Industry may only have 10 years to do it, but there’s no shortage of companies in B.C. looking to make a buck off pine beetle kill before it wastes away.
September has seen a series of announcements about new ways that industry plans to make use of B.C. pine, a resource that has been ravaged over the last decade thanks to a rampant beetle infestation.
On September 17, Quesnel-based Pinnacle Pellet Inc. announced plans to build a 400,000-tonne-per-year wood pellet plant near Burns Lake that would use pine beetle-attacked timber for feedstock.
Then an obscure Vancouver-based company called Global Bio-Coal Energy Inc. said it has plans to build a bio-coal production facility near Terrace that would also use beetle-killed fibre to manufacture black pellets.
Even the construction industry has jumped on the beetle bandwagon. Vancouver’s CEI Architecture Planning Interiors recently designed B.C.’s first building to use pine beetle kill wood as a stand-in for Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified lumber, effectively paving the way for other design firms to use beetle wood in green building projects.
And to top it off, Forests Minister Pat Bell re-issued the BC Biomass Guide to promote the use of the province’s glut of low-grade wood fibre.
“One of my key priorities is to improve utilization by turning what was previously considered waste and debris into bioenergy,” Bell said.
Russell Taylor, president of Vancouver-based International WOOD Markets Group Inc., said now is the perfect time for burgeoning green builders and bioenergy ventures to make use of pine beetle wood.
“We figure that by the end of the decade you’re bottoming out,” Taylor said, “so we have another 10 years of using this dead tree for sawmills.”
After that, most of the beetle-killed trees will have fallen over or rotted, which means sawmills won’t have any use for them. That leaves the bioenergy players who may be able to pick up the leftovers and compress them into pellets that can be burned to power homes.
Meantime, Taylor said B.C.’s sawmills continue to run on a “heavy diet” of beetle kill that can be used in the construction industry.
Tim McLennan, a partner with CEI, said the province’s Wood First Act is the reason why the firm chose beetle kill for Okanagan College’s Centre of Excellence in Penticton.
The act requires that wood be considered the primary building material for all provincially funded building projects.
“We’re building a building that is of the Okanagan and this issue is of the Okanagan,” McLennan said. “It’s really important to use, to incorporate as much volume of that wood as possible to help the industry.”
In the process, the firm successfully negotiated with the International Living Building Institute to have the pine beetle kill certified in lieu of FSC lumber.
McLennan believes that will promote more of its use.
John Bennett, CEO of Global Bio-Coal, said his company’s technology could also make better use of B.C.’s huge inventory of low-grade fibre. Global recently signed an agreement with First Nations forestry company Coast Tsimshian Resources LP to build what could be the province’s first bio-coal plant.
Bennett, who founded the predecessor company to North Vancouver’s Aqua-Guard Spill Response Inc., said the operation would manufacture a product similar to wood pellets and serve European energy markets.
Better yet, he added, the operation can use much of the wood waste that logging companies leave behind.
“It’s never had a value before, but it has a value now, and because it has a value now that will pay the overhead of running a logging operation,” Bennett said.
Although there’s much enthusiasm for B.C.’s bioenergy sector, Taylor said startups wouldn’t be able to rely on cheap beetle kill forever.
“There’s a shelf life to what we think is a storehouse of raw material,” Taylor said. “We don’t know enough about it. How long will it last before it falls over? The best industries are the ones based on existing raw materials.”
Minister Bell agreed.
“I think it’s the entry point for the bioenergy industry, but I think the long-term future of the bioenergy industry rests with intensive forest management,” he said.
“It’s a complete change in the way we approach forest management, and if we do it properly the operations that you’re seeing built today on 15 and 20 year licences will be able to sustain themselves into multiple decades, if not centuries.”