Environmental injustice: Wood pellet production increases air pollution, wood dust, heavy traffic and noise. Pellet mills and export facilities are often sited in communities of colour and lower income communities - who are often already exposed to other forms of industrial pollution and social exclusion. In February 2021, Drax’s Amite pellet plant in Mississippi was fined a record $2.5 million for having violated the state’s air permit for years - however, this sum is roughly equivalent to the GBP 2 million Drax is receiving every single day in 'renewable energy' subsidies from the UK government. In the Southeastern USA, Drax’s main pellet sourcing region, wood pellet plants are 50% more likely to be located in environmental justice communities (see here and here), i.e. counties where the poverty level is above the state medium, and at least 25% of the population is non-white. 

Drax power station is the UK’s single biggest emitter of CO2, with around 14 million tonnes of CO2 emitted in 2021, around 13.5 million tonnes of which were from burning wood. Drax claims that carbon emitted from burning wood can be ignored because new trees will eventually absorb the same amount of CO2. This flies in the face of science. In February 2021, 500 scientists wrote to world leaders, warning: “As numerous studies have shown, this burning of wood will increase warming for decades to centuries. That is true even when the wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas.” In the same month, 87 scientists and economists warned the UK government: “Forest bioenergy is adding increasingly large amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and reducing the capacity of forests to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, making it more difficult to reach net zero carbon as the stated goal for limiting global temperature. Adding carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to a bioenergy plant does not resolve this issue.” In October 2021, rating agency S&P removed Drax from its Global Clean Energy Index for failing to comply with their carbon standard.

Forest destruction: Drax burns the equivalent of 138% of the UK’s total annual wood production. Its main sourcing regions are the Southeastern US, Canada and the Baltic States. Furthermore, since its takeover of Pinnacle Renewable Energy in 2021, Drax has become the world's second biggest producer of wood pellets. Those pellets are burned in Drax's own power station in England as well as being sold to other energy companies in the UK, Netherlands and Japan. All of Drax's existing and planned pellet plants are located in the Southeaster US and Canada. 

In the US, Drax' biggest external wood pellet supplier is also the world's biggest pellet producer - Enviva. Enviva has been heavily criticised for regularly sourcing wood from clearcut coastal hardwood forests in the Southern US. As well as being home to black bears, salamanders and many bird species, these forests offer crucial protection from extreme weather events such as floods and droughts that are becoming increasingly common. While Drax and Enviva claim to use 'waste wood' and 'forest residues' for wood pellets, these terms refer primarily to the economic value of wood, and pelletising of whole trees is standard practice. 

Drax owns five pellet mills in the Southeastern US with two more under development. Wood for those plants is sourced mainly from monoculture pine plantations. Across the region, such plantations have been expanded at the expense of the rich forest ecosystems that are being clearcut. According to a study commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center, burning pellets from US pine plantations in the UK will be worse for the climate than the UK’s average electricity for a period of at least 40 years. 

Following its acquisition of Pinnacle Pellets, Drax now owns seven pellet mills in British Columbia and Alberta. Those plants are located next to some of the last stands of primary forests in British Columbia, Canada, home to endangered wildlife like caribou and among the most carbon-rich in the world. Drax admits in its 2021 Annual Report that those plants "operate in regions that include old growth forests" and that it will stop sourcing from such forests only if a provincial government review requires them to do so in future. 

In Estonia and Latvia, logging volumes have been increasing sharply as demand for wood, including for wood pellets for exports, has gone up. Logging is happening even in the few remaining old-growth forests, destroying habitat of rare and endangered species including Capercaillie, Black stork and Hazel grouse. In Estonia, the number of forest birds is declining by 50,000 breeding pairs year on year. In July 2021, a report by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) commissioned by Greenpeace Netherlands, exposed “logging in high conservation value forest (HCVF) areas, logging in watersheds and logging in peatland forests” in Estonia, all of them associated with Drax’s pellet supplier Graanul Invest.

Wood biomass is associated with high rates of deforestation as well as monocultures of various crops. There is a growing body of evidence that shows the connection between deforestation and an increased risk for disease outbreaks and pandemics. For example, monocultures like eucalyptus plantations reduce biodiversity leaving species like rats and mosquitoes, which are more likely to spread dangerous pathogens, to thrive. This biodiversity decline results in a loss of natural disease regulation and poses a risk for human, animal and environmental health.

Flawed claims around Carbon Capture and Storage: In May 2022, Drax submitted a planning application for installing carbon capture equipment at two of its biomass units. A decision on the application is expected, earliest, at the end of 2022. The National Grid plans to build a carbon dioxide pipeline which would connect Drax power station as well as various fossil fuel sits, and a consortium of oil and gas companies has already got consent to inject CO2 from that pipeline under the North Sea. 

However, there are good reasons to doubt that Drax is capable of capturing large quantities of CO2 from burning biomass: there is no example that demonstrates carbon capture from biomass combustion at scale is possible. It is widely accepted that all new technologies go through several technology readiness levels, yet Drax proposes to skip several of those development stages. So far, Drax has been involved in just two small-scale carbon capture trials. In 2018, Drax partnered with a start-up company called C-Capture to trial capturing one tonne of CO2 a day from biomass burning, financed by millions of pounds in government grants. This project failed, and, in March 2021, Drax described C-Capture’s technology as not proven. In June 2020, Drax announced a new carbon capture partnership with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) whose novel solvent Drax wants to use for capturing CO2 at scale. However, the trial so far has only captured 300kg of CO2 a day and this is not over a continous period. All CO2 that has been captured has subsequently been released into the atmosphere and no actual reuslts from the trial have been published. 

Beyond this very small and unpublished trial, CO2 capture from wood combustion has not been demonstrated anywhere in the world. On a nine-stage technology readiness level ladder, the CCS from wood combustion technology has reached stage 4 or 5. Stages 5-8 are considered essential prior to full commercial application. This makes it all but inconceivable that Drax would be able to operate one, let alone two of their large biomass units with full carbon capture and storage from 2027/28, as they propose. 

Campaigning groups like Biofuelwatch is concerned that the main purpose of Drax's planning application for BECCS could be to convince the UK government to grant them further subsidies once the current ones expire in 2027.