Renewables Obligation (Amendment) Order 2014
Debate between Baroness Worthington and Viscount Ridley
Viscount Ridley (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest in various forms of energy as detailed in the register, including both coal and forestry. I welcome what the Minister said about improvements to the requirements on auditing, sustainability and reporting, but I draw her attention to a report in the Mail on Sunday last weekend on exactly where the fuel for Drax biomass is coming from in the Carolinas. It is clear that whole trees are being logged for that. I draw her attention also to a report that came out last month from the International Council on Clean Transportation, which stated:
“Consistent with earlier studies, we find that pathways based on whole-tree logging in forests offer little or no climate mitigation over 50 years. We also show that reduced impact logging does not deliver GHG savings within 50 years. These bioenergy feedstocks are not good candidates from a climate policy point of view”.
I would just continue the debate with those points.
Baroness Worthington (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing these changes to the RO. They cover two issues: the non-duplication of being able to receive funding through both the RO and CFDs, which seems eminently sensible and an important tidying-up. On the sustainability of biomass, this is obviously a complicated issue, but I say in response to the comments made by the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, that we have to keep a sense of proportion about this. There is a danger that we start to confuse the CO2 emitted from the chimney of a biomass plant with the fossilised CO2 that comes from the burning of fossil fuels. One is a function of the flow of biospheric carbon, meaning that trees absorb carbon while they are growing and then emit it when they are burnt. This has been happening since man crawled out of a cave and is not of the order of magnitude that we see with the fossil-fuel impact, whereby one is taking carbon stored over many millennia and releasing it into the atmosphere. I am glad that the noble Viscount made reference to the article in the Mail on Sunday because there is a real danger that we are slipping into a misunderstanding whereby we equate CO2 from a chimney with adding to the stock in the atmosphere. That would be regrettable, because biomass does not contribute in the same way as fossil fuels.
However, we are of course keen that all biomass should be sustainable and I think that we all agree that its best use is probably not in power generation but in the generation of heat. Therefore, CHP plants and use of biomass in district and smaller-scale heating is probably the most sustainable use. We also face the great challenge of reducing the carbon intensity of our power sector. There are sustainable sources of biomass out there from well managed forestry. We have used forestry to a far greater extent for paper production. While that is decreasing, we are now seeing an increase in use for energy to displace fossil fuels. That cannot be something that we want to stop; it is something that we want to manage, with good, strong reporting. It creates livelihoods; it creates income. Management of forests is a well established form of economic activity and we should not seek to stop it.
It strikes me as slightly odd that the Minister should state that municipal waste has a lower sustainability impact, because much of the calorific content of municipal waste comes from plastics, which are obviously a fossil fuel. I am trying to avoid the singling-out of biomass for special treatment when other forms of energy are not perhaps treated in the same way. It is true that biomass should be under scrutiny because it is a less energy-dense form of material and its upstream emissions can therefore have a disproportionate impact, but it is also true that we do not add on the life-cycle emissions to gas—LNG, for example, has a different carbon intensity if taken on a whole well-to-wheel basis from natural gas or fracked gas. We do not load our normal carbon accounting to those fuels, yet we do with biomass. I am arguing in favour of proportion and trying to get the balance right.
This is especially important in the UK as we consider how we are to meet our targets at 2020. I am sure that the demise of a couple of high-profile biomass projects—the Eggborough project and the REA’s dedicated biomass project—will not have escaped the Minister’s attention, both signalling that they are no longer seeking to pursue renewable options. That raises questions, because it means that we might be more reliant on more expensive forms of renewable power. It would be regrettable if that were the outcome: that an overzealous approach to biomass forces us into ever more expensive options. With offshore wind, we have the added cost of having to make sure that we have security of supply and back-up. Biomass has at least one very strong benefit, and that is its firm power. It can be stored, it is reliable and it will be there when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. As I said at the beginning, we are keen that all biomass is sustainable, so we welcome the proposals. It is all about getting the proportion right and treating biomass fairly, relative to other sources.
I want to raise just one other issue. The noble Baroness referred to the fact that we have further changes to the RO coming forward. I have had representation from the Low Carbon Finance Investment Group that DECC has recently raised the possibility of introducing competition into the RO and that, in line with the desire to move towards competitive auctions in the CFD, it was mooted that we might require some form of competition in the RO. This would be a significant change and not one that would be welcomed, because it would almost certainly be retroactive in its application.
Therefore, I would like some reassurance from the noble Baroness that, although it has been put out that we might seek to do this to the RO, this is not the case. I am sure that it would significantly change the way in which the instrument operates to its detriment. Those are the comments that we see. This is an order that we welcome because it is tidying up, but it raises some concerns and I hope that the Minister will be able to make some reassuring statements.
Viscount Ridley
Before the noble Baroness sits down, I may have misunderstood what she said, but as far as an infrared beam is concerned, is there really a difference between a carbon dioxide molecule that came from burnt gas and one that came from burnt wood?
Baroness Worthington
No, absolutely not. It is about the flow, compared to the stock. I am sure that CO2 values differ throughout the year and a large part of that depends on how much foliage we have. CO2 is not permanently in the atmosphere, it is sucked in and out, depending on the atmosphere and the biosphere and how those interrelate. What we are doing with fossil fuel, as noble Lords will know, is extracting carbon that was once stored and releasing it very rapidly into the atmosphere, which is changing its composition. Concentrations in the atmosphere are now at record levels, touching 400 parts per million, and they have not been at that level for many hundreds of thousands of years.
Energy Bill
Debate between Baroness Worthington and Viscount Ridley
Viscount Ridley
Would the noble Lord accept that the figure that came out last week for the amount of shale gas under the UK is far higher than was assumed when his report was written? I went to talk to Cuadrilla at one point last year. I said that the 200 trillion cubic feet that they were talking about under Lancashire was being ridiculed as a very high number and asked whether they stood by it. They said, “Privately, we think it is much higher. It is about 300 trillion cubic feet but we dare not say so because people will not take that seriously”. Then an independent consultant, Nick Grealy, said 700 trillion cubic feet and everybody laughed at it. Now, the British Geological Survey has said there is 1,300 trillion cubic feet. This is the largest find of shale gas ever on the planet. The shale rock we are talking about, the Bowland shale, is in places 10 times as thick as the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania.
I went to see shale gas extraction in the Marcellus shale in 2011 because I had heard about it and thought it was interesting. You could hardly find these well pads—they are tiny and hidden among the trees. There was a flock of wild turkeys running across the road on the way to one. I asked somebody for a calculation of just how much energy can come out of a small area when you are drilling for shale gas. The answer is that about 25 acres of well pad in Pennsylvania can produce as much energy from shale gas as the entire UK wind industry produces at the moment.
Baroness Worthington
I am sure that that is a fascinating discussion and one we will probably return to, but can the noble Viscount point to where in this part of the Bill there is anything that prevents shale gas contributing to the meeting of our decarbonisation targets? I would embrace it and would hope that it came along quickly if it could be done sustainably; there is nothing in this part of the Bill that prevents it.
Viscount Ridley
If we embrace within the next couple of years a decarbonisation target that is stricter than shale gas can help us to get to, I think that there will be a problem in the way of shale gas.
Perhaps I may turn briefly to climate change. This is not the time to re-fight the climate change debate, but others have brought it up. Given that shale gas offers the possibility of a slower rate of decarbonisation—not to as low a level of target as we are talking about—we need to retain the flexibility of that and to take into account where the climate change science has shifted to. It is simply not the case that the science has become more alarming in the past few years. There has been a series of studies of climate sensitivity in recent years by Otto et al., Aldrin et al., Ring and Searchinger and many others. The biggest of those, the Otto et al. study, which had 14 leading authors, two of whom are co-ordinating lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, concluded that transient climate sensitivity—that is, the number that we are likely to reach in about 50 years—is about half of what we thought it was. It is about 1.3 degrees centigrade, of which we have had nearly half already. It is not true to say that we are seeing damaging effects on weather from climate change. Weather is not climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change SREX report in late 2011 came to the very firm conclusion that you could not see a signal of climate change in current climate events, neither in droughts, floods, storms nor any of those kinds of things. Professor Roger Pielke at the University of Colorado has come to exactly the same conclusion. There is no evidence yet that we are seeing damage. Meanwhile, we are seeing clear damage from climate change policies. The denial of cheap electricity to people in poor countries and the effect of biofuels on food prices are having a demonstrable effect on both hunger and well-being in other parts of the world. We have to take these things into account.
I hasten to add that I accept the science of climate change. By that, I mean I accept that carbon dioxide has its full greenhouse effect. At Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, said that I was denying this, but I accept that it has the full effect. However, the full effect is only 1.2 degrees centigrade warming for a doubling of the quantity of carbon dioxide—it is there in section 8.6.2.3 of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The danger arises from the potential feedback effects from water vapour in the atmosphere. We can measure whether those are happening and it is clear they are happening more slowly than expected—that is what those papers I cited are all about.
This is not about saying that climate change is or is not happening; it is about saying that potentially the world is changing. We are finding flexibilities in the way in which the world is changing which mean that we should retain flexibility in policy. That is why I oppose the amendment.