Biomass and our Forests

From the Chronicle Herald

Just how much clearcutting will be needed?

By ROGER TAYLOR Business Columnist
Wed. Dec 23 - 5:54 AM
ENVIRONMENTALISTS say they have come up with a simple way to demonstrate just how much of Nova Scotia’s forests would need to be clearcut if the province is to generate 150 megawatts of electricity from biomass each year.

But the image they use is more than a little provocative.

Jamie Simpson, the forestry program co-ordinator from the Ecology Action Centre in Hali­fax, called me Tuesday to say that he and his colleague, Ker­mit deGooyer, the group’s wil­derness and public land con­servation planner, estimate that burning biomass to gener­ate 150 megawatts of electricity would be equivalent to clear­cutting Kejimkujik National Park once every four years.

Just to be clear, no one has ever suggested trees would be harvested in Kejimkujik for biomass power generation. It wasn’t by accident, however, that they chose Kejimkujik, one of the most popular and beloved wilderness parks in Atlantic Canada, to help il­lustrate just how much area they believe would be affected by clearcutting.

I have to admit I’m not sure the comparison is an accurate one.

Kejimkujik National Park covers about 400 square kilo­metres, or 40,000 hectares, in an undeveloped area of south­western Nova Scotia between Liverpool and Annapolis Roy­al. But no matter what, the desire to generate electricity from renewable energy in the coming years is going to in­crease the amount of cutting in Nova Scotia’s forests.

David Wheeler, the soon-to-be former dean of the faculty of management at Dalhousie University in Halifax and lead­er of a team of consultants asked by government to make recommendations on renew­able energy, has said that burn­ing biomass will help the prov­ince achieve its goal of produc­ing 25 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy gener­ation by 2015.

Wheeler said that he believes Nova Scotia’s forests could be sustainably used to provide biomass for electricity generation and, even though that would likely mean clear­cutting, he believes the govern­ment could establish stringent regulations for clearcutting so that it would not devastate the province’s forests.

Papermaker NewPage Port Hawkesbury Ltd. has already announced a desire to build a $100-million, 60-megawatt bio­mass furnace at its mill in Point Tupper, Richmond County. The biomass generator would put renewable energy on the provincial energy grid and the waste steam produced would be used in the paper­making process.

The total amount of biomass contemplated for the Point Tupper project is about 650,000 tonnes annually. Of that, New­Page is already producing 225,000 tonnes of wood waste from the logs it takes into its paper mill. The Ligni Bel saw­mill in Scotsburn, Pictou County, is expected to provide another 70,000 tonnes of wood waste.

If it isn’t allowed to burn forest biomass, NewPage warns that it will be forced to burn oil.

At the same time, Wheeler has endorsed a Nova Scotia Power Inc. plan to mix biomass with coal and burn it in its coal-fired generators as an interim step toward increasing the amount of renewable ener­gy generated in the province.

But that has its critics, too.

Luciano Lisi, a renewable energ y proponent with Cape Breton Explorations Ltd. in Syd­ney who supports biomass energy production, said his biggest beef with the Wheeler report was the preliminary recommendation on the mix­ing of coal and wood waste.

There is no other jurisdic­tion in the world where the practice of mixing biomass with coal is considered renew­able energy, he said.

“You cannot make a dirty product (coal) clean and green by adding a little bit of some­thing else. You cannot. It’s as simple as that."

So it’s not only the fight over using our forests to provide biomass for power generation, it is also going to be a dispute over mixing biomass with coal. There are no easy decisions for government on this issue.

(rtaylor@herald.ca)