The world’s largest biomass power plant is to go ahead on Teeside after the £650m project secured funding.
The 299MWe combined heat and power (CHP) plant is to be built on land within the Teesport Estate near Middlesbrough.
Project developer MGT Power announced in July 2015 that it was partnering with Macquarie Capital and Macquarie Commodities and Financial Markets to deliver the project. Macquarie and Danish pension fund PKA, will now become the joint owners of MGT Teesside, which will own and manage the Tees Renewable Energy Plant (Tees REP).
The project will be built under a turnkey engineering, procurement and construction contract by a consortium of Tecnicas Reunidas of Spain and Samsung Construction and Trading (SCT) of South Korea. At least 600 jobs will be created during construction and about 100 full time jobs sustained on site once operational. The project is expected to sustain several hundred more jobs in the supply chain.
“The Tees REP project has had to overcome many hurdles in development but we have now successfully reached the next stage despite the difficult financing environment,” said Ben Elsworth, CEO of MGT Teesside. “We can’t wait to get work started on site and make this project a huge success for the Teesside region”.
PD Ports will provide biomass discharge services through the port of Teesport. Teesside-based energy and process industry specialist, the px group, will support MGT Teesside during the construction phase alongside Poyry Energy, RPS and Mace.
Tees REP will be fuelled by wood pellets and chips from the United States and Europe that will be delivered directly via ships arriving at Tees Dock adjacent to the plant. The CHP plant itself will be compromised of one circulating fluidised bed boiler supplied by Amec Foster Wheeler.
Site preparation works will begin within weeks, with main construction works starting a few months later. Commercial operations are due to start in 2020.
The biomass to be consumed here embodies the carbon which the growing parent trees had “downloaded” into their own cellulose and lignin. This new CHP venture will simply return this same carbon, now CO2, to the very atmosphere from which it was extracted, thus contributing to the maintenance of the atmosphere’s present excessive concentration of carbon dioxide. This might be temporarily advantageous for the investors, and for the people of NE England, but in the long term it is represents a tragic misdirection of resources. Neither fossil carbon nor “bio” carbon can be where our future truly lies. These two thirds of a billion pounds would have been better spent on wind power (a rich resource in NE England) and on the non-carbon energy storage of electricity and heat.
Hi Mike
It is a common misconception that using trees in this way constitutes adding to the CO2 issue but when you consider that a growing tree will absorb more CO2 as it grows than a fully mature tree then cutting mature trees and re-planting is good practice, also when you consider leaving the trees uncut then when they die the decomposition process will release these products in nature anyway.
What I do agree with is the hydrocarbons that are used in the transportation of these renewable products, I would prefer the wood to have been sourced locally.
Here in California, some see the unfolding Mass Tree Die-Off not so much as a climate ‘canary-in-the-coal mine’ but as an economic opportunity… I wonder who did the analysis of the net energy and total carbon cycle of shipping a relatively low energy density fuel like forest residues thousands of miles by burning a high energy density fuel, in this case bunker oil, the most carboniferous form of petrol.
Again, good to see investment in the north of the UK. But why is the UK incapable of funding and constructing such large scale projects? I guess the profits will go abroad, not to the UK. (Macquarie Group is Australian owned with operations worldwide).
The use of wood chips, which are presumably otherwise waste, does of course add to the carbon footprint, but to bringing it by sea from the USA doesn’t ‘seem’ to make logical sense and adds massively to that carbon footprint .
I’m all for investment in the NE, but biomass is not a clean fuel, it is fallacy to believe that the CO2 emitted is all captured by regrowing trees, which take tens to hundreds of years to grow.
It is not ‘waste’ wood, much of it comes from forests in the USA, where trees are converted into biomass pellets and shipped half way around the world.
There is nor enough ‘waste’ wood in the UK or Europe to feed all of these biomass plants. It will be a white elephant, and if more trees are planted for fuel, it takes up land that could be used for food production.
It is obvious, you are neither a farmer nor a forester, your assertions are outdated.
It would have been nice to see more technical detail included in this article such as numbers and sizes of steam turbines, where they are going to be made and what UK companies are going to benefit from the supply chain jobs. It is the kind of dumbed down article you would see in a newspaper and not what we should expect to see in a specialist engineering publication.
I think that the reason that no-one mentions price or supply origin is because both are massive embarrassments to the UK. We are importing the types of technology that the UK led the world in a generation ago and importing it from Denmark, Spain, Germany, Finland …. not from the developing world as one might expect: as we close our industry the rest of Europe laughs and plans its holidays on our money.
The biomass needs to be sourced locally, or the transport emissions make a nonsense of the eco claims. Yet another potential, expensive greenwash subsidy junkie.
Graham and Mike are right to show degrees of cynicism about this trophy technology: the UK’s only involvement is a small (relatively) civil engineering project: all the plant and machinery is imported using foreign loans. We will be re-paying this long after I am gone.
The dishonesty and stupidity of burning trees grown in the USA is well known but rarely discussed in the press, wonder why??? The power generation is inefficient, the carbon is not saved: the trees would be buried if CCS were a real objective rather than self-satisfying humbug for politicians and greenies.
Here in the US, we are fighting against the marketing and export of American forests and forest products to other nations for the purpose of burning to produce electricity. It’s a falsehood that the timber industry and their fellow travelers have perpetrated on a gullible public that burning trees is somehow good for the environment. Trees sequester carbon; burning them releases it. You can argue all you like about putting more CO2 in the atmosphere will stimulate future tree growth, but putting more carbon in the atmosphere today makes no sense! We need to keep the carbon in the trees–that’s being sequestered every day without the help of the logging industry! This biomass program is a counterproductive scam designed to sell trees, not a path to reducing atmospheric carbon. So please, stand with us here in the States, against the exploitation of forests that does far more harm than good.
The different valid points that can be extracted from the previous comments:
-the project can only have a low carbon footprint if for every tree chopped, there is a tree re-planted (practically – quite unrealistic);
-alternatively, if only the wood waste utilisation, instead of intentional full-grown tree chopping for burning, is practised, there could be a positive net effect;
-raw material transportation needs to be local, otherwise logistics emissions will indeed bring too negative of a net impact.
Here in the US the industry makes much of how much they re-plant after logging. It’s a false equivalent, really more a marketing and political slogan than anything based on science. Think of how much carbon is sequestered in a large tree, versus a few spindly saplings that grow on the same area after the large tree is cut and the area re-seeded. Furthermore, through soil disturbance caused by the logging activity, and soil erosion by wind and rain, not only cause loss of fertile topsoil and critical soil microorganisms that provide nutrients, but exposure of soil to the elements leads to rapid oxidation and other chemical changes that are implicated by recent science in release of large amounts of carbon. There is no way that future growth of re-planted trees can balance out all this loss but for decades or even centuries to come.
David Orr highlights the very real problems with this project.
I find it hard to believe that they fell for this scam.
Longannet coal-fired power station in Fife, Scotland (decommission 24 March 2016) should have been converted to burn biomass – wood-chips – like they did to Drax coal-fired power station in England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longannet_power_station
That would have been a relatively cheap and quick way of providing a renewable back-up power supply for times when there is very little wind and wind turbines are becalmed.
When there’s no wind now, Scotland has to import power from England – which makes Scotland vulnerable to any issues England ever has with its power surpluses or shortages.
One day, English power won’t be there when Scotland needs it and then our lights are going to go out.
So I still have Longannet pencilled in as a biomass burning back up – on stand by most of the time, but available to be fired up on the odd occasion when needed.
If the government can be persuaded to invest £10s of billions more in renewable generators and pumped-storage hydro back up for 100% renewable energy on demand 24/7, then such a national investment will mean eventually there will be less call for biomass burning as a back-up because pumped-storage can do the back-up job, if you have enough pumped-storage capacity and enough extra wind power to power the pumps as well.
“Modelling of wind and pumped-storage power”
https://scottishscientist.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/scientific-computer-modelling-of-wind-pumped-storage-hydro/
But we can transition to 100% renewable energy much faster with cheap and cheerful biomass burning back-up to a relatively modest amount of wind generation compared to expensive pumped-storage hydro back-up to back up a much greater capacity of wind generation.
Closing Longannet altogether and not opting to convert Longannet to burn biomass was just a very bad move that is going to cost Scotland dearly, one way or another.
It may be too late for this, but if there is any way to save Longannet for conversion to biomass burning we should seize the opportunity with both hands.
“Scotland Electricity Generation – my plan for 2020”
https://scottishscientist.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/scotland-electricity-generation-my-plan-for-2020/
Fundamentally this is a “Sustainable energy ” con as everyone except DECC (or their successors) seem to know.
I agree with much of what Scottish Scientist says, but it is sad that it is all predicated on SNP based anti-England policy. We have an integrated energy network, both gas and electricity from which Scotland have gained greatly. His proposals for storage are certainly good as would be the ongoing use of Longannet, but NOT conversion to wood: two wrongs do not make a right!