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A Word or Two (editorial comment)
Wood briquettes
a new way to be sustainable?
Saw a news item recently about communities in northern Canada
spending a fortune to produce electricity with diesel generators.
Since my return from the World Bioenergy conference in Jönköping,
Sweden, the solution seems perfectly obvious. Even above the
tree line, wouldn't it be better to bring in wood chips from
forestry operations in Ontario and Quebec to run small cogeneration
plants? It's not a new idea, but maybe the time is right.
Closer to home in Nova Scotia, a forest fire this June in the
Porter's Lake area forced thousands to evacuate and destroyed
a couple of homes. It seems likely climate change is contributing
to dry conditions in the woods and maybe also increasing
the frequency of "extreme weather events." I wonder,
would a robust biomass industry in Halifax County have ensured
that forest stands damaged by hurricane Juan were salvaged, providing
revenue for landowners while reducing the fire risk associated
with downed timber?
These connections were hitting me even before I left Scandinavia.
During a stopover in Copenhagen an elegant city that has
embraced district heating stacks and huge wind turbines as part
of the urban landscape I went to the Frihedsmuseet, a museum
dedicated to the Danish resistance. And there, in all its black
iron glory, was an Imbert generator a wood gasification
unit of the type widely used to power cars, trucks, and buses
in the early 1940s. Perhaps at that relatively early period in
the petroleum age going back to wood wasn't such a big deal,
although certainly it was a compromise. What struck me was how
energy sources and technologies can sit on the back burner for
many years, to be brought forward and refined in times of need.
Across the canal in Christiania, Copenhagen's once-idealistic
but increasingly seedy "alternative community," I saw
members of the anti-establishment crowd gathered around a barrel
fire, that universal symbol of protest. But their fuel of choice
was not scrap lumber or busted pallets; it was wood briquettes
tidy and uniform, conveniently packaged in a clear plastic
bag. Maybe the commercialization of forest fiber biofuel has
been so successful in Denmark that it has no cultural significance.
It's just the best stuff for making a fire.
That's what Peter de Graaf says about briquettes. "You
can use any wood-burning device, whether it's a campfire, stove,
fireplace, or furnace," he told me. "I've even barbecued
steaks over these suckers."
De Graaf is marketing chairman of the Community Wood Briquette
Project, in the Sussex area of New Brunswick. The idea is to
build a small plant to produce these artificial logs. There's
a volunteer steering committee of about a dozen people with diverse
backgrounds, including woodlot owners, machinery experts, and
community activists. By mid-June it looked like the Fundy Model
Forest was going to come through with project funding for a technical
study and a marketing strategy.
In an effort to jump-start the local market, he has been distributing
briquettes purchased by the tractor-trailer load from a Quebec
manufacturer that uses the same process the Sussex group has
its eyes on. They're packaged 10 briquettes to the 30-lb. bag,
selling for $6.95. One analysis of the cost per BTU concluded
it's like getting oil for $0.80/liter. That might be on the optimistic
side, "but it's definitely under a buck-a-liter oil,"
said de Graaf. "It's obviously less expensive to heat with
this product. It makes economic sense."
There's no thought of replacing firewood, which is cheaper.
In fact the briquettes may even be distributed through firewood
suppliers. With so many wood-burning households in this part
of the world, briquette demand will be plenty strong if just
a small percentage of them will pay the extra for fuel that is
easier to store and cleaner in terms of handling and emissions.
Since the days of cheap sawdust and shavings are long gone,
the briquette project is looking to purchase low-grade roundwood.
That means having a debarker, a chipper, and a hammer mill set
up in front of the main machine that produces hexagonal extrusions.
Still, it's likely to be just a one- or two-person operation,
running 24 hours five days a week, producing 6,000 or 7,000 tonnes
a year to start.
The group envisions offering shares for about $250, so people
can get in with a small investment. Larger players will be welcome
too, but the business structure will be designed to maintain
local control. That is very much the point. This is no mega-project.
Yes, there will be some jobs and spin-offs, but it's more a case
of bolstering economic stability and community self-determination.
De Graaf believes the plant could easily be operating within
two years. "We don't need to rely on Venezuelan crude or
Lepreau II," he told me. "We've got the trees, we should
use them. There's scads and scads of wood that's not being harvested.
And by providing a market for the low-end stuff, that's a good
way to promote sustainable practices."
The issue of fiber supply may be a little more complicated than
that, but the modest scale of this proposal makes it seem an
appropriate community project. It doesn't hinge on the vagaries
of export markets. It doesn't depend on infrastructural investments
or progressive government policy or even radical changes in consumer
behavior all of which need to happen soon. This is not
the revolution advocated by bioenergy boosters in Jönköping,
but it's one example of a good start.
David Lindsay
Correction
My apologies for not having
included Robin Barrett and Donna Hurlburt as members with forestry
backgrounds on the Voluntary Planning Committee holding public
consultations on a vision for natural resources management. That
error was in the "Word or Two" editorial, May issue.
DvL
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