Biomass project goes to court after planning permission refused to convert former coal plant

The plan to convert the shuttered Redbank coal power station to a biomass burner will go to court, as its backer appeals a rejection by the New South Wales (NSW) final planning arbiter. 

Verdant Earth Technologies has filed an appeal with the Land and Environment Court after the state’s Independent Planning Commission (IPC) rejected its planning application in September. 

The company wants to restart the 151 megawatt (MW) Redbank facility, which closed in 2014, and spend $70 million to convert its fuel source from highly polluting coal tailings to biomass.

Verdant, formerly known as Hunter Energy, said it wanted to burn 700,000 tonnes of biomass a year, initially sourced from “invasive native species” that would be provided by farmers, and eventually through plantation crops. It said it would provide “much-needed” baseload power for the grid, particularly as ageing coal plants close.

The NSW planning department said the project was “approvable” but a high number of opposing submissions meant it was sent to the IPC for a final review. The IPC rejected the application. 

During the IPC hearings, locals said they wanted to live in a region without a pall of smoke hanging over it and others feared native forests would be turned over as fuel, something Verdant says it now won’t do. 

In its rejection, the IPC said the application didn’t address the risk the project would encourage commercial land clearing nor the environmental impact of clearing INS – invasive native species – and didn’t consider what it would do if future plantation crops were not available when needed. 

Verdant CEO Richard Poole says they didn’t get a chance to address this in front of the IPC, and the appeal is a chance to offer a full throated rebuttal.

“What they [the IPC] said is we didn’t provide them enough information around our fuel strategy and how it will work,” he told Renew Economy.

“But there’s no problem in any of this that I can’t answer.”

That rebuttal revolves around the environmental benefits a biomass-burning power station could have for a region eight hours distant from the Hunter Valley. 

The issue he’s talking about is helping farmers remove and deal with INS, or invasive native species, in Cobar, western NSW. 

Invasive native scrub is a proscribed weed. In places like Cobar, dense woody vegetation that isn’t local can take over what used to be rangelands and crowd out other plants. Farmers are allowed to remove it, under certain conditions, to open land up again.

In 2021, Renewed Carbon, which is also looking to do something with removed INS, speculated that there is as much as 24 million tonnes of it within 75km of Cobar. 

Current solutions are to remove it and then burn it on site, Poole says. 

“These are biomass resources and we’re being profligate in wasting them…. We have one farmer saying he can provide us with 500,000 tonnes per annum, and that’s all we need,” he says.

“What we’re saying is a better use of that energy is not to burn it in a field, which creates other issues around emissions, but to take it to Redbank and burn it at 850ºC in a controlled environment.”

He argues that supplementing this with what he calls an “energy crop” will give Redbank enough fuel.

Poole says they will plant 2.4 million fast-growing trees a year which when coppiced after four years, or cut back to ground level so they can regrow, will provide fuel for the power station and an ongoing wood crop for the future.

By growing, burning, and regrowing, Redbank would be a carbon neutral wood-burning power station, Poole argues.  

A proposal to redirect wood from landfill, such as construction timber or furniture, is also a possibility.

But burning wood in an era of climate consciousness is an argument that doesn’t sit well with entities such as the Nature Conservation Council, which called the plan to “burn woodlands and forests for energy” illogical and disastrous.

But Poole says wasting already-available biomass from the likes of invasive native scrub is being recklessly extravagant with Australia’s existing resources.

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