Wood from Canada and Scandinavia will be imported to be burnt in Britain’s largest power station as part of a plan to generate 10 per cent of its electricity from biomass.

Drax, the huge coal-fired power station near Selby in North Yorkshire that generates 7 per cent of all the UK’s electricity, has signed a deal with Alstom, the French engineering group, to build a £50 million “co-firing facility”, enabling it to burn biomass as well as coal in its boilers.

The company says that the biomass project is the largest of its kind in the world and will help it to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide by more than two million tonnes a year. It forms part of a plan to reduce the plant’s CO2 emissions by 15 per cent by 2011.

Others attacked the scheme, which will rely almost entirely on imported wood. Once on site, the woodchip or other fuels will be milled into a fine powder, allowing them to be injected directly into the boilers and burnt alongside coal.

Dorothy Thompson, the chief executive, said yesterday that it was unclear where the 1.5 million tonnes of biomass fuel required annually would come from. She said that initially the plant would be “quite dependent on imports from overseas”. Philip Hudson, the company secretary, said that Drax was considering suppliers in Scandinanvia and the Atlantic basin, including in the United States, Canada and South America, and that efforts would be made to ensure that any fuel was sourced sustainably.

Doug Parr, chief scientist at Green-peace UK, questioned whether Drax would be able to meet this pledge. He welcomed the use of sustainably sourced biomass as a fuel, but said that it was in short supply and was likely to be so for several years.

Dr Parr gave warning that Drax’s approach might cause more harm than good and he urged it to pledge that any wood used was approved by the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC). Drax played down these concerns, but it stopped short of saying that it would use only FSC-certified wood. It said that all of its procurement contracts would include sustainability criteria.

Mrs Thompson said that importing biomass needed to be looked at in the context of its business model. Drax burns about ten million tonnes of coal annually. About 50 per cent is mined in Britain, but the rest is imported from the US, Eastern Europe and South Africa. She also hoped that the need to import large amounts of fuel would be a temporary measure, taken until a domestic supply chain could be established in the UK.

As well as wood, almost 50 other fuels could be used, including peanut and sunflower husks and agricultural waste from cereals. Mrs Thompson said that there were new opportunities emerging to use waste agricultural material from Britain, such as pelleted straw, but that it would take time for such new industries to develop.

Biomass fuel costs three to five times more than coal, which could help to create a market. Mrs Thompson said the plan would allow Drax to qualify for the payment of government subsidies in the form of renewable obligation certificates. She insisted that the decision had been taken because Drax believed that there was a compelling business case for cutting its use of fossil fuels.

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