Canadian Wood Products Magazine

Halifax sustains and Ottawa burns

News briefs from the pre-DEMO biomass conference in Halifax, NS, and CanBio's annual conference & tour in Ottawa, ON. Look for more news in upcoming issues of Canadian Biomass, or read our first issue in digital format by clicking the icon above.

Harvest sustainability 

One issue never far from the surface when discussing the future of bioenergy in Canada is sustainability. Forest biomass can provide a source of renewable energy in the wider battle against global warming, but how much, and to what affect on overall forest sustainability and future site productivity? It would help if science could provide clearcut rules as to where, and what extent, forest biomass can be removed, but we're not there yet. But at the pre-DEMO bioenergy conference in Halifax, NS, Natural Resources Canada researcher Evelyne Thiffault yesterday presented a common sense, four-step approach to managing this issue in the meantime. More details will be provided in an upcoming Canadian Biomass issue, but here it is in a nutshell:

• Use current soil and site knowledge, and forest management expertise to identify those sites that should NOT be subjected to biomass extraction or aggressive whole tree removal. Perhaps this means shallow, coarse sandy soils.
• Classify the rest according to sensitivity, and develop clear, localized guidelines on how to approach the rest - removal intensity, volumes left behind, ash return, etc.
• Get on with it - Carefully and intelligently at the operational level, extracting biomass for bioenergy as part of a wider mitigation effort to global warming. It needn't be scary - for example, if the goal is to leave 30% behind in a given site type, it's likely that operation limitations will demand this anyway (i.e. we're not picking stuff up with rakes).
• Monitor the work you are doing as you go. Have researchers like Evelyne looking at certain indicators on various sites under different harvest scenarios in say five years time, and then feed that new data back into your decision-making model, and so on. Adaptive management is not rocket science; it's just good sense. And so's this approach.  

OPG wants pellets, and lots of them!

The really big news at the first day of CANBIO's annual conference yesterday came from Jane Todd of Ontario Power Generation (OPG), who spoke on the public utility's growing plans for co-firing biomass to replace all or a portion of the coal it currently uses for a large part of its power generation needs. OPG has been running co-firing trials at its four coal-fired plants, including four hours of using 100 percent biomass at its Atikokan facility, and various levels at North America's largest coal-fired power plant in Nanticoke, ON. According to Todd, the trials have been much more successful than even OPG's best-case expectations, with both power generation and emission standards more than acceptable.

Building on this success, and an aggressive provincial policy to phase out coal by 2014, OPG plans to quickly ramp up biomass firing, and is talking of 100% conversion at Atikokan, which currently uses a lower-quality lignite coal and has direct rail access. The fuel of choice is wood pellets, as they allow the utility to use existing assets, such as pulverisers, with a minimum of modifications. The target announced yesterday is 2.5 terrawatts, which if my math is right (600,000 tons of pellets per TW) requires 1.5 million tons of high quality pellets. For an idea of the effect this power giant could have on the solid bioenergy market, Canada currently produces slightly more than 2 million tons/year. If the economics and politics work out, OPG could create a biomass support industry all its own.