Subcontractor Nortech Logging does some harvesting for Great Western Forestry (GWF). Left to right: Owner Willie Krahn, equipment operator Carl Krahn, and GWF supervisor Brian Porter. area for commercial and residential heat-ing because natural gas is readily available and cheap in comparison.” The company is therefore actively looking for partners to work with to create a plan to ship pellets to British Columbia and/or Asia at a price that’s worthwhile. “Some time ago, we did experimentally transport some chips and had them manu-factured into pellets at a facility in Vancou-ver, then shipped them from the Port of Vancouver to Europe through the Panama Canal,” Dudka explains. “It cost from $64 to $74 per tonne for transportation and $80 per tonne to make the pellets. They won’t pay enough in Europe to cover it.” To proceed with a pellet plant, trans-portation costs must become much lower than manufacturing costs. “We have lots of material here, but there needs to be someone who needs a large amount of bio-mass—not likely in BC—and there needs to be something that happens that would level the energy playing field,” Dudka as-serts. “There are lots of incentives for oil and gas companies to do exploration and development, but these don’t exist for for-estry. What would change things most ef-fectively is a carbon tax.” On the east coast, the company’s pel-let activities are going strong. In Chandler, Quebec, situated on the Gaspé Peninsula, its Atlantic Fibre Resources subsidiary started construction of a pellet and dimen-sional lumber plant in May 2011. “It will be completed by September and will be the largest pellet facility on the east coast,” says Dudka. “It will provide 158 full-time jobs, 250,000 tonnes of pellets, and 6 mil-lion board feet of lumber that meets Eu-ropean standards.” All lumber and pellets from the plant will be shipped to Den-mark, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Fin-land, and probably Germany as well. At-lantic Fibre Resources is also looking into several other projects, with announce-ments expected later in the summer. • firefly EXIMIO Setting new StandardS in Spark detection www.firefly.se 12 Canadian BIOMASS MAY/JUNE 2011
Canadian Biomass May/June 2011: Page 12
