Britain's Guardian newspaper announced yesterday that Drax power station, the UK's largest, had begun a project to replace up to 10% of the coal the plant uses with biomass (see Drax's £50M renewables project throws biomass into coal mix, Guardian, May 19th). After testing cofiring up to 2-3% biomass for several months, the company signed an agreement with Alstrom (EPA: ALO) to construct a US$98 million biomass processing facility that would allow up to 1.5 million tonnes of biomass to be used per year, replacing 1 million tonnes of coal and saving up to 2 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.
Drax is operated by the Drax Group plc. (LON: DRX). The 4,000 MW power station in north Yorkshire supplies 7% of the UK's power.
While this is not a first, I was unable to find other examples of co-firing with biomass on this scale. Not unlike Drax testing 2-3% co-firing for several months, other utilities have run trials. For example, in 2006, Alliant Energy completed a test burn of switchgrass co-fired with coal at its Ottumwa Generating Station in Iowa (see Switchgrass Burn Test Proves Hopeful, Renewable Energy World, June 19th, 2006).
The Guardian article qoutes Drax's CEO who describes co-firing biomass and coal as the "forgotten" renewable. No doubt in the rush to embrace Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) technology even the coal industry has not paid a lot of attention to what appears to be a relatively low-tech, incremental approach.
CCS offers a high cost, long term solution to managing the carbon risk associated with coal fired power. If it ever works for widespread implementation, it is some ways into the future. Co-firing biomass appears to offer an interim step that could be implemented at relatively low cost. As noted above, Drax indicates that it will be spending only US$98 million for this initiative.
With all of the coal-fired generating plants in the world today, a simple, low-cost solution such as co-firing could be great first step towards managing carbon emissions.
New, Clean Life for Old Coal Plants?
