I’ve been alluding to a BC startup company that has developed a process to convert organic material into bio-fuels. CBC’s The National filmed the story in May and aired the story July 14th, 2008. It’s taken awhile to get the video, convert, and post to YouTube, but here it is.

Two things to note, 1) the 6 second sound bite of fame is about the only part of a 5 min. interview that I said rather reluctantly. It’s corny and somewhat misleading, but I guess it sounds sensational (two guesses on who is BC_EE). And, I feel somewhat vindicated as another member of the renewable energy industry made the same comparison; 2) we know biomass energy is not going to solve our problems of an oil depleted world. It’s just another “silver BB” in the multitude of methods and solutions.

Using biomass sources from many different sources is equal parts environmental clean up, job creation and sustainability, and energy fuel sources. For reasons of confidentiality, I can’t discuss the particulars of some of the feed stocks, but we all know about the massive beetle kill. Harvesting of the dead wood will be done with forestry stewardship as the main principle by leaving enough biomass to supply the forest. Being able to log the beetle kill for a commercial purpose helps the existing forest product industry. From where we stand now, we think we would be highly successful if we were build enough plants to satisfy the provincial and federal mandates for renewable fuel use by 2012. That in itself would require 25 large plants across the country. In reality, I would be happy with providing enough bio-diesel to fuel the BC Ferry fleet, or ensure supply to agriculture and local food production and distribution. I think that ought to be reasonable expectation if we are to use this resource and technology in a sustainable way.

If a woodlot has over 20% beetle kill it is not economically viable for a logging operation to harvest the healthy trees for saw mills. Whereas, if the beetle kill has a commercial use all the timber in the area can be harvested economically. When it comes to carbon capture, we need to keep one fact in mind, (as related to me by a Forester), young trees fix far more carbon than older mature trees. Makes sense, just compare the refrigerator throughput between a family with teenagers and a mature couple.

Working with this startup company, we have at least three projects on the go and significant interest from places as far away as Panama and Sri Lanka. This is an exciting time. We are committed to keeping the engineering and manufacturing here in BC - matter of fact, we don’t see any advantage to locating in less expensive areas because it would be false economy. That is, the advantages of BC’s workforce, climate, infrastructure, and comparatively rosy prospects in an oil constrained world far outweigh the relatively minor savings by locating in a cheap labor market. Furthermore, increasing energy prices are going to do some leveling of the global marketplace to our advantage.

I’ll endeavor to keep VPO posted on the progress of the projects. We’re working on 1/2 of the biomass energy projects under consideration in BC right now.