Previous | Next :: Rainbow Rising from Mississippi Forests : USA | September 29, 2014, 1:50 pm

Sorry if you have been checking in for an update ……… I guess even I just need to sleep sometimes …….. hehehe……. So what with one thing and another and zapping about as ever …… there has been nothing posted to my blog for well over a week …… Sorry…. What can I say …. I will try to do better hehehehe :-)))))))) …… so here it is the long overdue update……. :-))))

Yesterday….. On Sunday …… I had a big story in the Sunday Times Mag……. A story researched and written by Danny Fortson …….. It was shot in Mississippi, Louisiana and Yorkshire ……. Funny mix right?

Suffice to say it concerns the fuel for the biggest of the polluting power stations in Western Europe …… Drax Power Station…… up in Yorkshire ……. Drax is attempting to ‘go green’ by pursuing a ‘Biomass’ strategy …….. This means generating electricity by burning trees (and straw etc) not coal …… (some straw can be sourced locally without controversy and converted into the burnable pellets on the Drax site) …….. But the amount of trees they need for the bulk of the new fuel pellets …….. Well…… thats where Mississippi comes in …… as you see above they have a fair few trees in Louisiana and Mississippi………… so Drax is coming up with a plan that involves buying trees on mass in Mississippi building a pellet plant to mash the trees into pellets get those pellets driven to the port where they are then transferred to ships…… shipped from the US to the UK …… transferred from the port to Drax where they are then burned to generate electrical power……… now whether this is economically viable or actually green…….. Well …… thats where the controversy really lies ……. for a proper analysis of all the issues you need to read Danny’s Sunday Times Magazine piece………

I shot this image above flying by helicopter to the Drax pellet making factory in the heart of the Mississippi managed forests ……….. so I need to shoot the trees below as we fly…… but it's a little bit of a grey and rainy day half the time we cannot even see the trees …… then amazingly the clouds part just enough to see the trees in sunlight…… and a rainbow ……… you gotta love a rainbow …… a gift from the “Gods of Photography” as a mate of mine would always say at the sight of such a wondrous natural phenomena at just the right moment :-)))))))))))

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Cheers Jez XXXXXXX :-)))))))))))))))) XXXXXXXXX

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