Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for appearing today.
I worked in northern Ontario back in the mid- and late eighties. The Shell Oil Company had two pellet plants that produced wood pellets in the area that I worked in, Iroquois Falls and Hearst, Ontario. I had a wood pellet furnace. It wasn't a furnace; it was a boiler. But I also had a European-style electric boiler. It ended up both were economical, except that the wood pellet required a little more energy to clean out every now and then, so I went with the easy way out, and like electricity, took the path of least resistance.
We're dealing with technology from the mid-eighties, some intellectual property. Have any of you considered going to a company like the Shell Oil Company and asking them for a feasibility study as to how to use your biomass to produce wood pellets? I'm told they only use steam and the natural lignin within the wood. There are no adhesives, so it's very environmentally friendly. I wonder if either of the northern governments have done any exploration on that end, because that company is very familiar with that particular technology.