matured and more pellets are exported overseas. “We started using Handysize ocean vessels with around 30,000 tonnes of capacity. Eventually we worked up to Handymax ships carrying around 50,000 tonnes in Vancouver. Now, out of Prince Rupert, they’re shipping in Pana-max carriers, which hold about 80,000 tonnes. And so the bigger the ship, the more fuel efficient it is and the better im-pact it has on the bottom line – both in terms of cost and GHG emissions.” A similar story is being written in Eastern Canada as ports are building the infrastructure to accommodate larger ships for their pellet cargo but the car-bon and fuel efficiency savings poten-tials are even greater. Much of the East-ern pellets are shipped on coaster class ships that can hold a range of between 5,000 to 8,000 tonnes of pellets. “Now that the Port of Quebec City has put in new domes and they’re going to be handling the new Rentech prod-uct, they’re going to be using all Handy-max or even Panamax-sized ships out of there,” explains Murray. Switching from 8,000 to 80,000-tonne capacity will im-prove the carbon footprint substantially. SUSTAINABLE BIOMASS PARTNERSHIP There’s a new initiative in Europe that will make the research on a new pellet mill’s carbon footprint and other sustain-ability measures easier to understand. The Sustainable Biomass Partnership has been formed between six of the larg-er power utilities, both the U.S. and Ca-nadian wood pellet associations and the European Industrial Pellet Association, to come up with a sustainable biomass certification system that incorporates the requirements of all the parties involved. “We’ve got utilities from Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and the U.K. all represented on this and we’re doing our best to incorporate the sustain-ability criteria from all of those coun-tries so that our certification will cover trade into any one of those countries,” explains Murray. “We’ve taken absolute pains to understand what each country is doing and we reflected that in our cer-tification system.” The goal is to develop standards to allow biomass providers with the tools to demonstrate compliance with legal, regulatory and sustainability require-ments for woody biomass. The group is doing this by adopting existing credible systems whenever practical, such as the forest management certification that is already in use in Canada. The move to sustainable power and heat is a groundswell push to healthy air, land and water in Europe. The desire to limit pollution has driven the push from coal and fossil fuels for waste heat, and Canada has been a winner by providing pellets for this burgeoning market over-seas. But as the critical public eye turns from the fumes expelled from the coal burning power plant to the source of the new fuel, pellet producers must be able to stand up to public scrutiny to demon-strate reductions gained in Europe aren’t offset by emissions at the source. • KAHL Wood Pelleting Plants Quality worldwide. AMANDUS KAHL GmbH & Co. KG, SARJ Equipment Corp., Mr. Rick B. MacArthur, 29 Golfview Blvd., Bradford, Ontario L3Z 2A6 Phone: 905-778-0073, Fax: 905-778-9613, [email protected] www.akahl.de Canadian BIOMASS 15
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