Advance voting numbers and UK power company admits it was burning old-growth wood from B.C.
Advance voting numbers and UK power company admits it was burning old-growth wood from B.C.
Read to the end for a "bear door"
Let’s start with the second part of this newsletter’s title, which is based on a report in the Financial Times titled “UK power stations burnt wood from old forest areas, Drax emails show.” It’s behind a bit of a pricy paywall so here are some key bits:
Drax found that it was “highly likely” to have burnt wood sourced from old forest areas in Canada deemed to be environmentally important, according to internal emails, as the UK’s biggest biomass power station operator battled to maintain its green credentials.
The wood received by pellet plants owned by Drax from its suppliers in British Columbia was traced to areas local authorities classed as ecologically significant, as well as “high-risk” private land, according to the emails seen by the Financial Times.
While the material was not illegal to use, many environmental experts said old-growth woods and forests should be protected given their ecological benefits, including absorbing and storing atmospheric carbon for centuries.
You may remember Drax from reports done by CBC and BBC in 2022. If not, a quick recap from the CBC report:
From the highway just south of Prince George, B.C., you can see the logs, thousands of them, piled neatly in rows.
They were cut from trees in old growth and primary forests in the province's Interior.
This timber won't be used to build homes or furniture, or even to make paper. These logs will be ground and compressed into tiny pellets, shipped to Europe and Asia and burned to produce fuel for electricity.
Britain's largest power plant, Drax Power Station, controls most of B.C.'s pellet production and has ambitious plans to expand operations in Canada.
Panorama discovered Drax bought logging licences to cut down two areas of environmentally-important forest in British Columbia. One of the Drax forests is a square mile, including large areas that have been identified as rare, old-growth forest.
Then a followup from BBC earlier this year:
Papers obtained by Panorama show Drax took timber from rare forests in Canada it had claimed were "no-go areas"…
Panorama has obtained documents from British Columbia's Ministry of Forests that show the company took more than 40,000 tonnes of wood from so-called "old-growth" forests in 2023…
One example is an 87-hectare (215-acre) "cut block" called EM807M - located 180 miles west of the logging city of Prince George - which was all classified as old growth. Although a timber company held the licence to cut down the site, logging records show that Drax took 26% of all the harvested wood.
In total, Drax received 130 lorry-loads of whole logs from the site last winter. The wood was turned into pellets and some were burned at its Yorkshire power plant.
Ninety per cent of the cut block had the even higher classification of "priority deferral area". This category is for old-growth forests that are "rare, at risk and irreplaceable", according to an independent panel of experts in British Columbia.
Back to the new report from the Financial Times:
A lengthy investigation by Ofgem into its reporting concluded recently after the UK regulator cleared it of a deliberate breach, and Drax agreed to pay a penalty of £25mn into a voluntary scheme for failing to record adequate data about the wood it imported to burn from April 2021 to March 2022.
In the internal emails exchanged in November 2022, Drax executives discussed how the source of the wood ought to be classified.
“Drax Canada does take material from forests that are native species that has [sic] not been previously harvested”, but this did not necessarily mean those areas should be reported as primary forest, the emails said.
“That material from forests of native species that have not been previously harvested may come to Drax Power Station as processing residues,” one email said. This supply would have to “comply with the Land Criteria and the requirement for reporting primary forest material”, it added.
Ultimately, Drax reported its wood from Canada in 2021 to 2022 as “naturally regenerated forest”.
…
Drax said it took the sustainability of the biomass it used “extremely seriously” and any suggestion of non-compliance was investigated rigorously. It noted that it had no ownership of the forests, harvesting or sawmills.
“The internal conversations reflect a small part of the extensive review held within Drax as a part of our response to Panorama in October 2022 and are taken out of their wider context,” it said.
“Our internal emails reflect the open discourse and debate we have, which is critical for our communications to be as accurate and transparent as possible.”
KPMG, which examined Drax’s reporting to the regulator, did not find any evidence of misreporting, according to Drax’s annual report for 2023. KPMG declined to comment.
The emails show that the internal Drax review found that some of the wood sent to its Canadian mills had been sourced from old growth areas, including those that a panel of experts commissioned by the BC authorities recommended should be protected from harvesting. Some also came from “high-risk” private land that lacked “publicly available traceability information”.
Given those findings, “some of the [old growth area material] is highly likely to have come to Drax power station”, and to have gone to Lynemouth power station in northern England, which Drax supplies, they said.
The Lynemouth station, on the Northumberland coastline, is owned by a company controlled by Czech entrepreneur Daniel Křetínský, which says it generates enough clean power to supply about 450,000 homes.
However, some of the pellets produced by Drax Canada that it supplied to Lynemouth were reported to the authorities by Lynemouth “as not sustainable” under the UK rules, according to the emails.
Advance voting numbers are in
A record number of British Columbians have cast their ballots in advance voting before the provincial election on Saturday, Elections B.C. says.
The elections body says 1,001,331 people have already voted, representing more than 28 per cent of all registered electors and putting the province on track for big overall turnout.
About 223,000 people voted on the final day of advance voting on Wednesday — the last of six days of advance polls — shattering the single-day record set just a day earlier by more than 40,000 votes.
On the higher end of things, advance turnout in John Rustad’s riding of Nechako Lakes is reported at 30.5 per cent.
Here in Prince George, the numbers are as follows:
Prince George-Mackenzie: 28 per cent
Prince George-North Cariboo: 25 per cent
Prince George-Valemount: 21 per cent
In 2020, voter turnout for Prince George-Mackenzie was 49.06 per cent and for Prince George-Valemount was 47.42 per cent, so we’re just about halfway there.
You can find previous election turnout results for Prince George here.
Election roundup
PG Daily News editor Bill Phillips is predicting one Conservative, one New Democrat and one Independent will be representing Prince George once the election results are in.
Conservative plans to replace SOGI 123 “raised alarm bells” for physicians.
Meet the four Prince George-Mackenzie candidates (My Prince George Now).
From that debate, this Citizen article: Candidates agree forestry is key but offer different solutions at debate.
The Tyee has a piece up titled “Why Both Parties Are Wrong about BC’s Forestry Crisis” which is very much focused on Prince George and area.
The chiefs of five northern B.C. First Nations, including the Lheidli T’enneh, have a joint letter encouraging people to vote — and not for the Conservatives:
There was a time when First Nations people were not allowed to vote in provincial or federal elections, never mind be candidates of political parties.
We encourage our citizens to vote for candidates that share your values, that understand the important roles and responsibilities First Nations peoples and our governments have in north-central BC.
We seek consistency in provincial leadership as we have unfinished business related to consent-based decision making in the forestry, mining and energy sectors; we also have jurisdiction over the care and wellbeing of our children.
This jurisdiction is inherent and does not come from any Crown government.
We do not have confidence in the leader of the BC Conservative Party, who focuses on all the wrong things, and if elected, First Nations human rights will be challenged and violated; our histories will not be revised, nor forgotten.
And the Citizen also has an editorial titled: “Involuntary care should be considered as a last resort.”
Here’s the Prince George election page for Northern Capital News. I will continue to update it throughout today to have a full roundup.
News roundup
Friend of the newsletter, Joel McKay, is leaving Northern Development Initiative Trust and taking the city manager position in Quesnel.
Despite September slip in home sales, Northern BC experiencing increased demand.
Police investigating crash that claimed two lives in Vanderhoof.
Fort St. James students take to the water in a unique environmental science course.
La Catrina, the taco pop-up on the roof of the Twisted Cork over the summer, has extended into fall.
PGSO kicking off mainstage series with Scheherazade (also, I like the Mr. PG jack-o-lantern costume in the background).
AV & the Inner City to play Knox Performance Centre October 25.
And finally, this is not in Prince George, but:
Northern Capital News is a free, daily newsletter about life in Prince George. Please consider subscribing or, if you have, sharing with someone else.
Send feedback by emailing northerncapitalnews@gmail.com. Find me online at akurjata.ca.