Protestors spotlight role of region’s biomass power station in US/Canadian forest destruction
Environmental campaigners today (May 19) staged a protest to spotlight the role being played by Lynemouth power station in the destruction of transAtlantic forests, part of the Earth’s ‘natural lungs’.
The station, a few miles north east of Ashington in Northumberland, generates electricity by burning the processed remains of biodiverse American and Canadian forests: mature trees which have been chopped down and ground into biomass pellets.
Such ‘biomass fuels’ are described by the bio-energy sector – and by Lynemouth itself – as ‘sustainable’ because trees can be re-grown to replace those cut down.
But campaigners say that takes decades (if it happens at all), while all the carbon held in the forests is released as soon as the trees are processed and burned – thus accelerating global warming in the short term.
According to Biofuelwatch, a UK/US group which campaigns against damage from bio-energy industries, Lynemouth power station burns over a million tonnes of wood pellets each year (which have to be shipped across the Atlantic, creating extra transport carbon emissions).
Like the UK’s largest biomass power station, Drax, in East Yorkshire, Lynemouth is a former coal-fired plant which was converted to burn biomass in 2017.
Today, activists from Biofuelwatch and environmental campaign group Climate Action Newcastle (CAN) protested outside, denouncing hundreds of millions in Government subsidies paid to its owners.
Olwyn Hocking, from CAN, said: “Many people now question why Drax power station receives staggeringly high subsidies, despite burning huge quantities of wood pellets linked to forest destruction, high carbon emissions and serious impacts on communities.
“Yet few are aware that EPH’s Lynemouth plant is ‘Drax 2’ – a slightly smaller version of Drax.”
Almuth Ernsting, from Biofuelwatch, added: “Cutting down trees and burning them for energy is no better for the climate than burning coal, yet the government continues to subsidise it as renewable energy.
“EPH, one of Europe’s biggest carbon emitters, has taken advantage of government policy to obtain lucrative contracts for Lynemouth power station. Subsidies for such destruction must stop.”
The campaigners are calling on investors and banks to stop funding Lynemouth’s parent company, EPH – a Czech energy corporation owned by billionaire Daniel Křetínský (who also owns a stake in Premier League club West Ham).
They say EPH’s “high-carbon, dirty-energy portfolio” includes UK gas power stations and gas pipelines, as well as coal power stations and opencast coal mines in Europe.
They are also supporting a protest in Paris on May 23, at the AGM of one of EPH’s main funders, Société Générale, to ask it to pull investment out of EPH.
At the time of publication today, Climate Post was still awaiting a response from Lynemouth power station’s owners to today’s protest.
Lynemouth’s biomass suppliers in forest-felling and ‘environmental racism’ controversies
Image: dogwoodalliance.org
One of the pellet companies supplying wood for Lynemouth – one of the UK’s smallest power stations – is the US company Enviva, which is contracted to ship its wood pellets across the Atlantic for the next three years.
US forest campaigners and independent reporters have revealed that it routinely sources wood by clearcutting (or completely levelling) coastal hardwood forests that lie at the heart of a global biodiversity hotspot.
Enviva has also been criticised for ‘environmental racism’, because its pellet plants are predominantly located in deprived communities with a high percentage of black Americans, whom they expose to air pollution and noise.
The other supplier to Lynemouth is Drax, which is the world’s second-biggest pellet producer as well as being the operator of the UK’s biggest biomass power station.
Investigations by the BBC’s Panorama programme and by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation have shown that Drax has been clearcutting old growth forest for its pellet production in British Columbia.
