Friday Mar 06, 2009 By The WOOD BIOMASS monthly
Attendance of 120 filled the North Bay Wood Pellets Forum March 5, chaired by Jay Aspin, of Trade North Ontario. Some very heavy hitters in the Ontario wood industry attended, to hear the new proposals by Ontario Power Generation and experience of pellet producers in Ontario now.
North Bay sees the possibility of a key region in the future of this heat/energy source for domestic and export wood biomass.
First speaker, Dr.Warren Mabee, of Queen's University is a forester who sees Canada having the resources to stabilize energy prices and demand. More meetings will be held at Queens on the issues.
Other speakers gave European models. The Austrian ambassador attended and spoke on his observations of the waste of opportunity wood and value rotting along the roadsides in Northern Ontario. He also enjoyed the absence of Swedish attendants telling him he was wrong, which he normally endures in Europe.
There were real life Canadian examples from Rick Minke of Walkerton, a manufacturer of pelletizing equipment, and Peter vanAmelsfoort of Powassan who recently installed a pellet boiler to reduce oil dependency for their kiln operation. Those boilers were Canadian technology and very successful. Pellets are delivered monthly by truck and have saved nearly $200,000 from oil prices. Oil continues to be the back up heat source to the wood pellet boilers.
Sandy Drysdale of Ontario Power Generation talked about the trials being done at Atikokan and Nanticoke. Indications are that Atikokan would be the first facility to go to biomass feedstock.
Drysdale said expects to see a range of small wood biomass feedstock producers (around the 100,000 tonnes of pellets level) who would come together to provide the supply for OPG. The total need for biomass is 30 million tonnes before the 2014 date of closing the coal plants. One speaker referred to the response for biomass pellets at OPG as "holy crap."
There was a consensus with attendees that the real issue for wood pellets was access to Crown fibre in Ontario. New investors to the wood pellet industry had no new access to fibre. There was no discussion on the availability of fibre for this emerging industry.
Some pointed to the major forest companies as blocking the access for wood biomass access. Many noted that major forest companies had ongoing threats to their wood supply from the government which undermined investment security, and the majors could not allow their future to be transformed to another industry.
This critical issue was not discussed. A number of attendees stated that companies were ready to deliver wood pellets and biomass but there was no OPG buyer at this time.
