January 15, 2025 | Warren Shoulberg
There could be a new use for timber in the American South and it’s coming from an unexpected source.
Long considered a prime building material, UK-based Drax Group is looking to use pine to fuel wood-fired power plants for tech users. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the company is looking for locations to build electricity generators fueled by burning wood chips.
“The plan calls for constructing wood-fired power plants in parts of the US South where pulp and paper mills have closed and left timber growers without buyers for those trees unfit” for other uses, the WSJ said. “The plants’ exhaust will be piped underground instead of out of smokestacks, which generates lucrative carbon credits for which Drax is already lining up buyers.”
Technology companies in need of power for AI data centers are considered the prime users for this new supply. Drax already burns pellets of compressed sawdust in a converted coal-fueled power plant in its home country, which produces about 5 percent of the UK’s electricity, the Journal said. “Drax has built pellet mills across the southeastern US and in western Canada to feed that plant as well as other wood-burning plants around the world.”
“The whole idea is that 24/7 renewable power is going to become increasingly in demand as data centers grow, as AI grows,” Drax chief executive Will Gardiner told the WSJ. “There’s a huge need for that commodity.”
Millions of acres of what was once a primeval forest of longleaf pine stretching from southern Virginia to northern Florida and west into Texas and Oklahoma have been replanted with rows of fast-growing loblolly pine, the WSJ said. But the volume of wood that American pulp and paper mills have the capacity to process is down more than 20 percent since 2011, the Journal said, citing commodity data firm Fastmarkets.
Image: Drax Group
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