A $40-million federal investment will enable one of Canada’s largest, modern kraft pulp mills to generate renewable energy from forest biomass. The Zellstoff Celgar Pulp Mill in Castlegar, British Columbia, is the first mill to receive funding under the Pulp and Paper Green Transformation Program for a renewable energy project. Across Canada, 38 pulp and paper mills from 24 companies have generated credits under the $1-billion program based on their 2009 production levels of black liquor used to generate heat and power. Qualified companies are required to submit specific project proposals for their facilities and have until 2012 to apply the credits to environmental improvement projects. The Celgar renewable energy project has three components designed to improve the environmental performance of Celgar Pulp Mill’s existing infrastructure. This investment will allow the mill to take advantage of waste heat, increase the production of steam from wood waste, and increase the capacity to generate bioenergy. The Celgar project will allow the mill to generate enough renewable electricity to meet its own needs and supply some energy to the British Columbia grid by late 2010. Lignol Energy Corporation recently completed important enhancements to its fully integrated industrial-scale biorefinery pilot plant in Burnaby, British Columbia. Following the successful construction of Lignol’s biorefinery pilot plant and the completion of initial production runs in June 2009, Lignol has developed process improvements and evaluated various equipment configurations that will enhance mechanical operability and process efficiency and increase the value of the related high-purity lignin derivatives. Design and procurement of these enhancements commenced in the summer of 2009, installation was completed in late fall 2009, and successful commissioning took place in December 2009. Each of the major unit operations of the pilot plant has been independently operated at the facility under a prescribed number of operating conditions using wood chips. Integrated production runs were expected to commence in February 2010. Through planned production campaigns, Lignol intends to operate the pilot plant under a wide range of operating parameters to process various nonfood feedstocks as the company undertakes final designs for commercial-scale projects. Raven Biofuels Ltd and its joint venture partner, the Kamloops Indian Band, have retained a Canadian forestry consulting firm specializing in resource inventory and analysis to complete a comprehensive fibre study in conjunction with the Tk’emlups Biorefinery Project. The project is a proposed 11-million gallon/year integrated biorefinery to be located near Kamloops, British Columbia. The overall objective is to define the 20-year economic wood fibre feed to the planned Tk’emlups Biorefinery facility. This will involve defining the appropriate fibre attributes, completing a fibre supply overview, determining cost estimates for various fibre sources, identifying various fibre sourcing options, and providing recommendations to secure the required fibre economically. The study will focus on wood fibre economically accessible to Kamloops. This overview will include fibre from the Kamloops Timber Supply Area (TSA), along with the Merritt, Okanagan, Lillooet, and 100 Mile TSAs. Fibre from private land, Indian reserves, tree farm licences, community forests, and woodlots will not be included in this study because of a lack of consistent publicly available data for these land tenures, and fibre in the form of mill residuals is not within the scope of this study. The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) and Dynamotive Energy Systems Corporation are planning a biochar field trial in Ontario. Although intensive study of biochar-rich dark earths in the Amazon has led to a wider idea of biochar’s properties as a soil enhancer, it is unknown whether there are similar effects on productivity in temperate region soils. As a start to answering this question, a field plot has been established on a farm near Shakespeare, Ontario. The local farmer supplied the test field plot, biochar application support, and GPS mapping. Dynamotive supplies biochar, which is made during its fast pyrolysis process. Staff from OMAFRA will be assisting in the monitoring and interpretation of data from the plot. Large enough strips to accommodate conventional harvesting equipment have been laid out in the field, alternate strips have received biochar application, and the entire plot will be monitored over the next growing season to determine if there are any differences in the growth or yield of the grain corn crop that will be planted in the field. Pacific Bioenergy Corporation and GDF Suez are partnering to support a $24-million expansion of Pacific Bioenergy’s wood pellet production facilities in Prince George, British Columbia. Pacific Bioenergy and global energy producer GDF Suez have formed a new joint venture to own and operate the Prince George plant. In addition to its minority interest in the joint venture, GDF Suez has agreed to purchase 2.5 million tonnes of wood pellets for its electrical generating facilities in Belgium over the next 10 years. The expansion project, expected to be complete in the fall of 2010, will see annual wood pellet production at the Prince George plant double to 350,000 tonnes. New state-ofthe- art emission control equipment will be installed, improving the air quality in and around Prince George. The expanded plant will use more mountain pine beetle killed wood and other waste wood from the forests surrounding Prince George. “Our use of carbon-neutral wood pellets from British Columbia allows us to lower our carbon dioxide emissions at our electrical generating plants and to achieve the goals concerning renewable energy set out by the European Union,” says Dirk Beeuwsaert, executive vice-president in charge of energy Europe & international for GDF Suez. “This new partnership assures that we will receive significant quantities of carbonneutral wood pellets during the next decade and will support our position as a world leader in large-scale biomass generation.”