This is the second article in a series produced in collaboration with The Intercept. Read part one, about Drax’s operations in the Southeast US, by clicking here.
Since 2022, Drax Group has had its sights fixed on a new pellet mill, in the small northwestern city of Longview, nestled on the Columbia river in Washington state, some 50 miles north of Portland, Oregon.
A high-gloss webpage for the $250-million project says that the plant will use sawdust and shavings from local sawmills to make their pellets and support over 300 jobs in the area.
“We’re Nature Positive, and our work centers on conserving the environment in which people across Washington and Oregon live, work, and play,” the promotional page reads.
But positivity – nature or otherwise – has not been the primary local sentiment in response to the project.
“People are extremely concerned about this because they know what communities are going through in the Southeast with the wood pellet industry and they just don’t want those problems,” explained Ashley Bennett, an environmental attorney at Earthjustice.
Drax’s approach to the regulatory processes around the proposed mill has not alleviated these concerns. In its initial air permit application, Drax grossly underestimated the prospective emissions from the site, claiming the mill would emit just 0.53 tons per year of hazardous air pollutants. In subsequent correspondence with local pollution regulators, Drax revised this estimate upwards to 48.9 tons per year.
Drax underestimating their emissions in official filings by a factor of almost 100 shocked experts. According to environmental attorney Patrick Anderson, the initial estimates were “absolutely not plausible. They were using emission factors and emissions estimates that didn’t apply to wood pellet plants. It’s mind boggling that this could happen, that they would be off by two orders of magnitude.”
Given its intended size and the toxicity of its emissions, the plant should be subject to the EPA’s Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) Standards in order to minimise levels of hazardous air pollutants.
But in both its initial air permit application and subsequent correspondence with regulators, Drax failed to state that the Longview pellet mill would be a major source of hazardous air pollutants, and so subject to MACT standards.
Anderson described this omission as “deeply, deeply concerning”. In its response, Drax said that it does not mislead on emissions and that its practice and policy is to cooperate with local agencies. In response to questions, Drax did not provide an explanation for how they had so drastically underestimated their emissions in their proposal, but denied that it was intended to mislead regulators.
40-year Longview resident Diane Dick said “there is a concern about Drax” from locals, including in regard to “the community’s health, environmental health, and the health of forest resources.”
Dick called state regulators herself in March after she awoke one day to find that a large white dome had been installed overnight, at the industrial site below her house.
Her call led to an investigation, followed by a clear finding by the Southwest Clean Air Agency: Drax had not only begun construction without legal authorisation, but was installing equipment that was not included in the permit application or draft air permit.
Dick’s dome sighting kicked off a chain of events that landed Drax with a $34,000 fine in June, and this was not even Drax’s first violation on the site. Late in 2023, the company also twice breached rules around water quality in the Columbia river.
Following the investigation, Drax was instructed to stop construction, and the permitting process was halted.
Drax’s initial claim that the mill’s raw material would be sourced from sawdust and shavings, rather than freshly logged timber, repeated both on the project website and its initial environmental impact report, has also fallen apart.
In the year since the initial environmental checklist was submitted, it has emerged that the project will require logging. Drax’s Director of Environment Wayne Kooy admitted as much in emails to regulators this year, saying it was an “oversight” that the original proposal stated the mill would only use “residual” wood.
Drax’s website still says an “independent third-party consultant” confirmed that “surplus of residual sawdust and shavings is available within a 60-mile radius.”
Based on the initial proposal, Cowlitz County awarded the project ‘Determination of Non-Significance’ status, meaning that it would not have to undergo a more rigorous environmental impact assessment. Cowlitz County has since acknowledged, in public records obtained by Earthjustice, that Drax’s new plans to use commercial wood rather than waste would place the project “way outside of” the original proposition.
“Drax seems to chronically and consistently underrepresent what its impact is going to be,” said Brenna Bell, Forest Climate Manager at environmental justice organisation 350PDX. “I don’t think they’re making themselves very welcome.”
When asked about these concerns, a Drax spokesperson said that the company works closely with regulators to establish best environmental practices, has invested $180m on improving the plants and has donated to local communities. She denied that Drax persistently mislead in relation to pollution and environmental impacts.
Big biomass is coming to rural California
As progress stalls in Washington, Drax is eyeing other developments 1000 miles down the West Coast.
In February 2024, Drax signed onto a self-described “forest resiliency initiative,” intended to mitigate wildfire risk, that proposes to build two pellet mills in rural portions of California, one in Tuolumne County east of Modesto, and another in Lassen County in the state’s far northeast.
The plan was put together by the Rural County Representatives of California, an association of local governments in rural parts of the state, and developed via a newly created public agency called Golden State Natural Resources. Drax is not yet legally committed to the project but has signed a non-binding agreement that discusses financing and investment.
The California project presents itself as a desperately needed wildfire mitigation measure, declaring that “by transforming excess and unmarketable biomass and fire fuels into higher-value wood products, Golden State Natural Resources will create jobs, stimulate rural economies, and begin the process of mitigating dangerous wildfire conditions.” But Drax’s involvement has raised alarm bells for local activists, who worry that the projects will bring the same problems plaguing communities in the Southeast and Washington state to California.
Rita Vaughan Frost, Forest Advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Drax’s involvement “wipes away the sheen of this being truly for wildfire mitigation or economic development. We can see it for what it really is, which is a profit driven measure.”
Drax said that it was untrue to suggest that the scheme was purely profit driven rather than for economic development or wildfire mitigation.
But Patrick Blacklock, the CEO of the Rural County Representatives of California, confirmed that profitability has been a key objective. When asked why pellet mills were chosen over less controversial methods of wildfire mitigation, the Yolo County Administrator said that “candidly, part of the reason is we wanted to find a commercially viable pathway.” He added that Wade Crowfoot, California’s Secretary of Natural Resources, had stressed the importance of commercial viability “at a recent meeting” with Blacklock.
Blacklock said he is aware of Drax’s history of noncompliance in the Southeast, but claimed the California plants will be “different”.
“I think it comes back to this being community-led and public agency-led. That’s not how public agencies operate. We operate to the letter of the law. We operate to the commitments that are made on environmental review.”
But Craig Ferguson, senior vice president of the Rural County Representatives of California, appeared to contradict this point in a meeting that Blacklock also attended, warning that the project is unlikely to remain in total control of the public agency:
“If we’re going to build facilities we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars, and we’re going to have to expect that those people putting the money up are going to expect some kind of control,” Ferguson said in May.
Nick Joslin, a program manager at the Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center, located in the sourcing radius of the Lassen site, has questioned the claims that the new project would bring good jobs to the area.
Both mill sites are in parts of the state that once had strong lumber industries, and Joslin confirmed that locals he has spoken with seemed happy to have any mill back in the area, for employment purposes. But Joslin believes that the pellet plants would be different to the industries that supported communities in the past: “Inside these industrial facilities, there aren’t that many jobs… and the jobs would be maintenance work in extremely hazardous conditions.”
Rural County Representatives of California also publicly opposed legislation in 2022 that would have set a minimum wage standard for forestry jobs.
“Ultimately they want people to be able to work in forest jobs again, but not to pay them well. That was a little shocking for everybody to see,” said Joslin.
Since 2021, Golden State Natural Resources has spent $150,000 lobbying the California government, some of which relates to workers’ wages. In 2023, after its parent group publicly opposed the bill that would set a “prevailing wage” pay floor for workers on “fuels reduction projects” — a category the proposed mills would fall under — Golden State Natural Resources spent $45,000 lobbying on the bill.
The agency’s own board members have even expressed concern over overblown promises of employment. “We’re promising to put local people to work. And the only local people we are going to be putting to work is the guy cleaning up the trailer park after the workers all leave,” Humboldt County Supervisor Rex Bohn told the board in May.
Local activists are currently awaiting the release of the project’s draft environmental impact review, slated for September after multiple delays.
In the meantime, Vaughan Frost and other opponents of the project are focusing their efforts on persuading state and county officials not to “waste our money on projects that are boondoggles, as the risk of wildfires only becomes more urgent every single year.”
“When I’m talking to policymakers, I put it this way: ‘supporting Golden State Natural Resources is like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire,’” said Vaughan Frost.
The push for more power
A 2023 report found that without subsidies for generating green electricity – totalling £548 million ($719m) from UK bill-payers in 2023 – the entire Drax Group of 72 companies, including all the pellet mills, would operate at a loss.
So like any sensible profit-seeking endeavor, Drax is looking to diversify its income stream – by building a new series of pellet-burning plants in the U.S. that would rely on the same suspect carbon math to get subsidies from the U.S. government. If Drax wants its new U.S. mills to usher in new profits and growth, the facilities need to be a prelude to new power plants.
The long-continuing uncertainty around its UK subsidies only increases the pressure. The company failed to make the shortlist for a major new subsidy in 2023, and last month it coughed up £25 million ($33m) for regulatory breaches after misreporting data about wood pellet imports to the UK energy regulator Ofgem.
Drax denied that the outcome of the regulatory investigation had anything to do with their pursuit of new revenue sources or the likelihood of future subsidies. The company told Land and Climate Review that the UK government is conducting a consultation on future support for biomass generators, which it welcomes.
The power company announced plans to construct up to 11 new biomass power plants across the US and Canada last year, each with additional carbon capture and storage technology. With this new (and expensive) tech, the company plans on going beyond the already contentious claims that its UK power plant is carbon neutral, to claim its new facilities will be carbon negative. In January it launched a new subsidiary, Drax US BECCS Development, LLC, to carry out the projects.
Headquartered in Texas, Drax’s new Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage arm claims it has already earmarked two sites in the U.S. South for power plants and that it is evaluating nine more across North America. Drax claims its first power plant project in the Southeast will require $2 billion investment, and is aiming to make a final investment decision by 2026.
Based on previously reported estimations for Drax’s UK power plant, if all 11 plants matched that station in fuel consumption, they would burn the equivalent of approximately 300 million trees a year and need to capture and store more than 100 million tons of CO2 in order to zero out their emissions. Drax contests these calculations.
The eligibility of Drax’s new power plants for federal subsidy will depend on whether the US chooses to adopt the same controversial carbon accounting rules that allows Drax to report its power station emissions as zero in the UK.
The company certainly appears to be pushing for this. Through its lobbying firm VNF solutions, Drax has engaged the services of Mary L. Landrieu, the former US senator from Louisiana who chaired the Energy and Natural Resources Committee when in office. Landrieu has lobbied on “legislation related to bioenergy with carbon capture and storage,” according to VNF Solutions’ lobbying disclosures.
Biomass energy in the US is at a juncture. In May, the US Treasury proposed regulations relating to the Clean Electricity Production Tax Credit. While the eligibility of biomass power plants was not addressed explicitly, the rule proposal stated that any “clean energy facility that achieves net zero greenhouse gas emissions” will be able to access the tax credit — which would apply to Drax’s plants if their preferred carbon accounting rules are adopted. It is one of a number of federal tax credits introduced through the Inflation Reduction Act that could help fund plants like the ones Drax plans to build.
When asked if Drax were recruiting Rural County Representatives of California or their agencies to lobby for a power station in California, Patrick Blacklock said equivocally that “Drax definitely have that interest but candidly, so do we… we have some shared interests.”
In the last year and a half, Rural County Representatives of California has spent over $1.5m ($1,563,835.52) lobbying the California government. In lobbying reports from January 2023 to June 2024, biomass is mentioned 13 times.
It is not yet clear whether either the Democratic or Republican party will take strong stances on biomass power. Donald Trump has threatened to gut the Inflation Reduction Act entirely, which would no doubt disappoint Drax’s American CEO, who released a press release describing the “eye watering” subsidies in Biden’s bill as “transformative” for the company.
But a Kamala Harris win is no guarantee of plain sailing for Drax, either. Harris is currently under fire for lacking clear energy policy, and she may eventually find herself under pressure from other Democrats to exclude Drax’s business model from new subsidy regimes.
Major party figures have begun to speak out against the industry, such as Senator Cory Booker, who said it exposes “low-income and minority communities [to a] disproportionate burden of environmental hazards and injustices”.
Along with other senior party figures such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, Booker introduced a law to reform biomass carbon accounting in April. That same month, the Environmental Protection Agency launched a research project investigating the health impacts of wood pellet plants.
“They’re currently in the process of doing that investigation, and are doing health impact analysis as well,” said Ashley Bennett at EarthJustice. “So I think that those are signs that this industry as it is currently operating is unsustainable.
“Clean energy should not lead to increased logging and forest degradation, and it shouldn’t create greenhouse gas emissions.
“These facilities are just not good for the communities that they come into. They put public health at risk, put forests at risk, put the ecosystem at risk, and ultimately, they further exacerbate the climate crisis.”
Camille Corcoran is an Assistant Editor at Land and Climate Review, where she writes about CCS, biomass, and steel. She has also published investigations with outlets including BBC, The Guardian, Channel 4, Private Eye and openDemocracy.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski is a Senior Editor at Land and Climate Review. He has published investigations with leading outlets such as Al Jazeera Investigates and BBC Newsnight, and has co-hosted the Land and Climate Podcast with Alasdair MacEwen since 2021.
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