a new boiler,” Gattinger says. The biomass plant now provides heating and hot water to 30 out of 50 buildings on SFU’s campus. The other four boilers are still running on natural gas, but they are only used to help meet heating and hot water demands during the colder months. MEETING EXPECTATIONS COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS The response from the local community and university students has been favourable, despite some initial reservations and mis-understandings about the sustainability of biomass. Overall, SFU expects the biomass plant will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from heating by 80 per cent – the equivalent of emissions from 900 homes each year. According to Waddell, it puts SFU well on its way to achieving the B.C. government’s 2050 greenhouse gas targets. At the time of writing, SFU planned to conduct an analysis of actual performance versus their business case in October, at the one-year mark of the biomass plant’s commissioning, to deter-mine how well it’s working. That said, the Corix biomass plant is running as expected. “Back in February, our natural gas expenditure at SFU’s Burn-aby campus was one-third of what it would have normally been before we had the biomass plant,” Waddell shares. “That indi-cates it was clearly replacing a lot of our former natural gas-gen-erated heat with biomass heat.” “We have been tracking expenditures on a monthly basis to determine if they are in line with what we estimated as well as the levels of carbon emissions we projected to avoid. So far, this has been tracking exceptionally well, aligning closely to what we ai1633019768215_ibce22-RegisterHALF-CaBiomassMag.pdf 1 estimated in our business case,” Gattinger adds. SFU expects the biomass plant will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from heating by 80 per cent -the equivalent of emissions from 900 homes each year. “There’s been some confusion around why we’re burning wood and why that is better than clean burning natural gas,” Gattinger says. “The issue of wood being carbon neutral as op-posed to natural gas is that urban wood waste would otherwise decompose and emit carbon into the atmosphere if not burned. Whereas natural gas left in the ground would not become a greenhouse gas. The biomass facility also has a smoke stack where some smoke and steam can be seen coming out of it, which creat-ed some concern among students. However, the university has helped address those concerns by explaining how the system 9/30/2021 11:36:10 AM works and the regulations around emissions. C M Y CM MY CY CMY K 14 Canadian BIOMASS CB_IBCAtradeshow_Fall21_CSA.indd 1 FALL 2021 2021-10-04 1:51 PM
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