Recommendation 22

The original 2030 targets for the CCUS programme, which the government has now told us are unachievable, included a goal for the UK to achieve 5 mtpa of engineered greenhouse gas removals. The bulk of this was expected to be achieved by applying CCUS technology to a biomass energy plant (a process known as BECCS).72 There are no BECCS projects included in Track 1, but the Department told us that it remained under consideration for its future plans.73 Ofgem administers the existing government support for large biomass generators, including overseeing an assurance regime intended to ensure that they only burn sustainably sourced biomass.74 However, an Ofgem investigation into Drax, which had received £6.5 billion in public funding between 2002 and 2023 and is by far the largest biomass plant in the country, found in August 2024 that there was an absence of adequate data governance and controls in place that had contributed to, amongst other things, to Drax being unable to support the reliability of its profiling data reporting of forestry type and sawlogs for Canadian consignments.75 Earlier in 2024, a National Audit Office report on the government’s support for biomass concluded, more broadly, that the government could not demonstrate that its current arrangements were adequate to give it confidence industry was meeting sustainability requirements.76 If not all of the materials used were meeting the government’s own sustainability standards this would be unacceptable. We also received written evidence suggesting that the application of carbon capture technology to biomass power generation is effectively untested on a commercial scale, as all real–world experience to date has been on coal–fired stations, which are substantively different.77 We also note the issues caused by international accounting principles for carbon emissions. If materials are exported from another country, it is that country that has to report the emissions. The absurdity of this is if the UK sou