WPAC Report Report on Central European Biomass Conference By Gord Murray, WPAC executive director T he Government of Canada and the Wood Pellet Association of Canada (WPAC) jointly sponsored the Central European Biomass Conference (CEBC), which took place in Graz, Austria from Jan. 18 to 20, 2017. One of our ongoing objectives is to position Canada as a reliable source of high-quality, sustainably produced wood pellets and the CEBC presented a good opportunity to do this. It is essential to continually reinforce to our European customers that our raw material comes from the most sustainably managed forests in the world. In his opening remarks at the conference, Mark Bailey, ambassador of Canada to Austria, described Canada’s commitment to forest management and the government’s support of the wood pellet sector. David Patterson, on behalf of the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers (CCFM), also gave a presentation, as did I. My presentation focused on Canada’s wood pellet sector, while David’s pre-sentation described Canada’s forests, our country’s forest management regulatory framework, and Canada’s rank as the No. 1 country in terms of third party certified forests. With 166 million hectares of cer-tified forests, Canada’s total is nearly four times that of second place United States at just 47 million hectares. The CEBC is held every three years, attracting more than 1,100 participants from all over the world. There is a home building fair attached to the conference, which showcased the latest in biomass boiler technology. The fair attracted 40,000 visitors. Austria is a leading bioenergy user with 17 per cent of its total energy and 57 per cent of its The Government of Canada and WPAC recently jointly sponsored the Central European Biomass Conference. renewable energies being created with biomass. In addition to attending the confer-ence and hosting our exhibition booth, together with Canadian Trade Commis-sioner Nicole Mothes we met with sev-eral companies – including numerous pellet boiler manufacturers – who are interested in co-operating with WPAC and in doing business in Canada. These included Bioenergy 2020+ GmbH, Die Österreichische Forschungsförderungs-gesellschaft (FFG), ETA Heiztechnik GmbH, Kraft & Wärme aus Biomasse GmbH (KWB), Fröling Heizkessel-und Behälterbau GmbH, Hargassner GmbH, HERZ Energietechnik GmbH, H. Stock-er GmbH, Schmid Energy Solutions, and WVT Breiding GmbH. As a result of our meetings, WPAC is co-operating with Bioenergy 2020+ GmbH. This federally funded Austrian company is engaged in applied bioenergy research including wood pellet combus-tion. We are trying to put together a joint project with two objectives: (1) to con-vince Canada’s provincial boiler safety au-thorities to accept the Austrian biomass boiler standard EN 303-5 so as to facil-itate the import of Austria pellet boilers to Canada; and (2) to establish a biomass boiler education and demonstration centre, likely in Eastern Canada. If successful, Austrian boiler manu-facturers will benefit by increasing their exports to Canada and potentially by es-tablishing Canadian manufacturing. Canadian wood pellet producers will benefit from increased pellet demand as more boiler systems are installed in Canada. During the CEBC, a full day was de-voted to the European pellet sector. This included presentations from Austria, the Baltics, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, MARCH/APRIL 2017 10 Canadian BIOMASS
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