Scaling Up Speakers Talk Bioeconomy Successes, Gaps in Canada

by Marie Church (Canadian Biomass Magazine) ... The global bioeconomy is rapidly progressing and while Canada has seen some bright advancements, there are glaring gaps to fill if we want to be among the front runners.

Scaling Up, an annual bioeconomy conference in Ottawa last week, convened dozens of experts and many of them expressed the above sentiment, urging Canada to do more to bring about biobased products, fuels, and climate solutions.

Organizer Jeff Passmore with Passmore Group welcomed attendees and offered comments throughout the conference, often pointing to Canada’s “missing” national bioeconomy strategy. While representatives from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Natural Resources Canada, and the Canadian Standards Association hinted at ongoing and collaborative work to advance the country’s bioeconomy, no announcement was made about a formal national strategy.

Jim Lane, editor and publisher of the U.S.-based Daily Digest, was among the opening keynotes and told the audience he’s in Canada with a specific message: the world needs feedstocks. The global bioeconomy has policy and economic tailwinds unlike ever before, with unprecedented emerging players, Lane said, but the bottleneck is a lack of feedstock to meet demand. “There is no country that gets the forest more, that gets feedstock more, than Canada,” he said.

Jamie Stephen with Torchlight Bioresources echoed Lane’s point with an urgent undertone. Canada’s forests – its largest feedstock opportunity – are going up in smoke. This year’s wildfires made that point clearer than ever.

Bioheat from forest residues, the leftover material from logging for wood products, represents the most significant and immediate impact Canada can have to lower its emissions, Stephen said.

Whitesand First Nation, an Ojibwa First Nation in Northwestern Ontario, has been working to sustainably eliminate the use of diesel generators for power since the early 1990s.

Good news: the community is in the final stages of financing its 6.5MW biomass co-generation facility that will connect to the local micro-grid currently powered by a diesel generator. The co-gen facility is part of Whitesand’s Sagatay Co-Generation Limited Partnership, which is also planning to build a wood pellet plant and wood merchandising yard.

Lake Nipigon Forest Management, a company comprising four First Nations in Northern Ontario, is on a similar journey to decarbonize using their forests, and things are ramping up fast. The forestry co-op is working with CharTech Solutions (formerly CHAR Technologies) to develop, build, own and operate a wood residues to renewable natural gas (RNG) and biochar facility.

In addition to the biochar project, Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek is at various stages with other forestry and biomass initiatives, including a fully operating sawmill, chipping operation, harvesting operation and plans for a biomass district heating system for their new build community. “It’s grown tremendously,” Hatton (Jordan Hatton, director of economic development for the Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek) said of their forestry activity. “Now we’re actually earning revenue from the forest.”

Madison Carroll, executive director of the Council on Sustainable Aviation Fuels Accountability (CoSAFA), introduced the organization and shared an overview of global and North American SAF markets and supply.

Boeing has developed a public web tool called Boeing Cascade Climate Impact Model that visualizes and evaluates pathways to decarbonize aviation.

Geoff Tauvette, executive director of the Canadian Council for Sustainable Aviation Fuels (C-SAF), says they’re no longer calling aviation a “hard to abate” sector. “We know how to decarbonize it – it’s SAF,” Tauvette said.

C-SAF, a consortium of 60 airlines operating in Canada, released its SAF Roadmap in June this year, which details its policy framework and priority areas to decarbonize aviation while remaining competitive. “We want to avoid a patchwork of policies that pop up here and there,” Tauvette said in reference to the roadmap.

Hydrogenii Canada CEO Martin Vroegh introduced the company’s technology that can produce hydrogen from hydrogen sulfide, a by-product of several industries including cement production and oil and gas. The technology can also be used as part of the anaerobic digester process, which Vroegh says affords them access to the pipelines where hydrogen can be injected into the natural gas grid.

Calgary-based SixRing has been making headlines for a couple years and chief technology officer Markus Weissenberger said they’re expecting to have an operational pilot plant in Lethbridge, Alta., by the end of next year. The company’s feedstock-agnostic delignification process creates liquid lignin-hemicellulose-depolymerized-organics and solid cellulose from non-food biomass.

Passmore honoured a speaker with the Scaling Up Award to mark their contributions to Canada’s bioeconomy growth. This year’s award went to Jordon Solomon, president and CEO of Ecostrat. Ecostrat is the pioneering company behind the Bioeconomy Development Opportunity Zone Initiative, which is helping de-risk biomass supply chains by rating and identifying biomass-rich regions and connecting them with international biomass developers and investors. READ MORE