Bio-messing around with Bristol green energy

Leading the kind of fashionably glamorous life you’d expect of a leading political columnist, ironist, wit and bon viveur, I’ve spent the last few days reading something called Avonmouth Bioenergy Facility Environmental Statement – Main Text and – compared to the main body of this work – I can assure you that title is a model of precision, concision and excitement.

The document is all about the proposed biomass plant at Avonmouth, which hit the headlines recently after planning officers attempted to railroad its planning permission under delegated powers rather than have a planning committee of elected councillors look at itplanning officers attempted to railroad its planning permission under delegated powers rather than have a planning committee of elected councillors look at it. Their cunning plan, however, was hastily withdrawn when it was pointed out that their behaviour looked a bit, well, dodgy.

What the hell is biomass?

But let’s start at the beginning. What the hell is a biomass plant anyway? Well, it’s an odd collision of Neanderthal man with 21st-century man. The basic idea is that you burn lots and lots and lots of wood and generate electricity. The Avonmouth plant is known as a gasification plant, which means they capture the gases from the burning wood, subject them to some sort of chemical process, ignite the lot and use this highly combustive process to drive a turbine to generate electricity.

Isn’t it dangerous? Creating highly volatile gases in a confined space and then setting fire to them? Indeed it is and Nexterra, one of the companies behind the Avonmouth plant along with civil engineering giants Balfour Beatty, did have a plant explode at the University of South Carolina in 2009. But if you overlook this unfortunate big bang, the whole thing sounds kinda neat on paper.

Some 75,000 tons of clean, local wood – lovingly collected by a friendly little man-in-an-eco-van from everybody’s favourite local wood recycling specialists, Avonmouth’s Boomeco – slickly moving up a covered conveyor belt from Boomeco’s ultra-modern, clean wood waste chipping facility to a state-of-the art gasification facility where it’s turned into “clean energy” What could possibly go wrong?

Err, what could go wrong?

According to the Avonmouth Bioenergy Facility Environmental Statement – Main Text, not much. I’ve searched for a risk assessment in the relevant chapter – 3. Proposed Development Description – and there isn’t one. So I suppose we shouldn’t worry our little heads about such things? Because these kinds of corporate planning documents are written by people with a little knowledge to bamboozle people with no knowledge, which makes me the perfect target audience along, probably, with most of you and most councillors on planning committees.

But as with many complex documents, a little bit of reading and comprehension can go a long way and the best place to start is at the beginning.

“Investing in healthcare, education, student accommodation, military family housing, renewable energy and highways; Balfour Beatty Investments is well positioned to adapt to emerging opportunities and apply skills across geographies,” gushes their opening statement, going out of its way not to say whether Balfour Beatty has ever actually built a gasification plant before, while saying, “look at us, we know how to turn the word geography into a meaningless plural to sound smart.”

We’re also told “Nexterra has eight operational biomass gasification plants in North America”. Although the one that exploded and the one that was decommissioned before it even opened are not mentioned. Neither are we told that the plant that exploded was built in a partnership between Nexterra and Johnson Controls Inc. (JCI). A Fortune 500 corporate with a large energy services division that had never built a gasification plant before.

Boom in eco supplies?

The lack of discussion of this is no doubt an accidental oversight? But moving on from this detail, I was immediately drawn to section 3.2. Waste Sources, Types and Inputs: “The waste wood to be treated by the bioenergy facility is currently accepted and managed at the Boomeco RRF. The main sources of the wood are from the household waste stream which is disposed of at Household Waste Recycling Centres as well as construction and demolition waste.”

Really? The 75,000 tonnes of wood they need to burn a year will come from tiny little Boomeco? Even though Boomeco only has a contract with councils in the West to collect and process just 6,000 tonnes of this stuff at present? Absolutely. Yes. It says it again here, “the key aim is to source material from local markets”. It couldn’t be clearer could it? It’s all about local energy from local waste and what could be greener than that?

Except it isn’t about local energy, local wood, local anything in fact. Just take a look at another thriller of a report Wood waste: A short review of recent research July 2012 published by Defra. Specifically take a look at page 20, Section 4.2 Biomass and it says that there is only “0.1 Mt [100,000 tonnes] of [class C] wood waste available to new biomass facilities and export routes” in the whole of the UK. This means Boomeco/Nexterra will be using 75% of the spare capacity of all class C wood in the whole of the UK at their Avonmouth plant!

This doesn’t seem possible. However, to be fair, the Defra document does claim that class C wood capacity may rise to 0.5m tonnes by 2015. Although there’s no evidence of this happening yet. Plus it’s doubtful that Boomeco could access the 15 per cent cut they would need of this increased capacity to supply the Avonmouth facility. Especially when you consider Nexterra/Balfour Beatty are building a similar plant with the same capacity in at Tyseley, Birmingham and they also claim to have another two similar plants under development in the UK.

So assuming this increased capacity to 500,000 tonnes of class C wood is achieved by 2015 then Nexterra/Balfour Beatty require 60 per cent of this for their four plants alone. Then consider that there’s another 30 such plants currently in development in the UK and the claims become a total nonsense.

When local’s not really local

The only way the quantity of fuel required for this plant can be obtained is by importing the wood. (Why else are they locating by a port?) This is not about local waste creating local power. It’s about setting up a corporate facility to access the globalised supply chain for the globalised trade in wood. Your home could well end up being heated by the forests of the Third World purchased on the cheap by western corporations, not by waste.

Careful reading of the environmental statement even reveals this. Buried in section 3.2. Waste Sources, Types and Inputs is this throwaway phrase, “The bioenergy facility will be able to accept waste from other facilities as contingency and in line with a longer term business strategy.” What “longer term business strategy” is this please? Oh! It’s the one that’s not discussed anywhere in their allegedly comprehensive environmental statement!

Instead we get a report about a short-term business model. One involving only local waste wood that due to wood supply constraints only exists as a fictional construct specifically designed to obtain planning permission for a plant that will operate on a completely different business model from the day it opens.

Moving on through their report, how about a look at section 5. Traffic and Transportation? But what’s the point? It’s based on local firm Boomeco supplying up to 75,000 tonnes of local wood to the plant and makes no mention of the traffic and transportation issues involved in importing 90 per cent of the fuel from abroad.

Perfectly safe for wildlife?

Or we could look at the ‘Ecology’ section. In which they try to convince us that spewing out nitrogen, sulphur dioxide and various particulates will have no effect whatsoever on the water voles or on the Severn Estuary – a genuinely green sustainable resource for creating electricity – 700 metres away.

Instead let’s finally look at – for Avonmouth residents at least – the big one: section 11. Air Quality. On first reading this is a maze of highly technical information and statistics that seems plausible enough. But a few words keep recurring. One of these is “assumptions” as in “the assessment has used a number of conservative assumptions throughout”. Another word that crops up a lot is “modelling” as in, “all air dispersion modelling is inherently subject to a degree of uncertainty.” Combine this with the revelation tucked away in section 10. Noise and Vibration that “details of the equipment that will be in use as part of the proposed facility are not known” and what we have is a model based on assumptions about the operation of a facility whose design is not known yet!

This is nothing more than glorified guesswork tarted up with jargon, tricky maths and indecipherable statistics, which conveniently enough concludes, “Stack emissions of oxides of nitrogen, sulphur dioxide, particulate matter and carbon monoxide will not affect the achievement of the relevant statutory air quality strategy objectives and limit values for human health.” Who’d have ever guessed that?

While the big unanswered question about a document that boasts at its start that “Nexterra has eight operational biomass gasification plants in North America”, is why is the air quality chapter based entirely on a model of “assumptions” about an idealised facility when it could contain real world data, experience and examples from the US? Will Bristol councillors on Planning Committee ‘A’ fall for this tosh just like their planning officers did?