Hazelwood slammed over plans to convert plant to native wood waste

Reports that the French owner of Victoria’s Hazelwood coal power station has been considering plans to convert it into a co-firing facility, allowing it to burn native forest waste as well as brown coal, have been slammed by the Greens as a “neither clean nor renewable” option for what is currently Australia’s dirtiest power plant.

ABC Radio National’s Breakfast program on Friday reported that Hazelwood owner GDF Suez had conducted a number of trials of native biomass burning over the past decade, as part of “highly secret” plans to clean up the La Trobe Valley power plant.

This was confirmed by Trevor Rowe, a spokesman for GDF Suez, who told the ABC the trials – the most recent of which was conducted in 2009 – had had varying degrees of success, and that the company had not yet chosen to proceed any further with them.

But the ABC noted that the company had, just last October, advertised for a coal-ash operator at the Hazelwood plant, with one of the job’s key roles listed as “participating in biomass trials.”

The report also noted that GDF Suez parent company, Energi, was well versed in coal plant conversions for biomass in Europe, having recently overseen such a project in Belgium.

Greens forest spokesperson and Victorian Senator Janet Rice, who was interviewed for the ABC story, later said in a statement that replacing one dirty power source for another was “like quitting cigars by taking up cigarettes.”

“Burning wood from native forests for energy is neither clean nor renewable,” said Rice.

“We now have proof that the deal between Labor and the Abbott government could see Hazelwood become even more destructive.”

This deal Rice refers to is the recent bipartisan agreement on Australia’s Renewable Energy Target, which, when all was said and done, was cut back to 33,000GWh and rejigged to include the burning of wood waste, or biomass.

And while the addition of wood waste in the RET was roundly criticised by many – for being ersatz renewable energy, and for taking already limited capacity away from solar and wind – it was also dismissed by some as a “distraction” from the main game.

As Lorraine Bower wrote on this site last month, Australia’s forestry industry – which some have claimed will come to reply on wood-waste burning in order to survive – was among those parties keen to hose down any fuss around its addition to the RET, arguing that biomass used for electricity would be a “very small amount,” and would only ever be a “localised industry”.

This theory was repeated by VicForest’s general manager of stakeholders and planning, Nathan Trushell, on Friday, who told the ABC that the economics of converting a plant like Halewood were “very challenging,” when you look at the cost of transporting heavy wood long distances, compared with cheap brown coal.

“It’s very difficult to make that stack up,” he said.

“Let me stress, again, that biomass burning at Hazelwood is not the priority (for the industry),” Trushell said, adding that schemes like that were not the main opportunities the industry was looking at, but rather small-scale, localised energy production projects – closer to the source.

But Coalition Senator Richard Colbeck, who is the Parliamentary Secretary for agriculture, told the ABC that the Abbott government was supportive of any such plan as that being considered by Halewood’s owners.

“Co-fire forest biomass is certainly an option,” Senator Colbeck said. “Those are things that can a should be considered by the forestry industry. …Why not?”

Senator Rice has a reason: “All the science is telling us that we must end our reliance on coal to reduce the impacts of climate change, but this must not come at the expense of our native forests,” she said on Friday.

“To get serious about storing carbon and reducing the impacts of climate change, we must stop logging our native forests, not encourage their destruction.

“We urgently need to replace Hazelwood with actual clean energy like wind and solar, as Labor promised to do in 2010.”