Power Struggles

Gravelle touches on an important point: in countries such as Italy and Austria, stoves fuelled by imported wood pellets are increasingly popular. In the past six or seven years, British Columbia companies have leapt into this burgeoning market, most recently making pellets from trees killed by the mountain pine beetle. Thus far that kind of infestation has not affected forests in Ontario, so if producers here want to make biomass fuel from wood pellets, where will the wood come from?

Ministry of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry (MNDMF) officials insist that there is plenty of wood waste – branches, tops and “unmerchantable” tree stands – that can be processed into pellets. Province-wide, MNDMF allows a total annual cut of 31.5 million cubic metres of timber, but because of the steep decline in demand for newsprint and building materials, the harvest last year was only 14.3 million cubic metres, reflecting the cataclysmic downturn in the U.S. construction sector. Logging activity generates a further eight million cubic metres of waste wood, much of which is left in large piles on the sides of bush roads. (“Full tree logging” is now the norm in Ontario: timber companies haul entiretrees out of the forest and remove their branches at the roadside). “Over time, [those piles] occupy large areas of the forest,” says MNDMF forest business and economics section manager Jason Koivisto. “You lose a lot of the land base.”

Environmentalists fear that the extraction of this “waste” will lead to a loss of nutrients and habitat, and may impair the forest’s ability to regenerate. Bell says that black bears, woodpeckers, boreal chickadees and winter wrens all feed on insects that live in rotting logs, which also are habitat for larvae, lichen and fungi. Removing all that organic material poses a huge ecological risk, she explains. “If you take that out, you’re going to have some impact on the species.” With conventional logging, all sorts of debris is left behind, and it serves an important biological role. Hauling away those leftovers pushes clearcutting to the next level. “We’re essentially mining nutrients out of the ground,” says Trevor Hesselink, forest programs director for CPAWS Wildlands League. “Is that sustainable?”

No one really knows, and that’s troubling. MNDMF’s timber harvesting policies make no mention of the use of wood waste, which means that the government has not sought answers to these ecological questions. Nor do the policies restrict harvesting trees for pellets. “There’s nothing that says, ‘You must leave behind [a certain amount] of the biomass,’” observes University of Toronto forestry professor Jay Malcolm. He notes that a dramatic loss of species has occurred in over harvested European forests, where controversial practices such as stump removal are permitted. He adds that producing biomass pellets is a step backwards for an industry that has long sought value-added products (such as furniture, and construction grade lumber) that generate more domestic jobs and command higher prices.

Malcolm predicts that if timber waste becomes a saleable commodity, forest companies will have a clear incentive to haul out as much of it as possible. Malcolm and others, including CPAWS Wildlands League and Ontario Nature, want the government to lay down explicit rules governing biomass-related harvesting.

Queen’s Park disagrees. “We don’t think that will be necessary,” says Gravelle, who claims the government is “highly sensitive” to the ecological risks. “It is important to say that we’re not going to be [removing] all of the bio-fibre from the forest.”

It appears that Ontario’s biomass strategy is more focused on reviving the logging industry than on finding the best way to generate power, especially considering that the case for using pellets made from crop waste or prairie grasses grown on marginal land appears to be stronger in terms of both energy efficiency and carbon reduction.

Biofuel expert Roger Samson, executive director of Resource Efficient Agricultural Production (REAP) Canada, says Ontario could produce seven million tonnes of pellets from fast-growing switchgrasses and judicious use of crop residue. Such species have a high energy content and store carbon in their extensive root systems. As well, native grasses are drought tolerant and require minimal fertilizer. The harvesting process for these plants is less complex logistically than for forests and does not result in the depletion of woodlands. By contrast, says Samson, “the economic viability of whole tree logging for wood pellets is not very strong.”

Canadian policy-makers, however, seem to have turned a blind eye to the energy potential of native switchgrasses, while stoking production of other types of renewable energy by means of generous subsidies. REAP has calculated that governments spend $350 in ethanol subsidies to offset a single tonne of carbon dioxide produced by burning ethanol blended fuels. Although production incentives for ethanol exist, there are none for pellets made from straw or grasses.

Samson also points to an ecological benefit of growing these plants: switchgrass crops, which are harvested in the fall, provide habitat for birds, insects and pollinators such as song sparrows and butterflies – an important point, given that increasing wood pellet production will probably lead to loss of habitat and biodiversity in forest regions. But Bell is cautious. She notes that a mixture of diverse native prairie species would be preferable to a monoculture of switchgrass, both because it burns better and does not require fertilizer. Since OPG started looking for biomass suppliers, Bell has heard from some farmers that southwestern Ontario has become a “wild west” where salespeople are out in force, trying to sell seed stock to farmers at inflated prices. “The risk,” she says, “is that production of biomass will move into high gear without a clear understanding of which options are the most sustainable.”

Nanticoke is not the only OPG coal plant that has become a test lab for biomass fuel. Atikokan, a 200- megawatt plant located between Thunder Bay and Rainy River, has never been one of OPG’s top performers, and in recent years its slim economic mandate – supplying electricity to the region’s lumber mills – has weakened. Three years ago, Queen’s Park established the Atikokan Bioenergy Research Centre at the plant to test various combinations of alternative biomass fuels. The centre has undertaken numerous projects in partnership with companies, but a spokesperson for Ontario Centres of Excellence, which oversees the centre, declined to release the results.

Aside from its northern address, Atikokan has another noteworthy feature. It happens to be close to a vast expanse of wetlands, fens and bogs. As a 2006 evaluation commissioned by the Ministry of Energy noted, roughly 60 million “bone dry tonnes” of fuel-grade peat are within a 100-kilometre radius of the plant. Essentially, peat is very young, damp coal – a dense, carbon-rich soil created from thousands of years of plant decay. Peat is found mostly in northern nations like Canada, Russia and Finland, and represents a massive carbon sink. Boreal peatlands contain up to one-third of the global carbon pool; Canada accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the earth’s peatlands. Ontario alone has 16 million hectares of peatlands. Less expensive to burn than wood pellets, peat could be the low-cost substitute for coal at Atikokan, the report concluded.

Environmental groups, though, warn that peat should not be considered a potential source of biomass. According to Bell, “peat is a mined resource, not a renewable resource.” The Ontario government’s current interest in peat is not clear, but Queen’s Park was sniffing around the wetlands of northern Ontario long before policy-makers began espousing green energy. During the 1970s oil crisis, officials seeking alternative energy supplies homed in on peat as a replacement for coal. In 1980, an upstart firm, Peat Resources Ltd. (PRL), secured a 20,000-hectare land permit near Atikokan with an eye to mining $100 million worth of peat. But by the early 1990s, the energy crisis had ebbed and so, too, did talk of peat mining. PRL went into a long period of hibernation until 2003, when Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals swept into office on a promise to stop burning coal.

Peter Telford, a former government geologist who once worked on a provincial inventory of peat deposits, now runs the firm. PRL’s board includes several former mining executives, who have helped Telford raise more than $10 million to finance peat “harvesting” operations in Ontario and Newfoundland. Telford positions the company as a clean energy supplier of sustainable biomass. He has told OPG that his firm could deliver 200,000 to 300,000 tonnes of peat pellets per year to Atikokan for 20 years. Telford is also looking to ship peat to coal plants in Atlantic Canada and the U.S. northeast and Great Lakes basin states.

PRL’s main selling point is a “wet harvesting” technology. In countries that burn peat, such as Ireland, the typical approach is to drain the wetland and then let the sun dry the peat – a process that allows trapped methane to escape into the atmosphere. PRL’s approach is to skip the drainage step. The company plans to bulldoze off the top layer of organic material (including trees and other wetland plant life), scoop up the wet peat and add water. The resulting slurry would be piped to a processing facility for dewatering and formation into pellets. The wastewater is then pumped back into the wetland. When all the peat has been extracted, the top layer of organic material would be shovelled back. “You’re recreating a wetland,” says Telford. “Obviously,” he adds, “it’s a very different wetland than when you started. It’s a more marshy type of environment.” He admits that, apart from a few pilot projects in Europe, wet harvesting is a “relatively untested process.”

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