Bioheat Profile A win-win scenario New Brunswick church finds financial relief with wood pellets By Andrew Snook F or as long as churches have existed, they have played key roles in their communities across Canada. Paroisse Notre-Dame-des-Prodiges, a multi-pur-pose facility and Catholic church located in Kedgwick, N.B., continues to play this important role to this day including acting as the church, secondhand clothing store, food bank, funeral home, and more. It also supplies heating through a district energy system for its presbytery and the Salle Fatima theatre. But in recent years, the church found itself in a dire financial situation related to spiking energy costs. The spike was so bad, it almost caused the church to perma-nently close its doors, which would have had a major impact on the community. “They used to heat all those build-ings with firewood, but when the person that was supplying the firewood for free passed away, nobody took that over,” ex-plains Jonathan Levesque, general manag-er of Biomass Solution Biomasse (BSB) and board member for the Wood Pellet Association of Canada (WPAC). The church had less people willing to volunteer to feed its big, old firewood boil -er located in the basement of the church, and had to start buying and managing all of its firewood. So, in 2020, the leaders of Paroisse Notre-Dame-des-Prodiges made the decision to swap out the system for three oil-fired boilers. At the time, the price of oil was low, but that changed dra-matically a year later, placing the church in a dire financial position. “In the winter of 2024, there was some stories on the news about how difficult it was for them to raise money to keep heating all those buildings. All the finan -cial cushion they had was almost gone,” Levesque says. Priest Felix Hatungimana and church board member Edgar Béchard stand outside Paroisse Notre-Dame-des-Prodiges, a multi-purpose facility and Catholic church located in Kedgwick, N.B. High energy costs almost forced the church to close its doors. Canadian BIOMASS 19
Canadian Biomass Summer 2025: Page 19
