Green group wages war against renewed bid to convert coal plant to woody biomass

Green groups have pledged to mount a “relentless” campaign against plans to reboot a shuttered New South Wales coal plant as a woody biomass fuelled power station, arguing that burning native forest for energy has no social license – and never will.

Verdant Earth Technology has this week lodged a scoping report for its plans to restart the Redbank Power Station near Singleton and use 850,000 tonnes of waste wood residue as a substitute fuel for the generation of electricity.

The scoping report kicks off the process of seeking environmental approvals for the project, after the NSW Land and Environment Court last year rejected Verdant’s Development Application Modification request to shift the fuel from coal to wood.

It is the latest bid by Verdant’s similarly controversial CEO, Richard Poole, to revive the plant as what he says will be a “100% green baseload power generator,” that could be used to support variable renewables – and when not serving that purpose, to produce hydrogen and even power crypto currency.

The problem is, woody biomass – particularly that derived from native forest logging – is quickly losing its green sheen, if it ever had one.

As it stands, burning woody biomass for power does emit carbon dioxide and does involve cutting down forests, which means removing carbon sinks, destroying biodiversity and releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere.

It’s also a costly way to generate power, compared to other forms of energy, and can cause serious particulate matter pollution which, while not a direct driver of climate change, does damage human health.

Adding to all of this bad PR is the move by the Albanese Labor government late last year to rule out the generation of electricity by burning native forest wood waste from being counted as renewable in Australia.

The changes – agreed to by Labor in a deal with the Greens – mean that electricity generated by burning pulverised native forest wood cannot be used to create tradeable Large-scale Generation Certificates – a practice the Australian Greens have described as “ludicrous.”

In the EU, members of the European Parliament voted last September for an exclusion of primary woody biomass subsidies and to cap the amount that can count as renewable energy – a compromise to ruling it out entirely that drew criticism from conservationist.

The reluctance of governments to rule it out entirely appears linked to the fact that generating power by burning woody biomass is favoured by incumbent fossil fuel companies keen to keep their assets going beyond the demise of coal.

As RenewEconomy has reported, Redbank Power Station was initially commissioned in 2001 and was run on coal, but was closed in 2014 after the power station underperformed and had an exceptionally high emissions intensity for a comparatively young power station.

The power station was established as part of a collaboration between the CSIRO and Ecogen, and is one of the few power stations in Australia that uses a fluidised bed reactor for combusting materials – with the power station initially designed to run on waste coal tailings.

The fluidised bed technology can be adapted to run on other sources of thermal fuel, and Verdant Technologies intends to switch the power station to running entirely on waste sources of biomass.

Verdant, previously known as Hunter Energy, claims in its new scoping report that the proposed plant would use sustainably and legally sourced waste wood residues and that, if approved, would be “Australia’s third largest 100% green baseload power generator” with “near zero” carbon emissions.

“The objective of the fuel replacement strategy is to transition the plant to using approximately a mix of native
and plantation forestry residues, sawmill residues and uncontaminated wood wastes,” the documents say.

“Forest residues will be sourced from forestry operations in private and public native forests, including hardwood and softwood plantations… [and] also … from approved land clearing, bushfire hazard reduction and other
development, or disaster related activities.”

But in a statement published on Friday, the NSW Nature Conservation Council says Verdant’s rebooted Redbank proposal – now considered “State Significant” with capital works valued at more than $30 million – would crush biodiversity and further damage the climate.