Bioenergy Day at UNBC
Prince George, B.C. – National Bioenergy Day will be celebrated at UNBC starting later this morning.
Sustainability manager Kyrke Gaudreau says it’s a day to recognize companies, institutions and communities who are using locally produced biomass to bring about sustainable energy.
“And what UNBC is trying to do is just really provide a venue for promoting dialogue and collaboration in UNBC itself and also reaching out to our industry and community partners.”
He says the day will include an information fair from 9:30-11:30am in the Canfor Winter Garden.
“That’s just an opportunity for our students, our researchers, our faculty and our operations to really demonstrate what the UNBC bioenergy system is all about, how it operates, what it’s been successful at and where the small hiccups have been.”
Gaudreau says society, not just UNBC, has been moving in this direction.
“We’ve had communities come calling asking for some help in terms of implementing it. For example one of our undergraduate students will be displaying some of her research working with Hazelton,” he says.
“And their work on trying to get a district heating system up and running and that heating system would be heated by bioenergy. In Prince George itself the City of Prince George also operates its own bioenergy district heating system and they’ll be up on campus illustrating and explaining how their system works.”
Gaudreau says there are also a lot of communities across Canada’s north who are still running off of diesel and propane and who are starting to look at alternative systems to provide them with the heat and power they need.
“In a way that actually draws from their local resource base and usually that will be bioenergy in combination with other small energy systems as well.”
Comments
And yet our governments are not on board with incentives to enable the sector to really compete with the fossil fuels sector.
Maybe some kind of tax rebate, or enabling capital depreciation flexibility would be all that’s needed to really move this industry along from treading water, to becoming a true local economic diversifier that helps generate more economic opportunity by keeping more dollars locally.
In PG this bioenergy sector employs hundreds and generates millions of dollars in local economic activity creating value from what was once considered waste.
Consider that just Pacific Bio Energy alone process thousands of tons a day in biomatter for the pellet industry. Ditto for PG Cogen or Northwood, and to a lesser extent Intercon, the City of PG, and UNBC. Easily 10,000 tons a day that has to be shipped for processing from the bush and mills as far away as 300km radius. Some of which goes further by train and ship as far away as Europe after processing.
As long as the industry is still allowed to burn slash (producing CO2 and cancer causing wood smoke) instead of trucking it out for fuel in electrical energy producing plants I am not convinced about the sincerity of efforts. Usually there are rail lines in the vicinity and the slash can be loaded into railcars if highway traffic is a concern.
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