Harvesting Technology

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By Patricia Nicholson

The term bioproducts embraces everything from ethanol to green chemistry technologies to biocomposites. It is an area that John Christensen, manager of BioProducts Alberta (Edmonton, AB), describes as a relatively new field in Canada.

“But as time goes on I think we’ll see this as a significant growth industry,” he adds.

Because of the nature and source of many of the feedstocks — byproducts of the agriculture and forestry industries — much of that growth is expected to affect rural areas.

Keith Jones, president of AVAC Ltd. (Calgary, AB), says that many bioproducts initiatives tend to spill over the borders that separate industries. Growth in this area may depend on new relationships between those sectors.

“We need to think about these opportunities in more broad terms than just what’s good for the forestry industry or what’s good for the agriculture industry, and have to think about it in terms of the bioproducts opportunity which extends across the traditional boundaries between agriculture and forestry, or forestry and energy,” Jones says. “So that’s going to take some new kinds of partnerships and new kinds of thinking about different business models that are out there.”

It is that type of co-operation that Jones currently sees emerging among key industries in Alberta.

“Particularly the agriculture industry and the forestry industry, coming together to look at some opportunities to make better use of waste products and waste streams in their traditional production, and using those waste products and waste streams to create new bioproducts — whether they’re bio-energy products, biomaterials such as composite fibreboard — those sorts of product opportunities,” Jones says. “And what it’s doing is creating some new opportunities, particularly in rural areas, to turn essentially waste streams into both jobs and valuable bioproducts.”

Waste Not

Waste streams include cereal straw, grass or forage straw waste, as well as livestock waste.

“One of the issues with a lot of these biomass waste streams is they’re very bulky, they’re very difficult to transport, and you’re much better able to deal with them or convert them at the source than to collect and transport them any distance,” Jones says. He uses the example of Ottawa, Ont.-based Iogen Corp.’s bioethanol technology. “The proper (site) for those kinds of operations is to establish them in a rural community — close to the source of the straw supply, and close to some of the industry factors you need to get these facilities up and running.”

Technologies for converting cellulose into ethanol, such as that developed by Iogen, open the possibility for building small processing plants close to sources of the feedstock, rather than a single large facility.

“You could build one of a size that would be affordable by, say, a rural municipality,” says Gordon McGregor, senior advisor on Life Sciences for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s International Issues team. “They’ve had a lot of interest, apparently, in that, and this has got a lot of farm groups very interested in the fact that if they could raise enough capital, in theory they could become a player; that they wouldn’t just be delivering their straw or their grain to a processing plant. They might — as a co-operative, say — actually own it.”

McGregor says there are some examples of these new-generation co-operatives in the United States. “It gives them an economic incentive to actually become investors in the value chain rather than just delivering raw material,” he says.

Such plants may not provide large numbers of jobs, but the employment potential, combined with other benefits, can be substantial for small communities.

“Fifteen new jobs in small-town Alberta means a lot,” Christensen says. “There is also the additional revenue stream factor — so the whole farming community that will wind up supplying into that will have another stream of revenue that perhaps it didn’t have before.”

He adds that if there were several of these plants scattered throughout the Prairies to make use of feedstocks in different areas, each might employ 15 to 20 people and buy feedstock from as many as 100 suppliers. That kind of activity, Christensen says, could cause a significant ripple effect in rural economies.

Growth Model

Initially, though, the funding to get such ventures off the ground is likely to come from industry.

“The investment will come primarily from the commercial interests that see an opportunity in the marketplace. So the financial capital to get these things up and running is much more mobile than the biomass is,” Jones says. “What we anticipate seeing is significant investment by energy companies, for example. Significant investment by agricultural and forestry operations that have an interest in these kinds of facilities and these kinds of market opportunities. So we anticipate we’re going to see the lion’s share of investment come from industry directly.” He cites oil companies’ support of Iogen as an example. Iogen has partnerships with Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies and Petro-Canada worth more than $60 million.

A significant waste stream that is of great interest to the livestock industry is animal manure, which can be bioprocessed into energy.

“We can run it through an anaerobic digester and basically create methane, methanol or ultimately electricity. And I think that’s a major coming trend, particularly in Alberta. But it will also apply in Saskatchewan and Manitoba in the hog industry — Alberta more so in the beef industry. They’re all under a lot of pressure to deal with the manure in a different fashion than spreading it out on the land,” Christensen says, noting that the digester technology has already been used in parts of Europe. “We have a number of drivers working this whole anaerobic digester system, and if they can turn it around, put it through this system, create the biogas…then the material that’s left over is basically a dry, composted material which doesn’t carry the odour or phosphorous levels with it, and they can turn and apply that on the land.”

The key impetus behind this scenario is not economic gain through the sale of the bioproducts from the process, but the creation of opportunities for growth within the livestock sector.

“The livestock industry is going to have a lot of difficulty growing in numbers of animals unless it deals with the manure differently,” Christensen says. Although producing electricity from livestock waste is more likely to produce a break-even scenario than to turn a profit, Christensen says some models predict a substantial amount of energy production. “Some of the modelling has been done, and they believe out of some of these large feed lots they can produce enough electricity to light up entire communities.”

Jones uses new approaches to dealing with livestock as an example of how some emerging bioproducts are meshing with regulatory issues.

“What’s interesting is most of the immediate (bioproducts) opportunities…actually support a lot of the new policy and regulatory directions that have been established,” Jones says. “Some of the opportunities in terms of bio-energy and utilizing livestock manure to generate electrical energy as well as fertilizers are very complementary to the new regulatory regime that’s in place for intensive livestock operations.”

Wood Stock

The second major source of biomass feedstock is forestry. Luc Duchesne, PhD, a bioproducts research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service division of Natural Resources Canada, says that from an economic perspective, energy is likely to be the main bioproduct emerging from forestry. But energy and other bioproducts, he adds, will be produced along with existing forestry activities. “It’s in addition to milling operations,” he says. “There is no competition between the traditional logging industry and the bio-energy industry that’s coming in.”

Energy can be produced from mill waste as well as from energy plantations designed to produce biomass.

“More and more we understand that we will have to grow fast-growing species in order to meet energy needs,” Duchesne says. “We want them to be very close to the mills, and we want them to be very fast growing. So we’ll have species that are screened for fast growth, like poplars and willows, and in this country we have a tremendous amount of data on those.”

There are three methods of turning forestry biomass into energy: burning, conversion into oil through pyrolysis, and fermentation processes that produce ethanol. Duchesne points out that burning is inefficient because of the high moisture content in many forms of mill waste. Fermentation and pyrolysis processes are preferable alternatives.

Montreal, Que.-based Tembec Inc. uses fermentation to produce ethanol from some of its waste streams. Tembec is an integrated forest products company that uses several processes to transform waste products from its pulping operations into products that include resins, lignosulfonates and alcohol.

One company that uses pyrolysis — the process of rapidly heating biomass in the absence of oxygen — to produce bio-oil is DynaMotive Energy Systems Corp. (Vancouver, BC). DynaMotive’s BioTherm™ process is a fast pyrolysis technology that converts organic residue such as forestry or agricultural wastes into an environmentally friendly fuel. The company recently announced plans to develop a heat and power project in West Lorne, Ont. in collaboration with Erie Flooring and Wood Products (West Lorne, ON), which will provide wood residue feedstock for the plant, and Magellan Aerospace Corp. and its operating division, Orenda Aerospace Corp. (Mississauga, ON), which will provide generation equipment.

Forest Finds

Forestry-related bioproducts go beyond biomass and fuels. “Down the road there are those commodities you can generate along with trees and within forest stands,” Duchesne says.

The forest, he says, is a source not only of biomass, but also of new, high-value compounds and products.

“Roughly, there are a thousand plants in Canada with medicinal properties, and we haven’t explored most of them,” Duchesne says. “The emerging star right now is paclitaxel.”

Paclitaxel — a compound used in cancer treatments — can be extracted from ground hemlock, a form of yew tree that grows as an understorey in hardwood forests from Manitoba to Newfoundland. It was once considered a weed, but Duchesne says that this form of yew may eventually outweigh the economic output from the hardwoods that surround it.

Another example of pharmaceuticals from the forest is Vancouver, B.C.-based Forbes Medi-Tech Inc.’s cholesterol-lowering food ingredient Reducol™, which is derived from wood-pulping byproducts.

Nutraceuticals are another area in which forestry could play a role. Duchesne cites ginseng as an excellent example.

“Exporting wild ginseng is outlawed because it’s a threatened species,” Duchesne says. “But we can create agri-forestry ecosystems where we cultivate ginseng under maple stands, for example. And so, suddenly our forests can be managed more intensively to generate commodities that go beyond the traditional timber values.”

More traditional forest products, such as blueberries that tend to grow alongside jack pines, he says, also contribute to forest economies. All of these commodities, in addition to logging, provide greater opportunities and greater socioeconomic benefits from the forest.

“It means we can create more jobs. It means we can create economies that are more stable. It also means we can create employment for a broader sector of society,” Duchesne says. “People who cut trees tend to be men between the ages of 20 to 45 or 50. That’s the demographics. However, if we can co-manage things like blueberries and trees, then pickers are not only men, but we can also bring women into the forest. You can bring older people, you can bring younger, so you end up with a greater sector of society.”

Learning Curve

One of the advantages of the bioproducts sector is evident in its name: it revolves around products.

“It’s actually very development-focused rather than research-focused,” Jones says. “Pure science tends to focus on new discoveries, and basic research leads to new knowledge creation.

“One of the trademarks of the bioproducts economy is that while it benefits from new discoveries and basic research, where it really benefits is in applied research and development, where you take some of the emerging science and link that directly to a commercial opportunity with industry partners,” Jones says. “That’s one of the aspects that makes the bioproducts sector so appealing: because you’re actually talking about products, you’re working way downstream in the development end of the innovation chain. And that’s the end where it’s actually easier to get industry to invest. It’s easier to see where the economic development will happen.”

While there are some excellent examples of companies that are commercializing bioproducts, the industry is still in its very early stages, and there is much work to be done.

“We have to achieve cost-effectiveness as well as improving on the functionality of some of the products,” says Ron Kehrig, president of Bio-Products Saskatchewan Inc. (Saskatoon, SK). Kehrig says that while there are already some excellent opportunities in the sector — such as ethanol and other energy-related products as well as lubricants and strawboard — many proposed products and technologies are still in their infancy. “They are going to take investment on the part of industry and public institutions over the next number of years to work on developing new products, new processes, and improving on the cost structure.”

In addition to the time it will take for the industry to evolve and mature, Kehrig also notes that while the sector has great promise, companies and communities working on bioproducts will face the same challenges as other enterprises.

“Like any other business venture, the bioproducts industry takes committed individuals, it takes a good business plan, it takes a good investment and marketing approach. You have to have a good business basis to make it in this industry, like all of the others,” Kehrig says. “It’s just that this industry — being not only environmentally friendly but involving renewable feedstock — is an industry that will be around: it is an industry for the future.”

Fortunately, the emerging bioproducts industry may have a model from which to learn.

“In some ways it’s like the biotech industry 20 years ago: huge opportunity but also a huge set of unknowns to deal with,” Jones says. “The real advantage is the bioproducts economy can learn an awful lot from what the biotechnology industry has learned over the past 20 years. And the learning curve, as a result, for bioproducts will be much shorter.”