Future of Biomass

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I start from the assumption that biomass is a promising technology that could, if handled correctly, help to reduce our net carbon emissions in the context of Government policy. My reservations relate to the air pollution emissions from biomass and to whether we have sufficiently robust sustainability criteria.

In response to a parliamentary question that I tabled, the previous Government revealed in a written answer on 26 September 2009, at Hansard columns 695-96, that the then target of 38 TWh of biomass risked causing £557 million of annual social costs. In blunt terms, that means people dying early because of polluted air. That was supplemented by a written answer to the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) on 10 November 2009, at Hansard column 219, that made it clear that the mortality bill would be 340,000 life-years in 2020 alone. By my maths, using those figures, I reckon that a small, 20 MW, biomass plant running at 85% efficiency would kill roughly 17 people a year—and that is just the mortality impact. The Government have made no estimate of the cost of ill health consequent on polluting the air. If the Minister or his Department can find fault with my figures, or perhaps find more precise ones, let us hear them. However, I do not think that one can get away from the central, appalling fact that unabated biomass emissions will kill significant numbers of our fellow citizens, and this as a result of deliberate—or, if not deliberate, negligent—public policy.

A recent report by the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants, “The Mortality Effects of Long-Term Exposure to Particulate Air Pollution in the United Kingdom”, published on 21 December last year, estimated that the 2008 burden of particulates cost

“an associated loss of total population life of 340,000 life-years…a greater burden than the mortality impacts of environmental tobacco smoke or road traffic accidents.”

That figure is remarkable: it is exactly the level of extra burden to be inflicted on the UK atmosphere by 2020 under originally intended biomass targets. It cannot be right that public policy risks effectively doubling existing mortality rates. In contrast, currently at least in the UK, the mortality and morbidity caused by carbon emissions is presumably nil.

Near my constituency, at Barton, we have had planning permission turned down for a biomass plant that would have contributed significant amounts of particulates—ammonia, oxides of nitrogen and arsenic—to an area already under stress as an officially designated air quality management area. To be fair, the amount of arsenic to be emitted would have been restrained, because the amount of CCA—chromated copper arsenate—wood would have been limited to small quantities contained in demolition rubble. I doubt that constituents were greatly reassured on that count, but why are we allowing such toxic material to be burned in biomass at all? The bigger point is that if we can improve automotive exhausts supposedly to the extent that they can be “cleaner than the air we breathe”, it should not be beyond the wit of man to design a biomass burner that screens out the majority of particulates and therefore does not bring early death and disease to the population at large.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

The proposed biomass plant to which my hon. Friend refers would have been in my constituency. Does he agree that it is of great concern that there seems to be no drive to use the best available technology, which is what really ought to underline any decisions about such plants?

[Graham Stringer]

That is the point that I am making.

There is another trap to avoid. It is important to make the distinction between biomass that is good and biomass that is bad for the carbon balance in our atmosphere; otherwise, the danger is that biomass will be tarnished in the same way that first-generation biofuels were, creating a wall of cynicism about biofuels in general. Installing bad biomass plants around the UK rather than good ones would not only be a prodigious waste of taxpayers’ money, but embed into our electricity generation system for years to come a significant proportion of unsustainable electricity production.

I was drawn to the opinion of the European Environment Agency scientific committee on greenhouse gas accounting that was published on 15 September 2011, a copy of which I have submitted to the Minister’s officials. It knocks on the head the assumption that biomass combustion is always inherently carbon neutral, and points to the “double counting” that causes that error. The report explains that the assumption

“ignores the fact that using land to produce plants for energy typically means that this land is not producing plants for other purposes, including carbon otherwise sequestered.”

If biomass production replaces forests or reduces forest stocks or forest growth that would otherwise sequester more carbon, it can increase net carbon concentrations. If biomass displaces food crops, as biofuels did, it can lead to hunger if crops are not replaced, and to emissions from land use change if they are. The committee concluded that to reduce carbon in the air, bioenergy production must increase the net total of plant growth, or must be derived from biomass wastes that would otherwise decompose.