Bioenerģija un granulu ražošana Kanādā

"Sometime down the road, possibly even in the near future, certain buildings in the downtown core of Prince George could be drawing heat from a communal system that relies on wood waste to heat a water loop. The loop would run through businesses and municipal facilities heated by hot water, such as the library and the soon-to-be-opened RCMP facility at the corner of Seventh and Quebec.
"Using community energy would likely be a more efficient way of providing heat for the downtown core buildings than using geothermal," civic facilities manager Greg Anderson said.
It also has the potential to improve air quality because a single boiler would be required for ignitions control. The downside is the cost of installing such a system - $8 million, to be exact - which is subject to a government grant program.
"If there's enough there to make the project a go, we could start construction as early as next year," utilities division manager Marco Fornari said.
"Once we put community energy through, any building that has hot water heating could then be run off the biomass," Anderson added. "Because you're using local wood waste to operate the facility, you've now taken yourself out of the equation of fluctuating energy prices for fossil fuel."
In terms of energy production, linking the words 'wood' and 'waste' is something akin to blasphemy because wood, mill residues and standing dead timber are some of the most common sources of biomass energy.
"We never use the word 'waste,'" said John Swaan, executive director of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada. "We have wood residues, whether it's sawmill residues or roadside debris, or whole log standing dead. We've got municipal waste in whatever form, gas and solid. Effluent has a lot of gas for us to utilize if we wanted to.
"We've got the opportunity to launch a bioenergy economy because of the resource that we do have. It's more than just energy systems, it's a complete system. In Europe, for example, you see what they call CHP, which is combined heat and power, and that's effective, efficient use of using energy if you will, no matter what it is. But particularly bioenergy, or biomass, because you're not only generating one form of energy, you've got others coming out that you utilize for electricity, or heating homes. In this case, you're generating hot water so you can distribute that as a heating medium to heat more than just a facility, now you can heat all buildings and offices."
Swaan said Europeans are utilizing biomass because it's the "most sustainable green energy source" we have. The trouble in North America, he feels, is that people have not bought into the concept that biomass is carbon neutral.
"That's our biggest problem, Swaan said. "When we're utilizing it, we're burning it so we are generating CO2 (carbon dioxide). Some people have a difficult time wrapping their head around the carbon neutrality of that."
As mentioned, money is another problem of converting biomass into energy. But Swaan has a solution called a "carrot and stick approach" which would tax the offenders, namely gas, oil and coal.
"Anything that comes from beneath the ground needs to be taxed, and anything you utilize from above the ground needs to be rewarded. Period. That's one of the major issues that we need to get the economics in line."
Wood residue is the most abundant source of biomass, which is defined as organic material derived from plants. It represents the largest opportunity for electricity generation in the province, according to B.C. Hydro, which is planning a call for power in 2008 to utilize beetle kill wood and other wood fibre fuel sources.
"There's promise with added potential revenue from the dead and dying component. You could take stands that are uneconomic and make them economic once again," said Doug Routledge, vice-president of northern operations at the Council of Forest Industries.
"The pulp and paper industry, quite frankly, has been in the power and heat generation business since their inception in the '60s. They're really bioenergy plants as well as pulp and paper plants, and the reason is because huge amounts of heat and power are required to make pulp and paper, and the more they can generate themselves, the more they can reduce their need to buy it off the grid, for example, and buy natural gas."
Increasingly, he added, mills such as the Canfor-owned P.G. pulp mill have been putting into place their own co-generation facilities, which burn wood waste to heat oil which in turn heats the kilns.
"That's kind of the next generation of bioenergy, still within the forest industry, all built on residues," said Routledge, adding most residues are "fully committed to offset natural gas consumption." Meaning beehive burners are disappearing, although some still exist at operations such as Dunkley Lumber.
But again, using mill residues to power a co-gen plant is a costly proposition.
"The biggest challenge to producing power and heat from biomass is that because this province has relatively inexpensive power from hydro generation from big mega projects, the price that consumers in B.C. pay for power is relatively quite low," Routledge said. "To try and transport biomass into a plant and then generate heat and power, the biggest barrier is the transportation cost."
Roadside residues might offer a more attractive source of biomass energy, since tree tops, limbs and rotten logs are not being utilized.
"That stuff, which annually we have to burn off over the winter to keep the fire hazard down for future years, is going up in smoke right now and could represent the next available fibre supply for the bioenergy industry," said Routledge, who notes increasing power prices may soon be able to cover transportation costs of roadside fibre.
Standing dead timber in mountain pine beetle areas is another potential biomass source, although harvesting and reforestation costs make this option less viable.
"(But) Because these plants are being built with 20-year lives, it could eventually be that the price of power gets to a place that can support harvesting those standing dead trees," Routledge said.
Which means forest companies could become energy producers, either by themselves or in conjunction with an existing energy company.
"Existing industry could act as a conduit," Routledge said. "It's just a matter of leveraging the fact that the most cost-effective way of getting that roadside and standing fibre out is to enter these business relationships. We see a role here emerging very quickly for these business-to-business relationships to develop."
"Waste wood" is being used to produce flake board and pellets, the latter of which have become a key product of this region's forest sector. Eraser-size wood pellets are made from sawdust, shavings and wood fines left over after a tree has been processed. Pellets are used mostly to produce energy, but have other applications such as livestock bedding.
The majority of the 1.6 million tons of pellets expected to be produced in Canada this year will come from B.C.
"We're the largest exporter to Europe. We took the product to them 10 years ago. I was the one that was responsible for the very first shipment," said Swaan, who in 1994 founded Pellet Flame, a Prince George company which amalgamated with the Vancouver-based Pacific Bioenergy Corp. Since that time, pellets have gone from being a niche product to a "globally-traded commodity.
"Now there's companies all over North America," Swaan said.
There are several pellet plants in northern B.C., including Pacific Bioenergy, Pinnacle Pellet and Run of the River Power Inc. The latter, which recently purchased Western Biomass Power Corp., plans to build a series of wood-fired plants utilizing beetle-killed trees and logging/mill wastes.
"They're taking a very different approach to things," Routledge said. "They're potentially one of this new generation of stand-alone power plants that would enter into business relationships with companies for fibre."
Alterna Energy is a two-year-old Prince George company which is close to finishing construction of a research plant, also known as an enviro carbonizer, through which tests will be conducted with materials such as wood, rubber and plastics that will provide data on emissions and energy output.
"We will one day be selling power to B.C. Hydro but not necessarily with our research plant," Alterna president Leonard Legault said. "We are considering projects in B.C. and elsewhere."
Clearly, the biomass supply - and demand - is alive and well in this province. As Swaan says, "It's growing at us all the time."
But is this enough to make a community energy system in Prince George become a reality?
Routledge thinks so, but only if existing underground infrastructure can be used in conjunction with a pulp mill, as is the case in communities such as Golden and Revelstoke.
"It's going to be a bit of a hurdle for us to do the retrofitting," he said.
"If somebody has an industrial process that has waste heat, and they're located close to our potential sources, we would look at entering into some agreement to purchase that heat, rather than do a biomass plant ourselves," Fornari added. "It makes sense long-term. It provides stable energy sources, rather than the volatile gas and oil markets. They're not manufacturing more oil, as far as I know. They're just pulling it out of the ground. Eventually it's going to run out."
A community heating system has been in place in Revelstoke in southeast B.C. since 2005, when a multi-million dollar project was commissioned. Town leaders had originally hoped for a full-blown co-gen plant using wood waste from mills, but electricity rates did not warrant the scale of the project, which would have produced about 4.5 megawatts (MW) of power.
"What we do now is it's a heat-only project where we only burn about 10 per cent of the waste, and we generate steam," said Geoff Battersby, the town's former mayor who is a director of the Revelstoke Community Energy Corporation. "Downie Street Sawmills is the big sawmill in town. They signed a 20-year agreement to provide us with fuel for the plant, free. And they also provided a site for the plant, free, within the boundaries of their operations. And they signed an agreement to purchase steam energy for the dry kilns for 20 years as well. It's a 1.5 MW biomass boiler. About half the energy goes to produce steam for their dry kilns, and the rest is used to provide hot water to be pumped around the community to various large buildings."
These include the ice arena, high school, community centre, aquatic centre, a motel, and a bed and breakfast. The corporation hopes to hook up a few more buildings in the future.
The project required 1.6 kilometres of underground piping from the mill to the buildings. The pipe cost about $750 a metre, the price of which has since jumped substantially. The total project cost about $6 million, which they hope to pay off in about 20 years.
"It's a great system but it's certainly capital intensive on the front end," Battersby said. "Our pledge to the citizens when we did this project was that we would not incur any liability for the taxpayers, and not use the city's borrowing power, but use the project alone as a stand-alone thing."
The environmentally-friendly system runs on heat exchangers, which take up less space than boilers.
"But more importantly, the 20-year contract gives them certainty of what their prices are going to be, with the only escalation being annual CPI (Consumer Price Index), nothing tied to fossil fuel prices," Battersby said."

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