WPAC Report Today’s wood pellets for tomorrow’s world Let us together grow a resilient wood pellet sector By Gordon Murray Skeena Bioenergy’s wood pellet plant in Terrace, B.C., is an important employer and an integral part of the local forest products industry, using sawmill residues as feedstock. Photo by Nathan Bond, Skeena Bioenergy. espite the record global demand for wood pellets over the past two de-cades, biomass, particularly wood pellets, is in the infancy of its evolution. Both domestically and internationally, biomass’ potential in the transformation to a low-carbon, clean and renewable world is almost limitless. Our vision at the Wood Pellet Associa -tion of Canada (WPAC) is two-fold. First, to grow a resilient pellet sector that creates green, renewable products at the forefront of the global transition to a low carbon economy, and second, to maximize the sec-tor’s innovation in the bioeconomy. In our recent video The Power of Pellets: D Innovation in the Bioeconomy , Fahimeh Yazdan Panah, Ph.D., director of research and technical development at WPAC, ex -plains that the bioeconomy is really the sus-tainable production of renewable resources and the conversion of these materials into higher value products such as food, bioen-ergy and bio-based materials. “Wood pellets offer a world of pos-sibilities not only to meet the targets of greenhouse gas emissions, but also to opening doors to having new and im-proved products. If you look around your home, everything that is made of plastic today could be made from wood and look exactly the same,” says Yazdan Panah. Much of the bioenergy opportunities al-ready realized by the Canadian wood pellet sector have been developed over the last decade, supported with nearly $1.6 million in public funding from Natural Resource Canada and Forestry Innovation Invest-ment’s Expanding Market Opportunities program. This funding, directed through WPAC, enabled our sector to grow mar -kets by 260 per cent and to generate $335 million in new sales, which has been in-vested in new plants, research, technology and people. In sum, we generated $211 for every taxpayer dollar spent to displace fos-sil fuels with responsible, renewable, clean energy in the form of wood pellets. SUMMER 2022 8 Canadian BIOMASS
Canadian Biomass Summer 2022: Page 8
