word would get transported by big shipping containers and I suppose most um shipping is fueled by heavy fuel oil or diesel so they already have a high carbon content yeah they do but it depends a lot of emissions from shipping
it will depend on the distance but also depends on like how much load the ship is carrying so they're carrying like lots of cargo then per tunnel per kilogram of goods being transported the emissions can be lower than other methods of strong of transporting yeah but in general for like the wood chips if you were to consider like all the CO2 emissions and so including the biogenic the emissions from burning the wood would be much bigger than the emissions from transporting it so it almost
doesn't matter where we get it from really because it's just ultimately that fuel is very carbon intensive if you're including those emissions in the calculation because what you were saying right at the start was they don't include them yeah because we assumed it's from a managed Forest which is a renewable source as opposed to a forest that doesn't grow back yeah so I guess this all comes down to how Jack's manages the land that they've bought did you guys think that what Drax was doing
made sense from a technical point of view as in the emissions are fairly low and they're not necessarily doing a lot of harm to the environment because you assumed that the land is managed appropriately well I know that tracks do have a bunch of scientists who do research on things like that bioengies in like around the sustainability it's kind of one of those issues where you're either really really for it I kind of like well there's still some gaps in it so like drops off like investing in
science and research to just make sure that what they are doing is done in like a responsible manner so looking at how to improve their modeling of biogenic carbon emissions as well as like other areas of the business portfolio the ipcc the internet governmental panel on climate change which is you know a huge collection of scientists internationally researchers about climate change did you know models scenarios about how could the whole world power themselves and
also meet climate change targets and they you know they they kind of said biomass has a limited role you know some will be useful but we can't totally rely on it to meet climate change targets and I think that's where I sit I suppose is is we kind of need some base load electricity and biomass from a responsible managed Forest is better than coal it's called the only option there's there's natural gas or biogas to kind of fill that Gap so we kind of are still
relying on some sort of thermal power plant or nuclear of course which is the other massive thermal power plant all these things that produce steam or hot gas that turns to turbine that's how we've been doing it for quite a long time now yeah so from the idea that it was a huge power plant anyway so there were the facilities you know all the people and skills to manage that kind of plan you know it's good to be able to use that and convert it into something that is for the future and you know
people can complain about you know oil and gas companies you know they're still doing what they're doing but I guess if you were working in that company you kind of want them to just stop you'd kind of want them to adapt and continue look ahead from a skills point of view you kind of want to keep people with those useful skills and maybe just transfer them to another technology yeah which I guess is part of doing things sustainably it's making sure people still have jobs yeah I've got to say
though if you ever walk through land that has recently been logged it's not necessarily strict deforestation because apparently that's cutting down trees to change the use of the land whereas I think this would technically be defined as Forest degradation is what it's technically defined as thinning of the canopy or a reduction the density of trees in the area uh the land use won't change and it is temporary and trees will regrow so it's not necessarily for deforestation but seeing Forest
degradation does look really sad it's like this huge hand just came down and swiped all these trees and left just this mess of sticks and mud yeah it's just really sad to see I think I'm really influenced by stuff that I grew up as a child like the animals are Farthing wood I distinct you remember reading that book that was all about humans coming in to build houses and destroying this habitat that was mostly trees and all the animals in the wood decided to band together and relocate oh
if only they could in real life it which is kind of weird like oh Nature's really terrible but there's a snake in the fox and some like small mammals have all come together that would normally eat each other they banded together to save their ecosystem and I guess that's kind of what we have to do isn't it try and find a way to coexist and I guess the first thing is knowing what's there to begin with if you did decide to log a lot of trees from an area what effect is
that going to have what's there already are you disturbing some bats or some rare birds or something especially because also what if it's not actually ecologically unique I don't know if that that accounts for anything yeah it's not ecologically significant then someone could argue there's a lot more to gain I hate to say it good job Ellie's not on today's episode physiologist the Love of All Things natural I'm sort of similar to Ellie I hate to see happen but it's one of those
things that where we're at you can't really have Modern Life as it is and not have some effect to the natural environment it's more about managing it in a way that minimizes whatever effect you might have one of my International Friends said when they came to study in the UK over their environmental science and Environmental Management was all about fixing some ecological disaster something bad that happened whereas over here we're talking more about sustainability and sort of preventing it
from happening so I feel like in some ways you know as Engineers we're trying to do better and you know sort of go back to the principles of you shouldn't have done this in the first place rather than learning how to fix it but just let's try and prevent this I guess that sort of thumbed up as learning from the mistakes of the past so you don't repeat them that sounds like it should be aligned from a film I might be mixing several films up there it's a bit sort
of spider-man-esque with great power comes great responsibility literally greater power demand comes greater responsibility yeah Drax take a leaf out of Spider-Man's book it's not it sounds that's probably a good place to leave it leave it oh dear that definitely is right having started off with kind of saying this Panorama documentary really got us thinking about how land is managed and what we're actually doing with our electricity generation and where the fuel for that
comes from it seems like it's probably okay to keep importing biomass at least for now as long as it comes from areas that are responsibly managed in where some sort of risk assessment has been done to see what effect it will have on the wildlife and to keep maintaining whatever monitoring systems they've got going and make improvements as they go so who knows maybe in 20 years time we'll see things very differently it will be taking trees from elsewhere or not taking trees at all sort of solve
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