CAMPAIGNERS have expressed their concerns over plans for a new biomass plant next to housing in West Thurrock.
The planning application by Proctor and Gamble for a plant in Fiddlers Reach in West Thurrock was submitted to Thurrock Council on May 13th.
YT understands that Procter & Gamble, Balfour Beatty and a Canadian company, Nexterra, are proposing to build a biomass plant expected to burn over 100,000 tonnes of wood a year – including chemically treated waste wood.
The plant is to supply heat and some electricity to Procter & Gamble’s factory in West Thurrock as well as electricity to the grid.
According to environment watchdog, Biofuel Watch, this would not be a conventional power plant but a gasifier: A conventional biomass power plant simply burns wood in order to power a steam turbine. A biomass gasifier exposes wood to high temperatures with limited oxygen, which produces a gas and that gas is then burned (also to power a steam turbine in this case).
Biofuelwatch has identified four main areas of concern:
1) An unproven and risky technology: Biomass gasification for electricity production remains an unproven, experimental technology. So far, Nexterra has built three such gasifiers worldwide, all of them in North America: One of them was closed after a ‘potentially lethal’ explosion, another one failed soon after it opened and the third does not appear to have started working successfully. Although there are risks of fires and explosions associated with storing and handling large quantities of woodchips for any power plant, there are special fire and explosion risks associated with gasifiers.
2) Bad for public health: Burning virgin wood causes similar levels of air pollution as burning coal, with more of some pollutants and less of others being released. The plant proposed at Fiddlers Reach is to burn chemically treated wasteÂwood and this will result in more different toxins being emitted and in some toxins being emitted in greater quantities. Technical problems associated with biomass gasifiers result in a high risk of emission spikes and breaches of legal emission limits.
3) Low efficiency levels: A gasifier that powers a steam turbine – proposed for Fiddlers Reach – will always be significantly less efficient than a comparable conventional biomass plant. This means that more wood will have be burned (resulting in more air emissions and more traffic) than would be necessary if the same amount of energy was produced from a more efficient plant.
4) A threat to forests: Based on figures provided by the developers during the Public Exhibition and on figures taken from other planning applications for Nexterra gasifiers, we estimate that the plant would burn over 100,000 tonnes of woodchips per year. The developers claim that they will burn nonÂrecyclable waste wood but the demand for the type of waste wood that they would likely be permitted to burn far exceeds the supplies available. Excessive demand for wood is a major cause of forest destruction worldwide.
YT will be reaching out to the applicants in due course.
