This two part series is published in collaboration with The Intercept. Read part two, which focuses on Drax’s planned operations on the West Coast, by clicking here.
All Sheila Mae Dobbins wants is an apology.
In 2014, an industrial facility producing wood pellets opened so close to her house in Gloster, Mississippi that she could overhear conversations between managers and staffers as they worked, and could smell the fumes the plant pumped into the air.
Dobbins, a 59 year old mother of two, relies on oxygen tanks to breathe. So do her sister and her brother-in-law, who also live in the town. Her husband Neal depended on an oxygen tank as well, but passed away in 2017, just as Dobbins was experiencing an acute health crisis that led to her diagnosis with heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). She tears up when discussing how her own hospitalisation left her unable to care for her husband of 36 years before he died.
“I was on life support,” said Dobbins, who wore a tracheotomy tube with a speaking valve. “I couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk. And through all this, my husband was sick and I didn’t even know it.”
The company that owns the plant, the UK-based power giant Drax Group, originally claimed the pellet mill would bring hundreds of millions of dollars of investment to the local economy, and touted the possibility of growing renewable power within the state.
Instead, the plant employs only a handful of local workers, and its wood pellets are shipped abroad to be burned for electricity in Drax’s UK power station and other foreign power plants. Residents of Gloster, a small town 50 miles north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, claim that the mill has polluted their air and harmed their health.
In 2020, the Mississippi mill was fined $2.5m for exceeding legal limits of harmful air pollutants, and Drax promised to install new pollution controls. It has since continued to breach emission limits, and this month faced another six figure penalty.
Gloster is just one of seven pellet mills that Drax operates across the US, along with 10 in Canada, and the company is currently at work on new projects in Washington and California. Land and Climate Review’s previous investigation into Drax’s Canadian mills uncovered 189 violations of environmental law, most of which related to air pollution. Drax’s two pellet mills in Louisiana have been fined millions for environmental law violations, and one entered dispute resolution discussions in March over further emissions breaches.
This sprawling operation is built to pursue a noble goal: replacing the coal-fired electricity generation at the UK’s largest single power plant, the Drax facility in the north of England, with a renewable input in the form of wood pellets.
But a growing chorus of environmentalists and scientists are warning that the UK power plant is more carbon-intensive now, burning wood, than when the plant burned coal. The entire company, from power plant to pellet mills, is only profitable thanks to massive subsidies from the UK government — but the company plans to open multiple new power plants in the U.S. in coming years, and is seeking federal subsidies to build its new projects.
The residents of Gloster, and other towns across the U.S. near Drax’s current and future facilities, are asking a simple question: why is a company propped up by the British government for an unclear environmental gain polluting their air?
Drax denies any physical impact on residents of Gloster, saying “an independent, third-party analysis commissioned by Drax found that our Gloster facility’s air toxics have no adverse effects on human health.” Questions remain however as Drax declined to provide the name of the consulting firm, or any more details on their findings.
Another Gloster resident, Myrtis Woodard, has first-hand experience of the problem. “It was better before that mill came,” Woodard said. “We can’t come outside, the air is so bad. I’ve got two inhalers and the doctor tried to give me another one. I have asthma, COPD, and angina.”
Debra Butler, another Gloster resident, echoed Woodard. “My yard looks a mess,” she said. “I’m afraid to go outside because of my breathing problems. I was taking Albuterol once a day, now I take it three times a day in my inhaler. I come outside with a mask on. The air is so polluted you can smell everything, taste it.”
Other friends and family members shared similar stories of heart and respiratory conditions. Dobbins knew six people who were reliant on oxygen tanks living on her street before she moved away. Five of them are now dead, she said.
The emissions from Drax’s pellet mill are not the only possible drivers of the heart conditions or breathing problems that Gloster residents described, and no direct link between the plant and the residents’ health has been established. Gloster has an overall poverty rate of 39 percent; the state of Mississippi ranks second to last in the U.S. for overall health and last for childhood respiratory disease.
Locals had hoped Drax could help revitalize the town’s economy. Instead, they described a town in decline.
“In my opinion, everything has gone down,” said Krystal Martin, who is leading community action for cleaner air. “Gloster is small, extremely rural, it has no public schools. The houses are in poor conditions, the buildings are old and dilapidated.
“The grass don’t grow green like it used to. The trees don’t bloom like they used to.”
Martin started organising with community members under the banner of “Greater Greener Gloster” in 2021, inspired by her mother Jane’s breathing difficulties.
“In 2016, I began to get sick, but I did not realise what was going on,” said Jane Martin. “In 2021 when the fine came out, we began to wonder if the air pollution had made me sick” over the years the plant had been operating.
Greater Greener Gloster has galvanised opposition to the mill in the town. Despite her dependence on “a 37 foot cord” for oxygen, Sheila Mae Dobbins is determined to speak out on the health impacts of the mill “as long as there’s breath in my body.”
“I died three times, but God was not ready for me.
“I am a walking testimony.”
Toxic spikes in the middle of the night
A research team at Brown University, led by Dr Erica Walker, has found in a preliminary study that the air in Gloster contains dramatically higher levels of toxic chemicals compared to a nearby town — and that levels of pollutants spike in the middle of the night.
The study, which is curerntly undergoing peer review, compares Gloster with a demographically similar town, Mendenhall, Mississippi, which does not have a wood pellet mill. Walker stressed the need for larger sample sizes and more time to monitor trends, but her initial findings are that “air pollutant concentrations in Gloster are magnitudes higher, even after adjusting for meteorological conditions.” This is especially true for a category of pollutants known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can be released when drying or burning wood.
“VOCs are nasty stuff,” said Walker. “When you’re thinking about a child that’s exposed to that in utero, if it’s during a critical window then we’re already talking about a compromised child from the beginning — and then it’s going to snowball over a period of time. VOCs have been shown to lead to short term things like irritation and to long term things like cancer.”
Heat maps in the study show concentrated clouds of pollutants around the plant and a nearby residential area. A preprint of the research states that vulnerable populations are impacted by air pollution from wood pellet plants, and that proximity is a statistically significant factor for risk of respiratory disease in children.
“From the data that we got from Gloster in particular, we know that it’s an issue when people live next to these plants,” said Walker. “This is their short-term and long-term health profile. It has direct impacts.”
A Drax spokesperson said their consultants “found that no pollutant from the facility exceeded the acceptable ambient concentration.”
An unexpected finding in Walker’s research is what she calls “opportunistic dumping”. Her data shows what she describes as “crazy spikes” of VOC emissions during the nighttime. She said that although the daily averages of VOCs seen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) do not look dangerous, her data has revealed a “structural issue” in regulatory monitoring being conducted on a daily rather than hourly basis.
Residents remembered being more aware of pollution at night. Dobbins said “at night sometimes I can’t rest, and I would have to get my husband up because I would like to sit outside. But when I went out there, I told him ‘I’m going back in the house,’ the odor is just that bad.”
“And the smell of it, I didn’t know it. In my life I smelled nothing like it, so I couldn’t really describe it. But it’s a funky scent. A foul, very foul odor,” Dobbins said. “We can smell it the most at night, it’s like they didn’t want nobody to see them do it.”
Environmental attorney Patrick Anderson warned that it is possible the spikes are simply due to atmospheric conditions: “It could be that even if they’re emitting at a constant rate, when things cool down at night, the VOCs settle down into the community.”
But he also suggested another possibility. “These facilities can bypass their emission controls. Sometimes there are reasons they absolutely need to do that to avoid something blowing up and people getting hurt.”
Whilst working for the Environmental Integrity Project, Anderson went into litigation with another wood pellet company in Texas and “really got to examine their operating records”. He found “they were bypassing multiple times a week. They were inundating a community with smoke when that happened.
“They were not just doing it for emergencies. It was happening all of the time. And the same thing was happening there; things were worse at night.”
In 2020, Louisiana state environmental regulators received a report from an anonymous source alleging that Drax facilities in that state had “literally hundreds of hours of uncontrolled venting annually.”
The Gloster mill’s own reporting to the regulator shows that pollution controls were bypassed for over 500 hours in 2023 – although there is no indication that they were in breach of regulations by doing so. Responding to a letter from campaigners in April 2024, the company has now promised to start “curtailing operations at night”.
A pattern of pollution across state lines
Since the start of 2024, the Gloster mill has been issued two letters outlining violations, including failure to provide inspectors with records and missing a deadline to conduct emissions testing by 43 days. But these are far from the company’s most egregious recent violations of environmental rules in the US.
In January, Louisiana regulators sent Drax a notice stating that the company had bypassed pollution controls on 381 instances between January 2022 and June 2023 at its two mills in the state. The Louisiana Department for Environmental Quality is currently negotiating a fine with Drax as a result. That agency issued a similar notice in 2022 for prior violations, and Drax agreed to settle $1.6 million per mill.
The company is also under scrutiny for emitting unsafe levels of a category of pollutants that Patrick Anderson describes as “some of the most toxic and harmful pollutants that are addressed by the Clean Air Act”. Hazardous air pollutants emitted by wood pellet mills include carcinogenic substances such as formaldehyde and benzene, as well as acrolein, which “causes lung and throat, nose and eye irritation, even in very, very low quantities.”
In 2021, the Mississippi government began to mandate tests for these hazardous air pollutants at the Gloster mill. The testing revealed that the facility had exceeded limits for these chemicals in both 2022 and 2023. Limits for specific chemicals were also breached throughout the period – the limit on methanol was exceeded by over 80% between June 2021 and June 2022, for example.
In September 2024, Drax was fined $225,000 for these breaches, amongst other violations.
In 2023, Anderson and his colleague wrote to Louisiana regulators about Drax’s plants in the state, saying “Drax is once again failing to accurately document and report its emissions.”
The Environmental Integrity Project attorneys argued that after the new emissions testing had taken place in Gloster in 2021, “Drax could have — and should have — reported to [Louisiana’s Department for Environmental Quality] that its Louisiana plants were almost certainly exceeding permit limits. … Instead, however, Drax continued to certify that its outdated and inaccurate [hazardous air pollutants] emissions data were accurate.”
Drax later conceded that the Louisiana mills were indeed breaching limits, by 59% at its LaSalle plant in Urania, and by 58% at its Morehouse mill in Bastrop.
Drax told Land and Climate Review that following the new emissions testing, it worked with the Louisiana Department for Environmental Quality to align on testing and permit updates.
The Gloster mill negotiated a hazardous air pollutant penalty with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, but in Louisiana, similar enforcement action has not yet been taken. Anderson said such action is “plainly warranted”.
Authorities had been warned of suspect activity at Drax’s Louisiana mills before. In 2020, the state’s environmental department received an email from an anonymous source who claimed to work for the company.
The email made numerous allegations about Drax’s regulatory compliance, several of which inspectors subsequently confirmed: Waste was being handled improperly at the Morehouse mill, and being burned without a permit at LaSalle. Drax told Land and Climate Review that its history of burning industrial sludge “was an administrative error.”
The inspectors were unable to find evidence of some of the email’s most shocking claims, including that Drax had failed to report “literally hundreds of hours of uncontrolled venting” of harmful pollutants at each facility. “Many of these events would easily exceed the Reportable Quantity for Acrolein,” the email stated. Drax told Land and Climate Review that the acrolein claim was “unproven,” but did not comment on uncontrolled venting.
The email also included allegations that “no actions were taken” after management was told that pollution data was being manipulated, and that any mention of unreported pollution would “cause senior management to threaten termination.” Inspectors did not address claims about management behavior, and Drax denied the allegations, saying “our pattern and practice is to cooperate with local agencies charged with overseeing emissions.”
Dubious carbon accounting at British bill-payer expense
Environmentalists and scientists warn that the pellet business is driving forest degradation, and that CO2 emissions from the UK power plant are actually more carbon-intensive than when it burned coal instead of wood. Drax however claims its pellet business is preventing forest fires and creating jobs, and the pellets come from well managed forests, saying “CO2 from the biogenic carbon cycle should be considered differently to the fossil CO2 released by the combustion of oil, gas, and coal.
“Whether the wood is used for bioenergy, or these trees naturally decompose, the same amount of CO2 is released into the atmosphere.”
Drax’s logic here aligns with carbon accounting rules established in 1997, in a United Nations treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol. The treaty came into force in 2005, and significantly expanded the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. But buried within its pages, a relatively minor rule designed to prevent double-counting of emissions in different locations transformed the bioenergy industry.
The framework stated that emissions should be counted only in the country where trees are harvested, rather than in the place where they are burned. This effectively provided a carbon accounting loophole for countries that import wood to burn in power stations.
In the UK’s case, even though Drax power station is the largest single source of CO2 in the country, its emissions are officially recorded as zero.
These rules are much criticised – even by some of the scientists who invented them – but still form the basis of UK policy. In 2021, 500 scientists wrote to the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen calling for the end of wood burning for energy.
“The burning of wood will increase warming for decades to centuries. That is true even when the wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas,” they wrote.
“To avoid these harms, governments must end subsidies and other incentives that today exist for the burning of wood whether from their forests or others. The European Union needs to stop treating the burning of biomass as carbon neutral in its renewable energy standards and in its emissions trading system”.
This mounting concern from experts has spilled over into UK politics, with parliamentarians becoming increasingly vocal about Drax’s heavily subsidised wood pellet business and the CO2 emissions from its UK power plant.
Politicians from all mainstream UK political parties have spoken critically about publicly funding Drax’s supply chain. Even two recent UK energy secretaries are skeptics; Kwasi Kwarteng, who was secretary from 2021 to 2022, was recorded admitting that Drax’s supply chain “is not sustainable” and “doesn’t make any sense” in 2022, while his successor Jacob Rees-Mogg went further, publicly describing Drax’s “ridiculous” carbon accounting as “barmy in-Wonderland stuff.”
After the centre-left Labour Party won the general election in July this year, both the UK’s new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and Energy Minister, Ed Milliband, have been suspiciously quiet on the matter, not mentioning biomass in key speeches about the energy sector.
Drax’s subsidies are set to run out in 2027, and deciding whether or not they should continue is a tricky issue for the UK’s new government. Renewal is likely to face backlash from Parliament, news media, and scientists. But Labour have set ambitious targets for clean energy, and politicians are already facing complaints from their constituents about new wind and solar farms. Meeting 2030 targets on paper, even if the scientific reality is more complicated, still offers political expediency that cleaner alternatives lack.
Drax has been clear that its backup plan is to expand operations in the U.S. and seek security in Inflation Reduction Act tax credits and state-level incentives rather than relying on UK subsidies.
In early 2023, Drax’s CEO Will Gardiner told the press the company would “accelerate” its U.S. plans and make the UK “less of a priority” if they had not got guarantees on future subsidies by July 2024.
Drax also told Land and Climate Review that it intends to create new Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage facilities and to concentrate on carbon removal technology.
The UK guarantees have not arrived, and if three new US pellet mills in development are anything to go by, Drax may be serious about U.S. expansion.
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.
Read more:
- Investigations
