July 19, 2010
Forth Energy's UK biomass proposals given thumbs-up in impact study [From the web]
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND, July 19, 2010 (RISI) - Forth Energy's proposed £1.7 billion programme to build four giant biomass plants will have "no significant impact" on air quality, according to an independent study which was commissioned by the group.
The study by consultancy Sinclair Knight Merz, which has been carried out into the proposed plant at the port of Dundee, strengthens Forth Energy's case in the face of strong public opposition. Although similar studies are yet to be carried out on the remaining three plants at Edinburgh, Rosyth and Grangemouth, the group believes it is now likely that they too will show that the proposals will have hardly any effect on the air quality surrounding the sites. The four plants, which will produce a mixture of heat and power, will produce a total of 500 MW between them.
Calum Wilson, managing director of Forth Energy, said: "Emissions is probably our biggest issue. In Dundee, we have found that the plant does not have a significant impact on the air quality.
"The Grangemouth study is almost complete and then the other two will follow a few weeks later, but we are now relatively confident that we will get the same results in the other plants."
With the Dundee plant due to be formally proposed to the Scottish Government in the next few days, the air quality findings did little to console its opponents.
Bob Adam, spokesman for Residents Against Tayside Turbines (RATTs), said: "It depends what they mean by ‘significant'. It's certainly not going to have a positive impact. The docks are pretty bad for air quality already and having a second waste incinerator in the middle of the city is not going to help. We have found the whole scheme to be ludicrous from the start."
Duncan McLaren, chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said that air quality had never been his main concern with the plant.
"Our concerns are basically twofold. First, it's an incredibly wasteful approach to use biomass to produce mainly electricity when it would be much more efficient to produce only heat. Second, the plant will almost inevitably be importing biomass and there are very few guarantees anywhere of a secure sustainable supply."
He added that the number of proposals for biomass plants worldwide far outstripped the quantity of wood that was harvested each year.
Calum Wilson countered that the plant was not an incinerator, since it would burn mainly imported wood pellets with the remaining 20% to 30% coming from waste wood.
He agreed that burning wood for heat was considerably more efficient than burning it for electricity, but said: "You have to remember that with heat, you are starting for virtually a zero market. There's no heat network. There's not a lot of process heat being used in our cities. We're producing the amount of heat for which we think we'll find a market."
The Dundee and Rosyth plants are to each produce 100MW of power and 30MW of heat. Edinburgh will produce 200MW of power and 60MW of heat, while Grangemouth will produce 100MW of power and 200MW of heat, since Forth Energy believes it will find greater demand due to the large adjacent industrial base in the town built around the Ineos refinery.
Wilson added that he had been reassured by advisers that there would be sufficient worldwide supply of biomass, particularly since many of the proposed plants were unlikely to get the go-ahead. He also believed that worldwide supply could be boosted in years to come by planting energy crops such as eucalyptus, but this argument was strongly rejected by McLaren, who argued that such schemes would face the same kind of problems faced by biofuels in the past decade.
Forth Energy is a joint venture between Forth Ports and Scottish and Southern Energy. The formal applications are expected to receive decisions in around nine months and would potentially be constructed by 2015.
