Extracts from NATTA's journal
Renew, issue 145Sept-Oct 2003

4. ARBRE’s fate still unclear

The fate of the £30m ARBRE wood chip combustion plant in Yorkshire remains unresolved. It has been inoperant since July last year, after the developers pulled out of the project due to the long delays in full commissioning (see Renew 141). The 10MW project was meant to be the flagship of the UK’s energy crops programme, but had been been bedevilled with technical teething problems- perhaps inevitably given the novel technology- a wood chip gasification unit feeding a combined cycle turbine. In early May, in something of a scoop, Earthed reported that the liquidator had found a new owner- Biodevelopment International, a US company based in New Hampshire, with subsidiaries developing various renewables projects in China, Italy, India and other countries. Earthed noted that Biodevelopment planned to set up a UK subsidiary, DAS GreenEnergy UK, to operate the plant.

However, subsequently, writing in the Guardian (30/5/03) Stewart Boyle and Paul Brown reported that one option could be that the plant would be dismantled and shipped to India. They quoted Alan Silverstein, a director of DAS GreenEnergy UK, as saying that the company was assessing whether the plant was viable- and although the company would prefer to restart the plant, shipping it overseas was a fall-back position. The continued availability and possible extension of its NFFO contract was evidently a key issue. That in turn meant getting reliable access to wood chips from short rotation coppice. That should not in principle be difficult since Renewable Energy Growers (REG), a 35-strong SRC growers cooperative exists in the area, supported by the Department for Environment. The group has been growing more than 1,500 hectares (3,706 acres) of willow which was to be used to fuel the plant and was due to harvest the first crop this year. With ARBRE stalled, REG has been looking for other markets- and were not happy at having been let down.

The Guardian spoke to John Strawson, a farmer in REG. "We thought, with government and EU backing, plus a big company like Yorkshire Water, our contracts would be safe". He was, they said, particularly disappointed with the attitude of the DTI which, he said, appeared to have washed its hands of the project. "Not a single contact has been made from the DTI with us in a year, even though they could be helping us secure alternative markets with coal-fired generators who are looking to co-fire biomass with coal".

But REG still had hopes that ARBRE might restart. A REG representative, Russell Toothill, told Earthed that, if it did go ahead, the group expected to have to renegotiate their contracts "but to claim Arbre’s NFFO contract [which guarantees a market until 2013] they would need to burn coppice. That’s what we have, so we think we are in a good negotiating position." So he was surprised that the growers had been ignored so far by the new purchaser.‘I would have thought they would want to talk to us sooner, rather than later’.

John Grogan, Labour MP for Selby, told the Guardian that he had been urging the DTI to support the plant and maintain a wood-fuel market for farmers in his constituency. "There doesn’t appear to be any sign that the DTI have any guarantees over the future of this critical power plant or that they can pull the rabbit out of the hat at this late stage". He added that if Arbre did not go ahead it would "lead to a collapse in confidence among farmers and would put back put the case for growing energy crops in the UK by 20 to 30 years".

Putting the issue in a wider policy context, Dominic Maclaine, the editor of Platts Power UK, told the Guardian: "The government should think long and hard about the ramifications that the Arbre saga could have for the development of a sustainable bio-fuel industry in the UK. Its hands-off attitude contrasts radically to its intervention to save the nuclear generator, British Energy, last year." And highlighting the seriousness of the situation, the Guardian noted that other large-scale biomass technology backed by the DTI, pyrolysis, was also in trouble - the company planning to build several pyrolysis power plants, Border Biofuels, has gone into liquidation.

The DTI told the Guardian it was interested in negotiations to save the plant, and that biomass remained a key part of renewables policy, and certainly the DTI have been funding many new projects- see our Technology section for a list of the latest round of funding allocations, totalling £4.2m, part of the £66m Capital Grants Bioenergy Scheme. However, as noted in Renew 142/3, the emphasis is now on smaller less complex plants using tried and tested conventional combustion technology. So perhaps the DTI have learnt the lesson- that there is a need, with novel technology, to adopt a more incremental approach. Even so one would have thought it is still worth trying to get ARBRE going.