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Port Talbot already has the worst air pollution in Wales, so why add to it?

THE pollution problems that have plagued the Port Talbot area for years are well understood. As much as a decade ago, Friends of the Earth labelled the town the most polluted in all of Wales, calling the continuing situation there “unacceptable”.

Both the Welsh Government and the local authority, Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council, have figures which demonstrate that while the number of ‘breach days’ (when PM10s – air pollution particles – exceed the average) have fallen since the turn of the Millennium, they remain too high. In December last year, the Government had a request to the European Commission to extend the deadline given to reduce PM10s in Port Talbot refused. It has now missed that deadline by five years.

And late last year, an independent report commissioned by the Welsh Government found that the steelworks in Port Talbot, operated by Corus Strip Products and known locally as the Abbey Works, was “probably” to blame for the pollution. However, air monitoring remains a complex science, and it is recognised that traffic – not least on the M4, which is elevated above the town – contributes significantly, too.

But for the past three years, people living in Port Talbot have been battling against a new development that they argue will also contribute to air pollution in the area. Somewhat startlingly, the proposed biomass plant – with a capacity of 350MW, which would make it the biggest of its kind in the world – is touted as an environmentally sustainable alternative to energy production, even though it burns wood, perhaps faster than it can be grown.

In addition, further along the coast, at King’s Dock in Swansea and at Coedbach, near Kidwelly, two smaller 50MW biomass plants are being appealed. Appealed, because the planning authorities in both Swansea and Carmarthenshire, like Neath Port Talbot, have resoundingly rejected them. However, despite council intransigence and co-ordinated, popular local campaigns, all three may still go ahead because biomass is considered a renewable technology and consequently enjoys support from both the Westminster Government and Welsh Government.

One opponent has told me that this apparently unquestioning approach would leave Swansea Bay – one of the most breathtaking coastlines in all of Wales – “wreathed in a necklace of power stations and pollution”.

The Prenergy application, as the Port Talbot project is widely known, will go to an appeal hearing that will be held in council offices in Briton Ferry for four days from April 27. Unveiled in 2007 as a £400m investment that would create as many as 850 jobs (although that was during the construction phase, and would drop to 150 when the station was operational), it was claimed that it could power up to half a million homes. But in January this year, Clessidra, an Italian private equity firm that bought out other Prenergy shareholders, put the scheme up for sale, hiring the Royal Bank of Canada to assist – having, according to Reuters, previously explored a sale of Prenergy with Rothschild.

There was much local anger last year when the Environment Agency Wales granted the project a licence to operate, having argued that it would produce electricity with between 50% and 80% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than gas or coal-fired power stations.

But this seems to be missing the point. The Prenergy plant is not an ‘instead of’ solution. It is an ‘as well as’ problem. Existing levels of pollution will not be reduced elsewhere. Instead, carbon emission levels in the Port Talbot area will be added to by burning at the station. This matters greatly, as a recent report from the Commons Environmental Audit Committee found that as many as 50,000 people a year suffer early deaths in the UK as a consequence of air pollution. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that an additional burden could be placed on the NHS in the area as a consequence.

In addition, there is emerging evidence to suggest that, far from providing an environmental solution in areas where high levels of pollution do not already exist, biomass stations may well contribute to climate change. Stuart Goodall, chief executive of the Confederation of Forest Industries, which commissioned the most recent research, told the Western Mail: “Diverting wood from existing users to large-scale biomass plants will be bad for the environment and bad for jobs – surely the opposite of what governments wish to achieve.”

The application would include a series of warehouses roughly equal in volume to two Liberty Stadiums, and they would be situated within a few hundred yards of residents’ homes. Biomass like woodchip does not need a spark or a flame to ignite. Under certain temperatures and conditions, it is susceptible to spontaneous combustion. In addition, it is incredibly hard to extinguish. It needs to be spread out and then doused with considerable quantities off water.

Many fire brigades prefer to let them burn themselves out. In 2005, a fire in Hendy, Carmarthenshire that contained a fraction of the woodchip that could be stockpiled in Port Talbot burned for three days, and fire officers admitted that they were helped in the end by torrential rain. It goes without saying that such a fire could not be allowed to burn for such a long time, or on such a scale, in a densely populated town like Port Talbot.

There are also questions over supply. The volume of woodchip that the Prenergy plant would require each year is roughly equal to the USA’s entire annual output, around three million tonnes. Even the world’s largest producer, Australia, manages only five million tonnes annually. There are around 1,000 biomass plants planned around the world, and all of them will be competing for a relatively scarce resource (which raises further questions about rising energy costs). Unless we are prepared to plant forests on the moon, it is difficult to see how supplies can be kept going.

In addition, I have my own doubts as to whether the woodchip can be offloaded at the Corus dock in Port Talbot. It is my understanding that the steelworks remains busy and that its dock is in constant use. I am exploring this issue further, as it was a crucial plank of the application. If the woodchip were to be landed elsewhere, it would have to be delivered to the plant’s site by road, thus negating some of the claimed environmental benefits that the station would bring.

In addition, other alternatives are being looked at in the Port Talbot area. Corus has told me that it is looking at a range of renewable projects for energy generation at its Port Talbot site. Not only does it appear to have the land capacity to make this happen, but it is designing these projects with the express purpose of reducing the emissions it produces.

Then there is the democratic factor to consider. When Neath Port Talbot councillors voted overwhelmingly against the Prenergy plant, their decision reflected the level of local opposition, voiced by the PT-RAPS group. It may seem unfair to some to compare this development with an episode in our history like Treweryn. But that sense of going over the heads of local opinion if the local answer isn’t the right one, and of powerlessness in the face of unhearing officialdom, pervades this application nonetheless.

It is those local opponents that recently spotted the Prenergy biomass plant marked down as an energy provider in recent data provided by the Welsh Government on Wales’ electrical generating capacity. This has been interpreted locally as a signal of Welsh Government intent over this project. Let us hope not.

Of course we must search out renewables. We all of us understand that the climate clock is ticking. But does that mean that biomass is right? That any form of alternative energy must be pursued, at whatever cost to local health and democratic opinion? And how will those energy providers of the future, operating with far more sophisticated technology, look back on this time and regard biomass? Let’s keep looking, but for real alternatives.