“Fibre is not an issue for us here,” Campeau says. “We will be able to get the fibre we need, at the price we need, for the foresee-able future.” With fibre in hand, the next step was to find a suitable partner who knew about making and selling pellets. “We were not comfort-able launching something on this scale with our initial knowledge base,” says Campeau. “We met the players at GF Energy from the Netherlands, who are intimately involved in the bioenergy sector, we went on a few dates, liked what we saw, and eventually got mar-ried,” he concludes with a smile. Out of this, Trebio evolved into a joint ownership model between GF Energy and four partners on the management team: Bonsall in the U.K., Campeau, operations manager Yann Sellin, and Marcel Be-lair. They also arranged some external financing, including some government support, as well as private finance. “That took some time,” Campeau recalls of the $20-million in-vestment. “For the banks, we were still forestry, not energy, and they were not keen to make forestry loans at the time. But we found a bank, got the finances in order, and got started.” First oF its kind The mill itself is a turnkey project from longtime sawmill machinery supplier Comact. The company has built over 100 turnkey sawmills around the world, and was no stranger to the Trebio management team. Thanks in part to some introductions from Yann Sellin, Comact had also started representing the French pellet machinery supplier Promill in North America, and now had the gear and knowledge base to extend that turnkey experience into the pellet sector. Trebio is both Comact’s first turnkey pellet mill, and the first Promill installation in Canada, but the managers were comfortable with the choice. “We had a solid knowledge of Comact from the sawmill side,” explains Sellin, who was intimately involved with the plant design from Day 1. “At the same time, I knew Promill well from touring around pellet mills in France and talking to the owners and manag-ers there about the equipment. This was not a big leap for us.” While Sellin, Comact, and Promill were hammering out the de-sign, Trebio was finalizing the plant location. They settled on an old pulp and paper mill site most recently owned by Smurfit Stone in Portage du Fort, Quebec. Just over the Ottawa River in Quebec, the site is serviced by a direct CN Rail link that can take product out to the St. Lawrence via the port of Trois Rivières. It is also perched on the only bridge across the river between Ot-tawa and Pembroke, allowing sawmillers in the Ottawa Valley easy access to a largely untapped fibre supply. Finally, with the addition of infrastructure like power and water, and a few usable buildings, everything was in place to begin. Construction on the mill started in September 2010, with com-missioning starting in June 2011, basically on time and on budget. FlexiBle inFeed While it started up using over 90% sawmill residuals, the mill is de-signed to handle a mix of roundwood and chips/sawdust. The final fibre mix will likely be 60% roundwood and 40% sawmill residu-als. The mill has hired a local contractor to run a mobile horizontal grinder in the mill yard to convert roundwood to usable fibre, a process that was set to start in late September. Depending on quality, fibre can either go to a Schutte-Buffalo 12 Canadian BIOMASS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011
Canadian Biomass November/December 2011: Page 12
