Panorama investigation, a corporation that has received billions of pounds in green energy subsidies from UK taxpayers is tearing down environmentally significant forests.
Drax operates the largest power station in the United Kingdom, which burns millions of tonnes of imported wood pellets categorized as renewable energy.
The company claims to use solely sawdust and scrap wood.
Panorama analyzed satellite images, traced logging permits, and utilized drone footage to demonstrate its results. Joe Crowley followed a truck from a Drax mill to confirm that it was collecting full logs from a valuable forest.
Michelle Connolly, an ecologist, told Panorama that the corporation was destroying woods that had developed over thousands of years.
“It is truly regrettable that British taxpayers are subsidizing this destruction. It is absurd to cut down natural trees and transform them into pellets to be burned for power “She stated,
The Drax power station in Yorkshire is a converted coal facility that now generates 12 percent of the renewable electricity in the United Kingdom.
It has already received £6 billion in subsidies for green energy. Burning wood is considered environmentally friendly, however, environmentalists are divided on the matter.
Panorama uncovered that Drax purchased logging permits to tear down two ecologically significant forests in British Columbia.
One of the Drax woods is a square mile in size and has vast tracts of unique, old-growth forest.
The provincial government of British Columbia asserts that old-growth forests are especially valuable and that firms should delay their logging.
According to Drax’s responsible sourcing strategy, primary and old-growth forests will not be damaged or disturbed.
However, the most recent satellite images reveal that Drax is currently tearing down the forest.
The corporation informed Panorama that many of the trees in the area had died and that logging would lower the likelihood of wildfires.
The whole land covered by Drax’s second logging permit has already been logged.
How green is burning wood?
Wood combustion creates more greenhouse emissions than coal combustion.
The electricity is considered renewable since new trees are planted to replace old ones, and these new trees should absorb the carbon dioxide released by burning wood pellets.
However, recapturing the carbon takes decades, and the offsetting can only be effective if the pellets are created from sustainably sourced wood.
Primary forests, which have never been harvested and contain large amounts of carbon, are not considered sustainable sources. It is extremely unlikely that transplanted trees will ever store the same amount of carbon as the original forest.
Drax told that it had given the logging licenses to other companies and had not directly hacked down the trees.
The authorities in British Columbia, however, verified to Panorama that Drax still possesses the licenses.
Drax stated that it did not utilize the records from the two sites discovered by Panorama. It was stated that they were delivered to timber mills – for the production of wood goods – and that Drax utilized only the remaining sawdust for its pellets.
The company claims that it uses some logs to manufacture wood pellets. It claims that it only employs undersized, bent, or rotten ones.
However, statistics from a Canadian forestry database reveal that only 11% of the logs transported to the two Drax plants over the past year were of the lowest quality and therefore unusable for wood products.
Panorama wished to determine whether logs from main forests felled by logging companies were transported to Drax’s Meadowbank pellet factory. The show filmed a truck on a 120-mile round trip: leaving the plant, collecting heaps of complete logs from a forest where they had been cut down by a logging business, and then delivering them to the factory.
Drax later confessed that forest logs were used to produce wood pellets. According to the firm, these were undesirable species for the wood sector, and they were frequently burnt to lessen wildfire hazards.
In addition, the business stated that the Panorama-identified places were not the main forest since they were close to roads.
However, the UN definitions of primary forest make no mention of road proximity, and one of the sites is six miles from the closest paved road.
The results of Panorama arrive at a crucial time for Drax.
The British government is expected to release a new biomass strategy later this year, outlining its policy for natural fuels such as wood.
A spokeswoman for Drax stated that eighty percent of the material in their Canadian pellets is sawmill residuals, which would be discarded anyhow.
They added that Drax applies high sustainability criteria to both its pellet production and that of its suppliers, with third-party certification schemes serving as verification.
“We are always examining these policies to ensure that they reflect the most recent scientific findings,” they added.
