How the UK Pays Billions to Burn the World’s Forests
A ship called the Ultra Lynx recently docked at the Port of Tyne. She’s a bulk carrier, nearly 300 metres long, and deep in her holds she was carrying 62,522 tonnes of compressed wood pellets
That wood had been harvested in the forests of the American South, mechanically chipped, thermally dried, compressed into pellets, and shipped 8,000 miles across the Atlantic from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Once unloaded, it goes onto roughly 50 freight trains heading south to Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire. There, it gets burned. The whole lot, incinerated in a matter of minutes.
This is the cornerstone of the UK’s strategy to reach ‘net zero’. We import millions of tonnes of wood from North America, set it on fire, and officially record the ‘carbon’ emissions as zero.
The British public pays for this through levies on their energy bills. It costs billions. The absurdity of this arrangement is so striking that triggers intellectual self defence.
Is this really true? I’m sorry to tell you it gets worse.
To understand how we got here, you need to know what Drax was. Built between 1974 and 1986, it was designed as the ultimate coal-fired powerhouse — nearly 4,000 megawatts of generating capacity, enough to keep the lights on for millions of homes.
But it was also the single largest source of CO2 in the UK. In 2007 alone, it pumped 22.1 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, alongside the highest estimated nitrogen oxide emissions in the entire EU.
Then came the 2008 Climate Change Act. Coal was on its way out, and Drax had a choice: adapt or die.
The company chose adaptation. It spent £700 million converting four of its six boilers from coal to biomass. The corporate PR narrative was one of redemption — the ‘dirty’ coal monster reborn as a clean, ‘green’ energy champion. And the government loved it.
Today, Drax runs 2.6 GW of biomass capacity, providing around six percent of UK electricity and 11-12 percent of what we officially count as ‘renewable’ power. To feed this, the station burns between seven and eight million tonnes of wood pellets every year.
Because the UK doesn’t have the forestry to sustain even a fraction of that demand, 99 percent of the fuel is imported. Environmental campaigners put it this way: Drax burns the equivalent of 580 million Christmas trees per year.
That’s roughly 20 trees for every household in the country.
The Physics Just Don’t Work
Biomass is ‘carbon’ neutral in theory, but in practice its utility falls apart. Wood is an inferior fuel. It has lower energy density than coal and higher moisture content, even after drying and compression.
A power station has to burn a much larger volume of wood to generate the same electricity, and 65% of the energy is lost immediately as uncaptured heat. The result is that burning wood emits more CO2 per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated than burning coal.
Read that again. Then consider that Britain has massive reserves of coal. One of the last things the National Coal Board did before it was dissolved was to issue their data on how much coal reserves the UK has. Their estimate was 500 years worth.
UK biomass burning generates 15.6 million tonnes of CO2 annually. Of that, Drax alone accounts for 13.3 million tonnes. To put that in context, total UK coal burning — including steel production — emitted 10 million tonnes in 2020, and wood burning now exceeds coal.
Drax ranks as the fourth largest CO2 emitter in Europe, behind only three coal plants in Poland and Germany. And remember, this is only the CO2 cost, when you throw in the damage to real north American ecology, the environmental cost of this ‘green’ technology becomes utterly absurd.
For reference, here’s how the fuel sources compare on lifecycle emissions are below. How can this possibly be considered as “zero carbon” technology?
- Imported wood pellets: 1,160 to 5,120g CO2 per kWh (varies with forest ‘carbon’ debt and supply chain)
- Hard coal: roughly 1,000g CO2 per kWh
- Natural gas: roughly 400g CO2 per kWh
- Offshore wind: less than 20g CO2 per kWh
The Accounting Trick
This is where the spreadsheet meets the stratosphere.
Under ‘carbon’ accounting rules established by the IPCC and adopted by the UK, the CO2 released when you burn wood for energy is not counted at the smokestack. Instead, those emissions are attributed to the country where the trees were grown — in this case, the US and Canada.
The logic goes like this: new trees will be planted to replace the ones that were felled, and those trees will eventually reabsorb the ‘carbon’ that’s released when we burn it here in the UK. Therefore, the net CO2 release is logged as zero.
In theory, this makes some kind of sense. In practice, it’s an accounting trick, and even seasoned parliamentarians have called it exactly that.
The problem is time. A wood pellet burns in minutes. The regrowth of a forest takes decades. Studies show the ‘carbon’ debt created by substituting wood for coal in natural hardwood forests takes 44 to 104 years to repay.
Imagine this absurdity with something your senses could intuitively detect: we’re going to pollute your town with a terrible stench, but don’t worry, because in 104 years time we’ll take the smell away again. This accounting trick operates on a century-long IOU.
Considering CO2 emissions on a generous 50-year assessment, electricity from Drax is as ‘carbon’-intensive as gas. On a less generous one, it’s worse than coal.
The European Academies Sciences Advisory Council has said that using woody biomass for power “is not effective in mitigating climate change and may even increase the risk of dangerous climate change.”
The UK’s own Climate Change Committee has warned that large-scale unabated biomass is not compatible with ‘net zero’. Yet the zero-‘carbon’ label persists, because the accounting rules say so.
By importing the wood from North America, the UK removes the ‘carbon’ liability from its own national ledger and pushes it onto foreign balance sheets.
This allows the government to stand on the world stage and claim significant domestic emissions reductions, while the atmosphere — the only thing the climate actually responds to — tells a different story entirely.
The Damage to the Forests
Drax has always maintained a clean narrative here. The company says it uses sawmill residues, thinnings, branches, and waste material — wood that would otherwise be left to rot or be burned in slash piles.
Investigations have repeatedly shown this isn’t the full picture.
In British Columbia, a BBC Panorama investigation used satellite imagery, logging licences, and drone footage to follow trucks from Drax-owned pellet mills directly into areas of primary and old-growth forest.
These are irreplaceable ecosystems — habitats for critically endangered species like the woodland caribou and the Canada lynx, and ‘carbon’ sinks that have been sequestering carbon for centuries.
Documents from the BC Ministry of Forests revealed Drax took more than 40,000 tonnes of wood from old-growth forests in 2023. In one 87-hectare cut block, 90 percent of the area was classified as a “priority deferral area” — a designation reserved for forests that are “rare, at risk and irreplaceable.”
When confronted with this evidence, Drax said its operations aligned with Canadian regulatory frameworks. The company has since announced it will phase out sourcing from British Columbia, but for the centuries-old trees already felled, the damage is done.
In the American South, the story takes on a different dimension. Across Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Carolinas, the process of thermally drying pine releases volatile organic compounds and hazardous air pollutants, including formaldehyde and fine particulate matter.
In Gloster, Mississippi, and Amite, Louisiana, Drax mills have been fined repeatedly for air quality violations. A $2.5 million penalty in 2020 was one of the largest air-pollution fines in Mississippi history — levied because the company had drastically underestimated its hazardous emissions since the mill opened.
A survey of households near these mills found 86 percent reported at least one family member diagnosed with diseases associated with pellet mill pollution. British bill payers are funding a policy that claims to help the global environment while poisoning people in the American South.
The whole pipeline of people involved in propping this up need to fess up to this absurdity.
The supply chain emissions add another layer to this. Lifecycle analysis’ are a tricky things; much like the ‘models’ used in pharmaceutical medicine development they can get you the answer you want.
They were almost certainly used extensively in all the greenwashing intellectual acrobatics that justified this initial absurdity. But… it’s worth considering the arrangement of felling and shipping 62,000 of thousands of tonnes of wood across the Atlantic ocean for burning in in UK power plants.
Bulk carriers run on Very Low Sulfur Fuel Oil, and even though it seems counter intuitive, each tonne of VLSFO burned actually releases 3.1 tonnes of CO2. This particular fuel is incredibly ‘carbon’ heavy.
A lifecycle assessment looked at the energy gained vs energy expended from Canadian wood pellets, and it found that 7.2 GJ of energy is consumed for every tonne of pellets produced and shipped to Europe.
That’s 39 percent of the total energy content of the pellets themselves. In financial terms, this is like every dollar costing you $1.39 because of the transaction fee.
A 2019 Chatham House analysis put it bluntly: US-sourced pellets burned in the UK are responsible for up to 16 million tonnes of CO2 when you account for the full supply chain and the forgone ‘carbon’ removal of the trees that were harvested.
That’s the equivalent of adding six to seven million cars to the road under the guise of ‘net zero’. None of which actually appears in the UK’s ‘net zero’ spreadsheets.
As stupid as this already is, there’s the final boss we must confront.
The Bill
Since beginning its conversion from coal, Drax has received over £6 billion in public subsidies — funded directly by levies on household electricity bills.
Independent analysts project the total will reach £11 billion by 2027. We are literally paying millions of pounds per day to prop up this whole bizarre saga.
2021: £893 million (£2.44 million per day)
2022: £617 million (£1.69 million per day)
2023: £602 million (£1.64 million per day)
2024: £869 million (£2.38 million per day)
Drax gets public money through two different government programs. In 2024, one program handed them £653 million to run three of their generators, and a second program added another £216 million for a fourth.
As part of this taxpayer-funded deal, the government gives Drax what is called a ‘strike price’. This is basically a legally binding safety net. It guarantees that no matter how cheap electricity gets on the open market, Drax will always be paid exactly £138 for every unit of power they generate.
If the actual market price is lower than that, the public has to make up the difference through their energy bills.
To understand how absurd that number is, consider that offshore wind strike prices at one time fell to £60/MWh and are currently between £80/MWh – £90/MWh. Onshore wind and solar are cheaper still.
The public is paying more than double the going rate for a fuel source that emits more ‘carbon’ than coal.
In February 2025, despite years of criticism, the government extended Drax’s subsidies for another four years, from 2027 to 2031, at a strike price of £109.90/MWh. The government still holds the view this is “value for money” but simultaneously dropped Drax’s load to 27 percent, meaning it sits idle when wind and solar are abundant and fires up as backup.
The Revolving Door
So how does a single company, engaged in a practice that’s environmentally destructive and economically inefficient, maintain an unshakeable grip on government policy across multiple administrations? A recent employment tribunal gave us a rare look behind the curtain.
The case involved Rowaa Ahmar, Drax’s former head of public affairs. Ahmar alleged she was dismissed after blowing the whistle internally on the company’s ‘sustainability’ claims following the BBC Panorama documentary.
She testified that she received information indicating Drax had been “deliberately concealing” the truth and was “misleading the public, government and its regulator.” She claimed she was given an ultimatum: sign an NDA, take money, and go quietly. The case eventually settled without admission of liability.
But the most revealing testimony came from Drax’s external affairs director, Jonathan Oates. He told the tribunal that the company employs numerous former civil servants, and that staff regularly cycle between Drax and government departments. “So there is a bit of a revolving door, if you like, between the business and the civil service,” Oates said.
That’s the external affairs director of Drax, under oath, describing a revolving door with the civil service. Clearly, I have more work to do in digging through LinkedIn to find this revolving door..
The company also spends £1.2 million a year on lobbying firm 5654 & Company, £480,000 on ‘sustainability’ consultancy Robertsbridge, and makes strategic political donations — including £12,000 to the Labour Party in September 2022, shortly before sponsoring a reception at their conference.
In 2024, Ofgem fined Drax £25 million for misreporting ‘sustainability’ data on Canadian wood. None of this has slowed the subsidy pipeline.
Even if you set aside the sheer physical absurdity of the CO2 emissions, the Drax saga is a glaring symptom of a much deeper disease: a catastrophic failure of governance. This is a system completely incapable of course-correcting a glaring mistake.
We don’t have a dynamic government, regardless of whether its politically of the left or right. Our decision-makers are trapped inside a closed-loop information ecosystem thats funded by lobbyists and consultants who warp reality to protect their interests.
The tragic net result? Instead of just burning the coal we already have readily available in places like South Wales — which would actually emit less CO2 and cost drastically less money — we are spending billions in taxpayer wealth to chop down ancient North American forests, ship them 8,000 miles across the ocean, and set them on fire, and we still have the highest domestic electricity prices in the world.
Perhaps the most terrifying part of this entire racket is that it operates in broad daylight, right in front of everyone, and absolutely no one seems able to stop it, or even admit that a problem exists.
See more here substack.com
Some bold emphasis added