Canadian Biomass • Spring 2025 • Weathering the storms

Anyone who has ever experienced a hurricane, knows of the destruction they leave behind in their paths. The residents of Halifax are no strangers to dealing with the aftermath of these powerful storms. One resident, Joe Lewis, president of BioBurn Pros Inc., used his experience with a recent hurricane to build a new business that is taking off across Nova Scotia.

“BioBurn was very much born from a hurricane,” he says. “Just about every year in September, October – sometimes as early as August – we get hit with some significant hurricanes; and there’s always some down trees and old growth falling.”

A few years ago, Lewis was using his background in excavation and groundwork to clear some land and build a road for a client. While he was in the process of moving out all of the stumpage and other unmarketable waste wood, Hurricane Fiona hit the province.

“We found ourselves running around the city cleaning up hurricane downfall for people, and we started running all the waste to these municipal drop centres that they opened up for the emergency processing of all the storm debris,” Lewis recalls. “The municipalities were taking on a lot of the cost of the cleanup from this type of event. That same year, we got hit with some of the worst forest fires that ever happened here on record.”

As the waste piled up at municipal drop centres, Lewis and his colleagues started asking themselves if there was a more effective way to remove all the unmarketable wood waste, as well as find a better solution than having it be left to rot in a landfill. While searching for solutions, Lewis came across the Air Burners website and started researching the company’s air curtain burners technology.

“I reached out to Air Burners and said, ‘I think there might be an application for your technology in Atlantic Canada doing storm remediation,’ so we started talking to them,” Lewis recalls.

From there, he reached out to the Province of Nova Scotia to learn how much money was being spent on hurricane and wildfire remediation. This is when Lewis realized there was a business case for bringing the Air Burners technology to Atlantic Canada to use at municipal drop sites to process the storm debris and other waste wood.

In August 2023, Lewis started up BioBurn Pros and purchased his first Air Burner technology, a FireBox S223. The principal purpose of the air curtain technology inside these units is for use as a pollution control device for open burning. They reduce the particulate matter, or smoke, which results from burning clean wood waste. The air curtain technology traps the smoke particles and reburns them, reducing them to an acceptable limit per U.S. EPA guidelines. The machines have been tested by the U.S. EPA, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Armed Forces to prove their specifications and performance. The FireBox S223 is the company’s largest unit that can be built for over-the-road travel without oversize load permits.

Lewis’ company started out in larger industrial-type settings, performing larger burns for municipalities.

“The last couple of years we’ve been really busy out there talking to municipal and provincial governments, talking about wood waste diversion programs to get this stuff away from landfills,” he says. “We’ve been seeing the most success for our contracts in the landfill waste diversion side of things.”

While Lewis admits there are lots of great things going on with biomass, sometimes it’s simply unmarketable.

“We did a little bit of investigating, driving around the province and looking at some of the disposal sites. We were seeing fields of mushy, old, rotten storm and wood debris that was just sitting there doing nothing but rotting away,” he says. “There’s a lot of good going on with biomass, but sometimes the biomass is just waste and has nowhere to go. So, elimination is the best solution to prevent further emissions, and processing costs. So, that’s where we landed with the business in the past two years.”

While BioBurn Pros has been busy servicing municipalities’ storm debris, Lewis has learned that the Air Burners technology also has other forestry applications and has been active performing forest thinnings and land clearing projects.

“We learned the benefits of using it for wildfire cleanups or even wildfire mitigation projects for preventative work,” Lewis says.

BioBurn Pros has met with a few different municipal emergency preparedness managers to discuss how they can work together, helping them with their wildfire mitigation strategies.

“You’re seeing communities actively invest into wildfire mitigation programs like FireSmart, and doing all the preventative work,” Lewis says. “But there’s a huge expense to those residuals… the conversations we’ve had with these municipal managers is that we can open these programs and open up central dump locations for the residents and the businesses to bring all this stuff.”

The company is still in the early stages of discussions with municipalities for work related to fire mitigation strategies, but there is interest from communities. BioBurn Pros recently met with the Town of Truro to offer a demo of their Air Burners technology.

“They said, ‘We love the idea, but we’re scared about the smoke or the idea of fire,’ for where they have all this stuff stored. It’s close to a provincial park and it’s close to communities. So, we said, ‘Okay, if you’re worried about it, how about we do a demo day for you?’ So, we went out there and we found a wood lot, and we burned for four days straight out there. They brought out all the municipal department of natural resources people; the fire marshals were out; the wildfire mitigation officers were out; and they all loved it,” Lewis says.

He adds that his business will benefit the forestry industry and surrounding communities by reducing fees related to hauling wood waste, and lowering CO2 emissions.

“It’s going to benefit not only residents, but it will benefit the forestry industry, all the landscapers and excavating companies doing land clearing. Right now, because we don’t have facilities like this, it’s creating a lot of unregulated and illegal dumping of the products. We’re really trying to help mitigate that,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of people bring up methane off-gassing from rot – the ability to not only provide a carbon neutral process for eliminating the wood waste, but something that avoids the methane. So, there’s some methane diversion discussions going on as well.”

The company now has additional demonstrations scheduled with municipalities booked between all the way into September.

The company recently purchased a second Air Burners unit, a BurnBoss, to service smaller projects.

“We were having a tough time engaging with small residential agriculture and forestry. Those markets, they love the technology, but the budgets for this type of thing are sometimes thin in those industries. So, we decided to go buy another Air Burner so we can engage more with those markets,” Lewis says.