Politics
Let's set the countryside on fire
Published 16 July 2001
Green issue - Coal, oil and gas are just the residues of plants that once lived above ground. So why not burn plants on the surface?
Why not resolve the British countryside crisis and save the world at the same time? Britain no longer needs to devote 70 per cent of its precious national territory to the production of food. It was fear of a repetition of Hitler's blockade that led us to throw most of our land surface (and much taxpayers' cash) into securing domestic food supplies. Nowadays, we have ready access to abundant food from places where it can be grown better and more cheaply than it can here.
Yet if food is no longer a strategic resource, something else very definitely is. We need to eat less, not more; but our demand for energy seems to know no bounds. U-boats no longer threaten us with starvation, but the politics of the Middle East still threatens our oil supplies. The fossil fuels on which we have come to depend are growing harder to find, and therefore more expensive.
Not that security of supply is any longer the main problem posed by fossil fuels. The latest findings on global warming suggest that the diversion of the Gulf Stream and London's disappearance under ice-cap melt may be among the least of the nightmares ahead. Once the methane bubbles up from the sea and the forests catch fire, releasing yet more carbon instead of absorbing it, warming may spiral to a level at which human life will become impossible, anywhere on the planet.
We know we must replace coal, oil and gas with renewable sources of energy. Unless rich countries such as ours show the way, the developing world's billions will kill us all by following our own, carbon-paved, path to prosperity. By signing the Kyoto treaty, we have promised to do our bit, yet our performance to date has hardly been impressive. The government says it would like to see 10 per cent of Britain's electricity produced from renewable sources by 2010. But how? The answer used to be "go nuclear", but nuclear power has proved prohibitively expensive.
Hydropower sounds clean, but you have to flood valleys. Much is heard of wind, wave and solar power. Unfortunately, intermittent energy sources need to be backed up by conventional power, for the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine, especially in Britain. Even more problematically, manufacturing the hardware that such sources of power require can use up almost as much energy as they generate. Put a solar panel on your roof, and it will spend its first eight years replacing the conventional energy that was needed to make its frame.
The hard truth is that, since early man discovered fire, we have found no energy source that begins to measure up to nature's hydrocarbons. Yet coal, oil and gas are only the mineral residue of plants that once lived above ground. Suppose that, instead of extracting and burning fossil remnants, we burned plants growing on the surface. And suppose we constantly replanted the areas from which we harvested this living fuel, and then burned the replacement plants.
Suddenly things would be different. Scarcity would disappear, as fuel became endlessly renewable. So would our dependency on vulnerable imports. And so would the threat to the climate. Carbon would be released when the first plants burned, but an equivalent amount of carbon would be reabsorbed by the replacement plants. In effect, the same carbon would go around and around, as we extracted the energy we need by burning it over and over again.
What a good idea! And it is the same good idea that humanity relied upon until quite recently. In time, the fossil fuel waves - first coal, then oil, and now gas - may come to be seen as something of a historical blip, just like so many other 20th-century phenomena. But could we really meet our energy needs today by burning plants? We could.
Nowadays, a ton of straw, once biologically converted from cellulose to bioethanol, will produce 300 litres of vehicle fuel. Two tons of dry wood will produce as much electricity as one ton of coal, oil or gas. Not as good, you may think, but there is more to the story.
Power generation produces twice as much heat as electricity. At present, however, we produce electricity in huge power stations sited for easy access to fossil fuel supplies, and these stations cannot use the heat that they produce. So it is simply wasted. Up to 20 per cent of the electricity these stations produce is also wasted, through overproduction to meet demand peaks and friction during the long-distance journeys around the national grid.
Plants, however, can grow anywhere, so bioenergy power stations could be located near the settlements they would serve. Bio-fuel could be fed into furnaces as demand required. Numerous small generating stations could capture the heat they gave off and pipe it to surrounding housing estates.
Power plants such as these can burn any kind of biomass. Wood produced from the short-rotation coppicing of fast-growing trees works best, but long grasses will do. All you need is the land to grow the greenery. Where would that come from?
Before we turned to fossil fuels, we devoted about one-third of our land surface to growing fuel. We could recover that amount of land today, simply by withdrawing (and persuading our EU partners to withdraw) the vast array of subsidies that now props up the production of often unwanted food. This step would probably make growing food uneconomic on roughly two-thirds of our current farmland - nearly half of our land surface. From that, together with some of our existing woodland, we could produce enough bioenergy to meet all of the nation's electricity needs, and much heat energy besides. The fiscal restructuring of our already rigged energy market would swiftly direct energy distributors towards the new fuel of choice.
Farmers could transform themselves from national nuisances into national saviours merely by changing their crop. Conservationists would see tree cover in the UK, currently lower than almost anywhere else in Europe, return at last to respectable levels. The ravaged rural economy would be boosted by the creation of tens of thousands of new jobs in forestry, transport and power-plant operation.
Will it happen? For the first time, we have in Margaret Beckett a minister responsible for both farming and the implementation of the Kyoto treaty. On the other hand, her department's current idea of radicalism seems to consist of giving farmers even bigger subsidies to produce yet more surplus food a little bit more organically. And saving the world is not a new Labour priority. Shouldn't it be?
David Cox is chairman of the forestry company Hawfinch Estates
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