Parc - Energy Crops

Energy Crops

ParcGro is used in the remediation of brownfield sites and can provide a growing medium for a range of crops that can be used for fuel.

Short Rotation Coppice (SRC)

SRC consists of densely planted, high-yielding varieties of either willow or poplar, harvested on a 2 to 5 year cycle, although commonly every 3 years. This wood is then used as fuel in specially adapted power plants to generate electicity.

In the UK, yields achievable from willow SRC at first harvest are expected to be in the range 7 to 12 oven dry tonnes per hectare per year depending on site and efficiency of establishment.

SRC has a low greenhouse gas impact as any carbon dioxide released in power generation will have been sequestered by the plantation over just a few years; although the planting, growing and harvesting will have a carbon footprint.

Electricity or heat from SRC provides better carbon dioxide reduction that growing and using biodiesel.

Currently Premier have six sites in the north east that are growing short rotation willow coppice. This will fed into the Sembcorp power plant on Teesside.

About Sembcorp

The Sembcorp Biomass Power Station is a £60 million investment in renewable energy at the Wilton International site in the Tees Valley.

The station became the UK’s first large scale ‘wood to energy’ plant when it began full commercial operations in October 2007 and uses 300,000 tonnes of wood a year as its biomass fuel.

Taking wood from a variety of sustainable sources in the UK, the plant is capable of generating 30 MW of electricity – enough to power a small town.

Forty per cent of the total energy required is derived from recycled timber – much of which was previously sent to landfill, with around 20 per cent of the energy total coming from wood from managed forests in the north east, sawmills and a specially grown energy crop.

It is helping in the battle against climate change by saving 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year compared to a fossil fuel power station with a similar capacity - the equivalent to the CO2 emissions of 67,000 vehicles a year.

Other crops

We have yet to set up trials of other energy crops such as maize, rape seed oil, wheat, etc. We do not see any reason these plants should not grow as well as the willow.

No agricultural land used

One of the main criticism of energy crop production is that it uses land that could have been used for food production, this causes the price of foodstuff to rise. Environmentalists are also concernced that virgin forest may be cleared to make way for energy crops.