Hardwood Trees Chipped for Nova Scotia Biomass

- by Roger Tay­lor, Feb­ru­ary 26, 2015, Her­ald Business

Hard­wood trees are being allowed to go up in smoke, and with them a num­ber of rur­al man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs that are hard to replace.

It is easy to reach that con­clu­sion after read­ing sto­ries about sev­er­al com­pa­nies in rur­al Nova Sco­tia that have been mak­ing prod­ucts from hardwood.

Just recent­ly, the inabil­i­ty to access enough local hard­wood was one of the rea­sons giv­en by the own­ers of River’s Bend Wood Prod­ucts Inc. for shut­ting down their floor­ing plant.

The fac­to­ry in rur­al Antigo­nish Coun­ty once employed 17 work­ers, but that num­ber has been slow­ly whit­tled away. Now the remain­ing 11 employ­ees will lose their jobs at the mill.

River’s Bend is not alone. There is recent his­to­ry of oth­er mak­ers of floor­ing prod­ucts in Nova Sco­tia shut­ting down, in part because they could not secure a sup­ply of hardwood.

While there are many rea­sons why com­pa­nies go out of busi­ness, there is no doubt the sup­ply of qual­i­ty feed­stock has been dry­ing up.

One of the the­o­ries is that trees that would nor­mal­ly go into man­u­fac­tur­ing wood floor­ing are being chipped up and hauled to Nova Sco­tia Pow­er Inc.’s bio­mass plant in Point Tupper.

Port Hawkes­bury Paper LP uses soft­wood in its paper­mak­ing process, but the com­pa­ny also has a deal to man­age the sup­ply of fuel for the bio­mass plant.

Some of that fuel comes from wood waste from the paper man­u­fac­tur­ing process, plus many thou­sands of tonnes of wood fibre cut from the for­est, much of which is report­ed to be hardwood.

In defence of that kind of forestry prac­tice, with work­ers employed cut­ting trees for both the paper mill and the bio­mass plant, it has been argued that there are many few­er wood cut­ters in the forests than in the recent past.

And because there are few­er lum­ber­jacks, there is lit­tle time to devote to find­ing the right hard­wood trees for a few man­u­fac­tur­ers that need that kind of product.

It has also been main­tained that weed­ing out the hard­wood and oth­er high-qual­i­ty species desired by the wood man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor is too time consuming.

The prob­lem may be on the demand side. It might be time for the provin­cial gov­ern­ment to take anoth­er look at its rules for bio­mass pow­er gen­er­a­tion, such as eas­ing up on the pres­sure to pro­duce fuel for the bio­mass plant by find­ing oth­er sources.

Some peo­ple still ques­tion whether the use of bio­mass real­ly is envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly because air pol­lu­tion is cre­at­ed by burn­ing the fuel.

The for­est may be a renew­able resource, but unlike soft­wood trees, which grow more quick­ly, hard­wood trees grow slow­ly and take many years before becom­ing mature for harvesting.

Bio­mass is still a big exper­i­ment in Nova Sco­tia. A recent study by the Ener­gy Depart­ment shows the cost of pro­duc­ing bio­mass, “even at com­mer­cial scale,” is rel­a­tive­ly high, rang­ing between 13 cents and 17 cents per kilo­watt hour.

It is entire­ly pos­si­ble that at least one of the bio­mass plants in the province is too large, requir­ing enor­mous amounts of fuel.

Cut­ting trees is an impor­tant source of employ­ment in the province, but if some of that work could be direct­ed toward sup­ply­ing the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, it has the poten­tial to cre­ate and main­tain more diverse employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties in rur­al areas.

And, in the end, isn’t that one of the goals of the Ivany report?