Canadian Biomass • Summer 2025 • A win-win scenario

For as long as churches have existed, they have played key roles in their communities across Canada. Paroisse Notre-Dame-des-Prodiges, a multi-purpose facility and Catholic church located in Kedgwick, N.B., continues to play this important role to this day including acting as the church, secondhand clothing store, food bank, funeral home, and more. It also supplies heating through a district energy system for its presbytery and the Salle Fatima theatre.

But in recent years, the church found itself in a dire financial situation related to spiking energy costs. The spike was so bad, it almost caused the church to permanently close its doors, which would have had a major impact on the community.

“They used to heat all those buildings with firewood, but when the person that was supplying the firewood for free passed away, nobody took that over,” explains Jonathan Levesque, general manager of Biomass Solution Biomasse (BSB) and board member for the Wood Pellet Association of Canada (WPAC).

The church had less people willing to volunteer to feed its big, old firewood boiler located in the basement of the church, and had to start buying and managing all of its firewood. So, in 2020, the leaders of Paroisse Notre-Dame-des-Prodiges made the decision to swap out the system for three oil-fired boilers. At the time, the price of oil was low, but that changed dramatically a year later, placing the church in a dire financial position.

“In the winter of 2024, there was some stories on the news about how difficult it was for them to raise money to keep heating all those buildings. All the financial cushion they had was almost gone,” Levesque says.

This is when BSB approached the church council with a proposal to swap out the oil-fired boiler system with a wood pellet boiler to reduce their annual energy costs. With limited budget, the church decided to host a fundraising event to attempt to pay for the new system.

“They did a ‘Chase the Ace’ fundraising session there and they were really successful with it because the whole community participated. They knew it was for the heating system, so there was a tremendous turnout,” Levesque says. “They raised enough money to pay for 75 per cent of the total installation, while the NB Power Energy Efficiency Program paid 25 per cent, because they were using oil.”

With the combination of the fundraising event and assistance from the NB Power Energy Efficiency Program, the church was able to purchase and install a Herz Firematic 150kW biomass boiler supplied by BSB. The church now only needs to pay for wood pellets to fuel the boiler system, which to date has offered a 60-per-cent reduction in fuel costs since being fired up on Dec. 31, 2024. The system is expected to burn 70 to 80 tonnes of wood pellets annually. With the switch to wood pellets from oil, the projected return on investment for purchasing the wood pellet boiler system (at 75 per cent of total cost) is between four to five years, Levesque says.

Edgar Béchard, president and board member for the church’s council, says the project saved the church from its financial crisis, which could have shut down all of the church’s operations permanently.

“We really appreciated the 25-percent incentive program. That was really a good help,” Béchard says, translated by Levesque from French to English.

For the installation, BSB swapped out one of the three oil boilers with the Herz wood pellet boiler system, keeping the other two oil boilers in place or in case they are needed for a higher peak load. The church had large enough access doors to its basement that the wood pellet boiler could be installed without any issues. A pellet silo was then added next to the church (BSB was able to repurpose a silo from a previous customer to lower the overall costs). All-in-all, it was a fairly standard installation with no significant hurdles to overcome. Since the system started up, the church has received positive feedback from the community for it having a lower operating cost, a more sustainable option over oil, and supporting a local business. All of the wood pellets supplied to the church come from Groupe Savoie’s wood pellet plant in Saint-Quentin, N.B., which is a 15-minute drive from the church.

“The only negative thing is you have to empty the ash bin, that’s it,” Levesque says.

Priest Felix Hatungimana and church board member Edgar Béchard stand outside Paroisse Notre-Dame-des-Prodiges, a multi-purpose facility and Catholic church located in Kedgwick, N.B. High energy costs almost forced the church to close its doors.

Priest Felix Hatungimana and church board member Edgar Béchard pose next to the church’s new Herz Firematic 150kW biomass boiler supplied by BSB. Swapping out its primary oil heat system for a wood pellet boiler system allowed the church to significantly lower its energy costs.Photos courtesy of BSB.