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All Sheila Mae Dobbins wants is an apology.
In 2014, an industrial facility producing wood pellets opened so close to her house in Gloster, Mississippi, that she could overhear conversations between managers and staffers as they worked and smell the fumes the plant pumped into the air.
Dobbins, a 59-year-old mother of two, relies on an oxygen tank to breathe, as do her sister and her brother-in-law, who also live in the town. Her husband Neal depended on an oxygen tank as well, but passed away in 2017, just as Dobbins was experiencing an acute health crisis that led to her diagnosis with heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. She tears up when discussing how her own hospitalization left her unable to care for her husband of 36 years before he died.
“I was on life support,” said Dobbins, who wore a tracheotomy tube with a speaking valve. “I couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk. And through all this, my husband was sick and I didn’t even know it.”
The company that owns the plant, the U.K.-based power giant Drax Group, originally claimed that the pellet mill would bring hundreds of millions of dollars of investments to the local economy and touted the possibility of growing renewable power within the state.
Instead, the plant employs only a handful of local workers, and its wood pellets are shipped abroad to be burned for electricity in Drax’s U.K. power station and other foreign power plants. Residents of Gloster, a small town 50 miles north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, claim that the mill has polluted their air and harmed their health. In 2020, the Mississippi mill was fined $2.5 million for exceeding the legal limits of harmful air pollutants, and Drax promised to install new pollution controls. It has since continued to breach emission limits and this month faced another six-figure penalty.
The Drax Amite facility in Gloster, Miss.
Photo: Nico Hopkins/The Perfect Shot
Gloster is just one of seven pellet mills that Drax operates in the U.S., along with 10 in Canada, and the company is currently at work on new projects in Washington state and California. Land and Climate Review’s previous investigation into Drax’s Canadian mills uncovered 189 violations of environmental law, most of which related to air pollution. Drax’s two pellet mills in Louisiana have been fined millions for environmental law violations, and one entered dispute resolution discussions in March over further emissions breaches.
This sprawling operation is built to pursue a noble goal: replacing the coal-fired electricity generation at the U.K.’s largest single power plant, the Drax facility in the north of England, with a renewable input in the form of wood pellets.
But a growing chorus of environmentalists and scientists are warning that the U.K. power plant is now more carbon-intensive burning wood than when the plant burned coal. The entire company, from power plant to pellet mills, is only profitable thanks to massive subsidies from the U.K. government — yet the company plans to open multiple new power plants in the U.S. in the coming years and is seeking federal subsidies to build its new projects.
The residents of Gloster, and other towns across the U.S. near Drax’s current and future facilities, are asking a simple question: Why is a company propped up by the British government for an unclear environmental gain polluting their air?
Drax denies any physical impact on Gloster residents, saying “an independent, third-party analysis commissioned by Drax found that our Gloster facility’s air toxics have no adverse effects on human health.” Questions remain, however, as Drax declined to provide the name of the consulting firm or any more details on their findings.
Another Gloster resident, Myrtis Woodard, has firsthand experience of the problem. “It was better before that mill came,” Woodard said. “We can’t come outside, the air is so bad. I’ve got two inhalers and the doctor tried to give me another one. I have asthma, COPD, and angina.”
“The air is so polluted you can smell everything, taste it.”
Debra Butler, another Gloster resident, echoed Woodard. “My yard looks a mess,” she said. “I’m afraid to go outside because of my breathing problems. I was taking Albuterol once a day; now I take it three times a day in my inhaler. I come outside with a mask on. The air is so polluted you can smell everything, taste it.”
Other friends and family members shared similar stories of heart and respiratory conditions emerging in the years since the plant opened. Dobbins knew six people who were reliant on oxygen tanks living on her street before she moved away. Five of them are now dead.
The emissions from Drax’s pellet mill are not the only possible drivers of the heart conditions or breathing problems that Gloster residents described, and no direct link between the plant and the residents’ health has been established. Gloster has an overall poverty rate of 39 percent; the state of Mississippi ranks second to last in the U.S. for overall health and last for childhood respiratory disease.
Locals had hoped Drax could help revitalize the town’s economy. Instead, they described a town in decline.
Krystal Martin of the Greater Greener Gloster initiative.
Photo: Nico Hopkins/The Perfect Shot
“In my opinion, everything has gone down,” said Krystal Martin, who is leading community action for cleaner air. “Gloster is small, extremely rural, it has no public schools. The houses are in poor conditions, the buildings are old and dilapidated.”
“The grass don’t grow green like it used to,” she added. “The trees don’t bloom like they used to.”
Martin started organizing with community members under the banner “Greater Greener Gloster” in 2021, inspired by her mother Jane’s breathing difficulties.
“In 2016, I began to get sick, but I did not realize what was going on,” said Jane Martin. “In 2021, when the fine came out, we began to wonder if the air pollution had made me sick” over the years the plant had been operating.
Greater Greener Gloster has galvanized opposition to the mill in the town. Despite her dependence on “a 37-foot cord” for oxygen, Dobbins is determined to speak out on the health impacts of the mill “as long as there’s breath in my body.”
“I died three times, but God was not ready for me,” she said. “I am a walking testimony.”
Toxic Spikes in the Middle of the Night
A research team at Brown University, led by Erica Walker, has found that the air in Gloster contains dramatically higher levels of toxic chemicals compared to a nearby town — and that levels of pollutants spike in the middle of the night.
The study, which is currently undergoing peer review, compares Gloster with a demographically similar town in Mississippi, Mendenhall, which does not have a wood pellet mill. Walker stressed the need for larger sample sizes and more time to monitor trends, but her initial findings are that “air pollutant concentrations in Gloster are magnitudes higher, even after adjusting for meteorological conditions.” This is especially true for a category of pollutants known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, which can be released when drying or burning wood.
“VOCs are nasty stuff,” said Walker. “When you’re thinking about a child that’s exposed to that in utero, if it’s during a critical window, then we’re already talking about a compromised child from the beginning — and then it’s going to snowball over a period of time. VOCs have been shown to lead to short-term things like irritation to long-term things like cancer.”
Heat maps produced by researchers from Brown University show high concentrations of dangerous compounds such as volatile organic compounds and nitrogen dioxide around the Amite mill in Gloster, Miss.
Images: Community Noise Lab at Brown University
Heat maps in the study show concentrated clouds of pollutants around the plant and a nearby residential area. A preprint of the research states that vulnerable populations are impacted by air pollution from wood pellet plants, and that proximity is a statistically significant factor for risk of respiratory disease in children.
“From the data that we got from Gloster in particular, we know that it’s an issue when people live next to these plants,” said Walker. “This is their short-term and long-term health profile. It has direct impacts.”
A Drax spokesperson said the company’s consultants “found that no pollutant from the facility exceeded the acceptable ambient concentration.”
An unexpected finding in Walker’s research is what she calls “opportunistic dumping.” Her data shows what she describes as “crazy spikes” of VOC emissions throughout the night. She said that although the daily averages of VOCs seen by the Environmental Protection Agency do not look dangerous, her data reveals a “structural issue” in regulatory monitoring being conducted on a daily basis, rather than hourly.
Gloster, Miss., residents protest outside the Drax Amite BioEnergy pellet mill.
Photo: Greater Greener Gloster
Residents remembered being more aware of pollution at night. Dobbins said, “At night sometimes I can’t rest, and I would have to get my husband up because I would like to sit outside. But when I went out there, I told him, ‘I’m going back in the house.’ The odor is just that bad.”
“And the smell of it, I didn’t know it. In my life, I smelled nothing like it, so I couldn’t really describe it. But it’s a funky scent. A foul, very foul odor,” Dobbins continued. “We can smell it the most at night. It’s like they didn’t want nobody to see them do it.”
Environmental attorney Patrick Anderson warned that it is possible the spikes are simply due to atmospheric conditions. “It could be that even if they’re emitting at a constant rate, when things cool down at night, the VOCs settle down into the community,” he said.
But he also suggested another possibility. “These facilities can bypass their emission controls. Sometimes there are reasons they absolutely need to do that to avoid something blowing up and people getting hurt.”
While working for the Environmental Integrity Project, Anderson went into litigation with another wood pellet company in Texas and “really got to examine their operating records.” He found that they were bypassing their emission controls multiple times a week, inundating the local community with smoke each time.
“They were not just doing it for emergencies — it was happening all of the time,” Anderson said. As with the findings in Gloster, “things were worse at night.”
In 2020, Louisiana state environmental regulators received a report from an anonymous source alleging that Drax facilities in that state had “literally hundreds of hours of uncontrolled venting annually.”
The Gloster mill’s own reporting to the regulator shows that pollution controls were bypassed for over 500 hours in 2023 — although there is no indication that the mill breached regulations by doing so. Responding to a letter from campaigners this April, the company promised to start “curtailing operations at night.”
A Pattern of Pollution Across State Lines in the South
Since the start of 2024, the Gloster mill has been issued two letters outlining violations, including failure to provide inspectors with records and missing a deadline to conduct emissions testing by 43 days. But these are far from the company’s most egregious recent violations of environmental rules in the U.S.
In January, Louisiana regulators sent Drax a notice stating that the company had bypassed pollution controls on 381 instances between January 2022 and June 2023 at its two mills in the state. As a result, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality is currently negotiating a fine with Drax. That agency issued a similar notice in 2022 for prior violations, and Drax agreed to settle for $1.6 million per mill.
The company is also under scrutiny for emitting unsafe levels of a category of pollutants that Anderson, the environmental lawyer, describes as “some of the most toxic and harmful pollutants that are addressed by the Clean Air Act.” Hazardous air pollutants emitted by wood pellet mills include carcinogenic substances such as formaldehyde and benzene, as well as acrolein, which “causes lung and throat, nose and eye irritation, even in very, very low quantities.”
In 2021, the Mississippi government began to mandate tests for these “hazardous air pollutants” at the Gloster mill. The testing revealed that the facility had exceeded limits for these chemicals in both 2022 and 2023. Limits for specific chemicals were also breached throughout the period: The limit on methanol was exceeded by over 80 percent between June 2021 and June 2022, for example. In September 2024, Drax was fined $225,000 for these breaches, among other violations.
The Drax mill in Gloster, with houses nearby.
Photo: Nico Hopkins/The Perfect Shot
In 2023, Anderson and his colleague wrote to Louisiana regulators about Drax’s plants in the state, saying, “Drax is once again failing to accurately document and report its emissions.” The Environmental Integrity Project attorneys argued that after the new emissions testing had taken place in Gloster in 2021, “Drax could have — and should have — reported to [Louisiana’s Department for Environmental Quality] that its Louisiana plants were almost certainly exceeding permit limits. … Instead, however, Drax continued to certify that its outdated and inaccurate [hazardous air pollutants] emissions data were accurate.”
Drax later conceded that the Louisiana mills were indeed breaching limits, by 59 percent at its LaSalle plant in Urania, and by 58 percent at its Morehouse mill in Bastrop.
Drax said that following the new emissions testing, it worked with the state’s Department for Environmental Quality to align on testing and permit updates.
The Gloster mill is now negotiating a hazardous air pollutant penalty with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, but in Louisiana, similar enforcement action has not yet been taken. Anderson said such action is “plainly warranted.”
In 2021, the Mississippi government began to mandate tests for “hazardous air pollutants” at the Gloster mill. The testing revealed that the facility had exceeded limits in 2022 and 2023.
Authorities had been warned of suspect activity at Drax’s Louisiana mills before. In 2020, the state’s environmental department received an email from an anonymous source who claimed to work for the company.
The email made numerous allegations about Drax’s regulatory compliance, several of which inspectors subsequently confirmed: Waste was being handled improperly at the Morehouse mill, and being burned without a permit at LaSalle. Drax told Land and Climate Review that its history of burning industrial sludge “was an administrative error.”
The inspectors were unable to find evidence of some of the email’s most shocking claims, including that Drax had failed to report “literally hundreds of hours of uncontrolled venting” of harmful pollutants at each facility. “Many of these events would easily exceed the Reportable Quantity for Acrolein,” the email stated. Drax told Land and Climate Review that the acrolein claim was “unproven,” but did not comment on uncontrolled venting.
The email also included allegations that “no actions were taken” after management was told that pollution data was being manipulated, and that any mention of unreported pollution would “cause senior management to threaten termination.” Inspectors did not address claims about management behavior, and Drax denied the allegations, saying “our pattern and practice is to cooperate with local agencies charged with overseeing emissions.”
Dubious Carbon Accounting at British Bill–Payer Expense
Environmentalists and scientists warn that the pellet business is driving forest degradation, and that CO2 emissions from the U.K. power plant are actually more carbon-intensive than when it burned coal instead of wood. Drax, however, claims its pellet business is preventing forest fires and creating jobs, and that the pellets come from well managed forests, saying, “CO2 from the biogenic carbon cycle should be considered differently to the fossil CO2 released by the combustion of oil, gas, and coal.
“Whether the wood is used for bioenergy, or these trees naturally decompose, the same amount of CO2 is released into the atmosphere.”
An aerial view of the Drax Power Station on June 19, 2023, in Selby, England.
Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Drax’s logic aligns with carbon accounting rules established in 1997, in a United Nations treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol. The treaty came into force in 2005 and significantly expanded the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. But buried within its pages, a relatively minor rule designed to prevent double-counting of emissions in different locations transformed the bioenergy industry.
The framework stated that emissions should be counted only in the country where trees are harvested, rather than in the place where they are burned. This effectively provided a carbon accounting loophole for countries that import wood to burn in power stations. In the U.K.’s case, even though Drax’s power station is the largest single source of CO2 in the country, its emissions are officially recorded as zero.
These rules are much criticized — even by some of the scientists who invented them — but still form the basis of U.K. policy. In 2021, 500 scientists wrote to the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, calling for the end of wood burning for energy.
In the U.K.’s case, even though Drax’s power station is the largest single source of CO2 in the country, its emissions are officially recorded as zero.
“The burning of wood will increase warming for decades to centuries. That is true even when the wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas,” they wrote.
“To avoid these harms, governments must end subsidies and other incentives that today exist for the burning of wood whether from their forests or others. The European Union needs to stop treating the burning of biomass as carbon neutral in its renewable energy standards and in its emissions trading system.”
This mounting concern from experts has spilled over into U.K. politics, with parliamentarians becoming increasingly vocal about Drax’s heavily subsidized wood pellet business and the CO2 emissions from its U.K. power plant.
Politicians from all mainstream U.K. political parties have spoken critically about publicly funding Drax’s supply chain. Even two recent U.K. energy secretaries are skeptics: Kwasi Kwarteng, who was secretary from 2021 to 2022, was recorded admitting that Drax’s supply chain “is not sustainable” and “doesn’t make any sense,” while his successor Jacob Rees-Mogg went further, publicly describing Drax’s “ridiculous” carbon accounting as “barmy in-Wonderland stuff.”
Since the center-left Labour Party won the general election in July this year, both the U.K.’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, and Energy Minister, Ed Miliband, have been suspiciously quiet on the matter, not mentioning biomass in key speeches about the energy sector.
Drax’s subsidies are set to run out in 2027, and deciding whether they should continue is a tricky issue for the U.K.’s new government. Renewal is likely to face backlash from Parliament, news media, and scientists. But Labour has set ambitious targets for clean energy, and politicians are already facing complaints from their constituents about new wind and solar farms. Meeting 2030 targets on paper, even if the scientific reality is more complicated, still offers political expediency that cleaner alternatives lack.
Drax has been clear that its backup plan is to expand operations in the U.S. and seek security in Inflation Reduction Act tax credits and state-level incentives, rather than relying on U.K. subsidies. In early 2023, Drax’s CEO Will Gardiner told the press that the company would “accelerate” its U.S. plans and make the U.K. “less of a priority” if they had not gotten guarantees on future subsidies by July 2024. Drax also told Land and Climate Review that it intends to create new bioenergy carbon capture and storage facilities and to concentrate on carbon removal technology.
The U.K. guarantees have not arrived, and if the three new U.S. pellet mills in development are anything to go by, Drax may be serious about U.S. expansion.
New Mill in the Pacific Northwest, New Problems
Since 2022, Drax Group has had its sights fixed on a new pellet mill, this time in the small northwestern city of Longview, nestled on the Columbia River in Washington state, some 50 miles north of Portland, Oregon.
A high-gloss webpage for the $250 million project says that the plant will use sawdust and shavings from local sawmills to make their pellets and support more than 300 jobs in the area. “We’re Nature Positive,” the promotional page reads, “and our work centers on conserving the environment in which people across Washington and Oregon live, work, and play.”
But positivity — nature or otherwise — has not been the primary local sentiment in response to the project.
The port of Longview, Wash., where Drax is constructing its new mill.
Photo: Diane Dick
“People are extremely concerned about this because they know what communities are going through in the Southeast with the wood pellet industry, and they just don’t want those problems,” explained Ashley Bennett, an environmental attorney at Earthjustice.
Drax’s approach to the regulatory processes around the proposed mill has not alleviated these concerns. In its initial air permit application, Drax grossly underestimated the prospective emissions from the site, claiming the mill would emit just 0.53 tons per year of hazardous air pollutants. In subsequent correspondence with local pollution regulators, Drax revised this estimate to 48.9 tons per year.
Drax underestimating their emissions in official filings by a factor of almost 100 shocked experts. According to Anderson, the initial estimates were “absolutely not plausible. They were using emission factors and emissions estimates that didn’t apply to wood pellet plants. It’s mind-boggling that this could happen, that they would be off by two orders of magnitude.”
“People are extremely concerned because they know what communities are going through in the Southeast with the wood pellet industry, and they just don’t want those problems.”
Given its intended size and the toxicity of its emissions, the plant should be subject to the EPA’s Maximum Achievable Control Technology, or MACT, standard in order to minimize levels of hazardous air pollutants.
But in both its initial air permit application and subsequent correspondence with regulators, Drax failed to state that the Longview pellet mill would be a major source of hazardous air pollutants, and so subject to MACT standards.
Anderson described this omission as “deeply, deeply concerning.” In its response, Drax said that it does not mislead on emissions and that its practice and policy is to cooperate with local agencies. In response to questions, Drax did not provide an explanation for how they had so drastically underestimated their emissions in their proposal, but denied that it was intended to mislead regulators.
Forty-year Longview resident Diane Dick said, “There is a concern about Drax” from locals, including in regard to “the community’s health, environmental health, and the health of forest resources.”
Dick called state regulators herself in March after she awoke one day to find that a large white dome had been installed overnight, at the industrial site below her house.
The dome as seen from Diane Dick’s residence overlooking the Drax site.
Photo: Diane Dick
Her call led to an investigation, followed by a clear finding by the local air agency that Drax had not only begun construction without legal authorization, but they were also installing equipment that was not included in the permit application or draft air permit. Dick’s dome sighting kicked off a chain of events that landed Drax with a $34,000 fine — and this was not even Drax’s first violation on the site. Late in 2023, the company also twice breached rules around water quality in the Columbia River.
Following the investigation, Drax was instructed to stop construction, and the permitting process was halted.
Drax’s initial claim that the mill’s raw material would be sourced from sawdust and shavings, rather than freshly logged timber — repeated both on the project website and its initial environmental impact report — has also fallen apart.
In the year since the initial environmental checklist was submitted, it has emerged that the project will require logging. Drax’s Director of Environment Wayne Kooy admitted as much in emails to regulators this year, saying it was an “oversight” that the original proposal stated the mill would only use “residual” wood. Drax’s website still says an “independent third-party consultant” confirmed that “surplus of residual sawdust and shavings is available within a 60-mile radius.”
Based on the initial proposal, Cowlitz County awarded the project a determination of nonsignificance status, meaning that it would not have to undergo a more rigorous environmental impact assessment. Cowlitz County officials have since acknowledged, in public records obtained by Earthjustice, that Drax’s new plans to use commercial wood rather than waste would place the project “way outside of” the original proposition.
“Drax seems to chronically and consistently underrepresent what its impact is going to be,” said Brenna Bell, forest climate manager at the environmental justice organization 350PDX. “I don’t think they’re making themselves very welcome.”
When asked about these concerns, a Drax spokesperson said that the company works closely with regulators to establish best environmental practices, invested $180 million on improving the plants, and donated to local communities. She denied that Drax persistently misleads regarding pollution and environmental impacts.
Big Biomass Is Coming to Rural California
As progress stalls in Washington, Drax is eyeing other developments 1000 miles down the West Coast.
In February, Drax signed onto a self-described “forest resiliency initiative,” intended to mitigate wildfire risk, that proposes to build two pellet mills in rural portions of California, one in Tuolumne County east of Modesto and another in Lassen County in the state’s far northeast.
The plan was put together by the Rural County Representatives of California, an association of local governments in rural parts of the state, and developed via a newly created public agency called Golden State Natural Resources. Drax is not yet legally committed to the project but has signed a nonbinding agreement that discusses financing and investment.
The site of the proposed project in Tuolumne County, Calif.
Photo: Gary Hughes
The California project presents itself as a desperately needed wildfire mitigation measure, declaring that “by transforming excess and unmarketable biomass and fire fuels into higher-value wood products, Golden State Natural Resources will create jobs, stimulate rural economies, and begin the process of mitigating dangerous wildfire conditions.” But Drax’s involvement has raised alarm bells for local activists, who worry that the projects will bring the same problems plaguing communities in the Southeast and Washington state to California.
Rita Frost, forest advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Drax’s involvement “wipes away the sheen of this being truly for wildfire mitigation or economic development. We can see it for what it really is, which is a profit-driven measure.”
Drax said that it was untrue to suggest that the scheme was purely profit driven, rather than intended for economic development or wildfire mitigation.
Patrick Blacklock, the CEO of the Rural County Representatives of California, confirmed, however, that profitability is a key objective. When asked why pellet mills were chosen over less controversial methods of wildfire mitigation, the Yolo County administrator said that “candidly, part of the reason is we wanted to find a commercially viable pathway.” He added that Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary of natural resources, had stressed the importance of commercial viability “at a recent meeting” with Blacklock.
Blacklock said he is aware of Drax’s history of noncompliance with environmental regulations in the Southeast, but claimed the California plants will be “different.”
“I think it comes back to this being community-led and public agency-led. That’s not how public agencies operate,” he said. “We operate to the letter of the law. We operate to the commitments that are made on environmental review.”
But Craig Ferguson, senior vice president of the Rural County Representatives of California, appeared to contradict this point in a meeting that Blacklock also attended, warning that the project is unlikely to remain in total control of the public agency.
“If we’re going to build facilities, we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars, and we’re going to have to expect that those people putting the money up are going to expect some kind of control,” Ferguson said in May.
Nick Joslin, a program manager at the Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center, located in the sourcing radius of the Lassen site, has questioned the claims that the new project would bring good jobs to the area.
Both mill sites are in parts of the state that once had strong lumber industries, and Joslin confirmed that locals he has spoken with seemed happy to have any mill back in the area for employment purposes. But Joslin believes that the pellet plants would be different than the industries that supported communities in the past: “Inside these industrial facilities, there aren’t that many jobs … and the jobs would be maintenance work in extremely hazardous conditions.”
The site of the proposed project in Lassen County, Calif.
Photo: Gary Hughes
Rural County Representatives of California also publicly opposed legislation in 2022 that would have set a minimum wage standard for forestry jobs.
“Ultimately they want people to be able to work in forest jobs again, but not to pay them well. That was a little shocking for everybody to see,” said Joslin.
Since 2021, Golden State Natural Resources has spent $150,000 lobbying the California government, some of which relates to workers’ wages. In 2023, after its parent group publicly opposed the bill that would set a “prevailing wage” pay floor for workers on “fuels reduction projects” — a category the proposed mills would fall under — Golden State Natural Resources spent $45,000 lobbying on the bill.
The agency’s own board members have even expressed concern over overblown promises of employment. “We’re promising to put local people to work. And the only local people we are going to be putting to work is the guy cleaning up the trailer park after the workers all leave,” Humboldt County Supervisor Bohn told the board in May.
Local activists are currently awaiting the release of the project’s draft environmental impact review, slated for September after multiple delays.
In the meantime, Frost and other opponents of the project are focusing their efforts on persuading state and county officials not to “waste our money on projects that are boondoggles, as the risk of wildfires only becomes more urgent every single year.”
“When I’m talking to policymakers, I put it this way: ‘Supporting Golden State Natural Resources is like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire,’” said Frost.
The Push for More Power
A 2023 report found that without subsidies for generating green electricity — totaling 548 million pounds ($719 million) from U.K. bill-payers in 2023 — the entire Drax Group of 72 companies, including all the pellet mills, would operate at a loss.
So like any sensible profit-seeking endeavor, Drax is looking to diversify its income stream — by building a new series of pellet-burning plants in the U.S. that would rely on the same suspect carbon math to get subsidies from the U.S. government. If Drax wants its new U.S. mills to usher in new profits and growth, the facilities need to be a prelude to new power plants.
A 2023 report by chartered accountancy firm Keartland & Co found that Drax is reliant on U.K. government subsidies in order to turn a profit.
Image: Keartland & Co
The long-continuing uncertainty around its U.K. subsidies only increases the pressure. The company failed to make the shortlist for a major new subsidy in 2023, and last month it coughed up 25 million pounds ($33 million) for regulatory breaches after misreporting data about wood pellet imports to the U.K. energy regulator Ofgem. Drax denied that the outcome of the regulatory investigation had anything to do with its pursuit of new revenue sources or the likelihood of future subsidies. The company told Land and Climate Review that the U.K. government is conducting a consultation on future support for biomass generators, which it welcomes.
The power company announced plans to construct up to 11 new biomass power plants across the U.S. and Canada last year, each with additional carbon capture and storage technology. With this new (and expensive) tech, the company plans on going beyond the already contentious claims that its U.K. power plant is carbon neutral to claim its new facilities will be carbon negative. In January, it launched a new subsidiary, Drax U.S. BECCS Development LLC to carry out the projects.
Headquartered in Texas, Drax’s new Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage arm claims it has already earmarked two sites in the U.S. South for power plants and that it is evaluating nine more across North America. Drax claims its first power plant project in the Southeast will require a $2 billion investment and is aiming to make a final investment decision by 2026.
Previous investigations have estimated that if all 11 plants matched Drax’s U.K. power station in fuel consumption, they would burn the equivalent of approximately 300 million trees a year and need to capture and store more than 100 million tons of CO2 in order to zero out their emissions. Drax contests these calculations, in part due to its carbon accounting methods.
The eligibility of Drax’s new power plants for federal subsidy will depend on whether the U.S. chooses to adopt the same controversial carbon accounting rules that allow Drax to report its power station emissions as zero in the U.K.
The eligibility of Drax’s new power plants for federal subsidy will depend on whether the U.S. chooses to adopt the same carbon accounting rules that allow Drax to report its emissions as zero in the U.K.
The company certainly appears to be pushing for this. Through its lobbying firm VNF Solutions, Drax has engaged the services of Mary Landrieu, the former U.S. senator from Louisiana who chaired the Energy and Natural Resources Committee when in office. Landrieu has lobbied on “legislation related to bioenergy with carbon capture and storage,” according to VNF Solutions’ lobbying disclosures.
Biomass energy in the U.S. is at a juncture. In May, the U.S. Treasury proposed regulations relating to the Clean Electricity Production Tax Credit. While the eligibility of biomass power plants was not addressed explicitly, the rule proposal stated that any “clean energy facility that achieves net zero greenhouse gas emissions” will be able to access the tax credit — which would apply to Drax’s plants if its preferred carbon accounting rules are adopted. It is one of a number of federal tax credits introduced through the Inflation Reduction Act that could help fund plants like the ones Drax plan to build.
When asked if Drax was recruiting Rural County Representatives of California or its agencies to lobby for a power station in California, Blacklock, the RCRC CEO, said equivocally that “Drax definitely have that interest but candidly so do we. … We have some shared interests.”
In the last year and a half, Rural County Representatives of California has spent over $1.5 million lobbying the California government. In lobbying reports from January 2023 to June 2024, biomass is mentioned 13 times.
It is not yet clear whether the Democratic or Republican parties will take strong stances on biomass power. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has threatened to gut the Inflation Reduction Act entirely, which would no doubt disappoint Drax’s American CEO, who released a press release describing the “eye-watering” subsidies in President Joe Biden’s bill as “transformative” for the company.
But a Kamala Harris win is no guarantee of plain sailing for Drax, either. The Democratic presidential candidate is currently under fire for lacking a clear energy policy, and she may eventually find herself under pressure from other Democrats to exclude Drax’s business model from new subsidy regimes.
Major party figures have begun to speak out against the industry, such as Sen. Cory Booker, who said it exposes “low-income and minority communities [to a] disproportionate burden of environmental hazards and injustices.”
Along with other senior party figures such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Booker introduced a law to reform biomass carbon accounting in April. That same month, the EPA launched a research project investigating the health impacts of wood pellet plants.
“They’re currently in the process of doing that investigation and are doing health impact analysis as well,” said Ashley Bennett at EarthJustice. “So I think that those are signs that this industry as it is currently operating is unsustainable.”
“Clean energy should not lead to increased logging and forest degradation, and it shouldn’t create greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “These facilities are just not good for the communities that they come into. They put public health at risk, put forests at risk, put the ecosystem at risk, and ultimately, they further exacerbate the climate crisis.”
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