Project Profile A Manitoba company gets funding to improve its biomass operations By Taylor Fredericks Grinder Funding Following the announcement of funding for 12 new biomass projects across the province, one Manitoba business is excited by the prospect of future growth. South-East Pallet and Wood Products, a sawmill and pallet company based out of Blumenort (a small town 45 minutes southeast of Winnipeg), was one of the 12 applicants chosen to receive funding from the initiative – a collaborative effort be-tween the federal government and the province’s Manitoba Bio-mass Energy Support Program (MBESP). Jac Siemens, the general manager at South-East, believes the grant will be a valuable step forward for his company, which only recently entered the biomass market after reimagining its production process. “Five years ago we split a logging sawmill operation into a logging company and a pallet company,” Siemens explained, tracing the decisions that led to their entry into biomass supply in March 2015. “Eventually, though, we had to change how we did business. With our sawmill operation, we ran small single-blade mills out in the bush, and I couldn’t find people to operate them anymore. So what we did was build a sawmill on site in Blumenort.” South-East’s move toward a more consolidated process led the company down a new path when, faced with an accumu-lation of byproduct at their new site, it decided to invest in the machinery necessary to make its residuals more valuable. “Instead of the sawdust and the wood slabs and the off-cuts remaining in the bush where we would either sell them off — or burn them off in the winter — we now have all that waste in the yard,” Siemens said. “In order to deal with it, we bought a Rotochopper grinder to make biomass for the winter season and landscape mulch for the summer season.” Already one of the largest pallet manufacturers in the prov-ince, this transition into a new and growing business market proved more challenging than the company had originally One of the challenges to entering the biomass production market is the upfront equipment cost, which the government grant provided funding for. 14 Canadian BIOMASS MARCH/APRIL 2016
Canadian Biomass March April 2016: Page 14
