Sunrise Industry | Alberta’s Forest Industry Strives To Become a Bio-Economy

Left for dead by many investors, Canada’s forest industry has one great, green hope for the future – as the source of feedstock for an emerging “bio-economy"

May 1, 2010

by Michael McCullough

While Wolodko searches for uses of sawmill residue, Wade Chute and his bio-processing team at Alberta Innovates focus on byproducts of the pulp and paper industry. These include cellulose that can be gasified or turned into ethanol fuel, lignin residues that can be made into resins or chemical feedstocks, and a variety of organic acids with commercial applications. Says Chute of the forest industry: “A lot of these guys don’t realize they’re sitting on chemical factories.”

Getting greener fits pulp mills’ goal towards efficiency

Cleanup that began in earnest during the ’90s carries on today

Environmental Efforts
Alberta’s pulp mills are making greater efforts in their environmental policies and actions. Millar Western Forest Products Ltd.’s pulp mill is no exception. While the Edmonton-headquartered company has been in operation for just over a century, its 22-year-old Whitecourt mill “in recent years, has been making really special efforts to reduce further its consumption of fossil fuel-based energy, of water and of other inputs,” says Janet Millar, director of corporate communications.

Facts about the Millar Western pulp mill:

Completed a number of projects in the last few years that have reduced electricity consumption by 15 to 20%
Uses a chlorine-free bleached chemi-thermo- mechanical pulp (BCTMP) process
ISO 14001 certified for its environmental management system and ForestCare certified; the wood fibre used in the pulp process is also ISO 4001 certified, as well as Sustainable Forestry Initiative and PEFC Chain of Custody certified

Alberta Pacific Forest Industries Inc. has been a part of ensuring the longevity of the pulping and the forest industry. As with Millar, Al-Pac understands that environmental sustainability is key to keeping the industry productive.

Takes about 1,000 litres per second of water from the Athabasca River, according to alpac.ca. Before being returned, water undergoes an extensive treating process that removes elements that may be harmful to life in the watershed
Became one of the first mills to produce elemental chlorine-free bleached kraft pulp in 1993. Elemental chlorine was commonly used in the pulp bleaching process of most Alberta mills up until 1998.

The true breakthrough in bioplastics may come at the molecular level, though. Researchers at Edmonton’s National Institute for Nanotechnology and elsewhere are looking at nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC), another forest-derived product that has the potential to replace plastic and other petrochemical products including coatings, lubricants, even food and biomedical packaging.

In 1998, Tam Tekle reached a personal and professional crossroads. The wood scientist had spent two decades working in the forest industry, most recently helping Sunpine Forest Products Ltd. build the world’s first mill producing a new microwave pre-heated composite panelboard, known as LVL, in Rocky Mountain House (today owned and operated by West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd.). Even with this success, he concluded he couldn’t change this huge industry from the inside, given its multibillion-dollar investments in the status quo.

Tekle (pronounced teck-lay) felt the forest industry needed a shift in mindset. As its name suggests, Sunpine was narrowly focused >
on the raw material – trees – and not mindful enough on finished products and customers. He founded a consulting and product development laboratory in Edmonton called Tekle Technical Services Inc. (TTS) with a vision as a fibre products industry dedicated to making things people actually use, from tree and agricultural (flax, hemp, cereals) fibre.

Moreover, he felt the industry should stop thinking about being a supplier of two-by-fours and oriented strandboard and move up the value chain to build the entire wall, which is what the end customer – the homebuyer – really needs. “We are essentially home builders,” he says of the forest industry. “If you look at residential construction… the bulk of what goes into a home, you can trace it back to wood.” And if it’s not wood now (fibreglass insulation, vinyl siding or asphalt shingles, for example), it easily could be. “If we think we’re home builders, we can replace everything with natural fibres, at least theoretically.”

By 2007, TTS had expertise in five families of products using natural fibre materials: fibre panels, fibre-reinforced cement, structural insulated panels (SIP), engineered fibre mats (a lightweight, molded filler material similar to polypropylene) and fibre-plastic composites. Following a strategic review, the company decided to move from contract research on these materials to their production in pilot plants. TTS today produces SIPs – think of a wall panel and insulation all in one – at its Edmonton facility. To convince skeptical builders to buy more of them, it is building a solar-powered model home in Drayton Valley using the panels.

Next up are the fibre mats, for which TTS is building a plant in Drayton Valley’s Bio Mile that Tekle hopes to open this fall. The foam mats that the plant is expected to produce out of both wood and crop fibre can be used, for example, in car doors by auto manufacturers, in building insulation or in replacing biodegradable plastics to help stabilize land disturbed by mining or road construction.

The final opportunity for forestry in the bio-economy requires seeing beyond forest products for the trees. Without harvesting, forests provide a service that is increasingly being monetized: carbon capture. Living trees produce oxygen and capture carbon dioxide, essential to reversing generations of rising atmospheric carbon emissions.

Alberta forest companies are working with Climate Change Central, a not-for-profit agency supported by the Alberta government and the oil and gas industry, to come up with protocols for “aforestation,” the practice of increasing carbon uptake by forests. That might include planting trees on lands that currently do not support carbon-thirsty forests, such as marginal farm lands and decadent stands on Crown land. Another opportunity is fertilizing healthy working forests to speed up tree growth (and therefore carbon absorption) in return for more carbon offset credits, explains Canfor’s Stephenson. “If we’re able to do that, the additional annual allowable cut is to our benefit.”

Alberta’s forest industry may be ahead of other provinces at exploiting the bio-economy because the province has a market for carbon, Stephenson adds. “It is creating a real market economy around this business.”

Here again, though, the new bio-economy is not so much a replacement for the old lumber- and paper-based economy but a complementary, revenue-enhancing addition. “I don’t think it will ever take the place of traditional forest products. I think that what we are seeing is an evolution of the forest industry,” says Drayton Valley Mayor Hamdon. “There’s so much of the tree right now that is wasted. There’s so much that can and should be used.”

As a point of comparison, TTS’s fibre mat factory in Drayton Valley, if and when it starts operating, will employ 15 to 20 people, not the hundreds that work in the neighbouring sawmill. “You can build very small operations that build high value and make an economic return for the industry. But we’re not talking about the 4,500 tonnes a day of wood coming into a mill. We’re talking 400 or 500 tonnes a day, and that would be a big one,” says Alberta Innovates’ Chute. “We have an absolutely enormous industry. Sixteen million tonnes of market pulp get exported from Canada each year. That’s the equivalent of 30 million tonnes of trees.”

In other words, the new uses for wood fibre aren’t going to replace existing lumber and paper production, one-for-one, in either volume or revenue in the foreseeable future. But they can augment and diversify forest companies’ sources of income and help restore a positive bottom line. “There are a lot of high-value opportunities that present themselves to the industry, ones that are going to make companies a lot of money, but they are not going to translate back to the same level of forest harvesting,” says Chute. In fact, the bio sector relies on a functioning pulp and lumber sector every bit as much as the traditional industry needs new sources of revenue. “You need the lumber in order to make things economical.”

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