Event Report Atlantic Biorefinery Conference Tours, discussions headline annual conference By Andrew Snook LaForge Bioenvironmental’s 1.6 MWh anaerobic digester operates on a dairy farm with approximately 90 cows, and is fuelled by a combination of cow manure and organic waste from regional food processors converting it to electrical energy, heat and liquid organic fertilizer. T echnology tours were the highlight for many of the 120 people who registered to take part in the first-ever Atlantic Biorefinery Conference, which took place from May 27 to 29 in Edmundston, N.B. Attendees were treated to tours of bi-oproduct producing facilities, including a tour by Groupe Savoie, a major em-ployer in northern New Brunswick. Groupe Savoie employs more than 600 people with the majority of its opera-tions in northern New Brunswick, where it has felling rights over a vast expanse of hardwood forest. The company’s in-dustrial facilities include two sawmills, a pallet plant, a component plant, a pellet plant and dry kilns in Saint-Quentin, N.B.; a component plant and a dry kiln in Kedgwick, N.B.; a pallet production and recycling plant in Moncton, N.B.; and a sawmill in Westville, N.S. The company’s tour consisted of its CHEP pallet manufacturing facility and its pellet plant operations in Saint-Quen-tin, N.B. Groupe Savoie began its pellet pro-duction in 2010, producing 42,000 tonnes of pellets per year, with the majority being shipped to the U.K. for industrial purposes. The company cur-rently produces 70,000 tonnes of pel-lets annually for use domestically and overseas, and plans to produce an ad-ditional 20,000 tonnes, or more, after the plant completes the installation of its new burner. Groupe Savoie recently decided to double its domestic pellet plant produc-tion and offer a fifty-fifty split between domestic pellets for residential use and exported products for industrial appli-cations, and shut down the pellet plant in June so it could install a new burner to reduce a bottleneck in the produc-tion process, according to Jonathan Canadian BIOMASS 27
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