Thank you for the opportunity to talk to the committee.
As the committee is only too aware, for more than a decade it's been obvious that this is a time of radical change in the forest products industry. The effects on companies and workers in the industry, particularly in smaller mill towns across Canada, have been effectively disastrous. Some of the details are given in a Globe and Mail article from last December, which lists at least a dozen mills that have completely closed. My colleagues here know, as you do, that there are many more. This is pretty gloomy.
However, I'd like to suggest that there really is a silver lining to all of this. In my opinion, in the last decade, perhaps spurred by this disaster, there's been an outburst of creativity encompassing science, technology, and the innovative effort with regard to lignocellulosic materials. It's been supported by universities, companies, and government. So I don't think it's as gloomy as I originally thought when I was trying to write this.
Some examples of the creativity and progress include things my colleagues have already mentioned. There is the biorefinery concept. The craft mill is no longer a craft mill, it's a method for making a range of products from the forest resource in as efficient a manner as possible. I completely agree that the use of wood-based materials and composites, which Mohini mentioned, in the automotive and even aeronautical field, which is our big field, and the use of engineered wood structures in building could be a great market.
Essentially, my interest is in the production and use of nanocellulose-based materials. So I'll spend the rest of my time talking about that. There are two main classes of nanocellulose. The first is cellulose nanocrystals. Really, if you imagine a grain of rice and then shrink it by about a million times and make it out of cellulose, that's cellulose nanocrystal. The other is cellulose nanofibrils, which are really shaped like a strand of spaghetti but are roughly one-millionth of the width of the strand of spaghetti.
Since the early 1990s, NSERC has been supporting our fundamental research on cellulose nanocrystals through the Discovery Grant process. Our problem was that we could make only very small quantities in the lab, and if people want to test applications, they want enough stuff to play with. That was taken care of by a scale-up undertaken by the Pulp and Paper Research lnstitute of Canada, which is now FPInnovations. This led to the formation of CelluForce, a joint venture of FPInnovations and Domtar, which, with government support, established Canada as a leader in nanocellulose production.
I've listed a few Canadian companies that are currently involved with nanocellulose production. CelluForce, of course, is in a mill in Windsor, Quebec. The Domtar mill in Quebec is probably still the world's largest facility capable of making cellulose nanocrystals. Alberta lnnovates Technology Futures can produce nanocrystalline cellulose at a smaller pilot plant facility in Edmonton. Cellulose nanocrystals can also be made by a novel process developed by NRC researchers at a biochemistry laboratory in Montreal; and they were available for awhile from Bio Vision Technology in Nova Scotia. Developmental quantities of cellulose nanocrystals are also available from Blue Goose Biorefineries in Saskatoon. As well, and perhaps most exciting at the moment, a five-tonne-a-day cellulose filament facility was recently dedicated at Kruger paper mill in Trois-Rivières.
In all cases there was provincial and federal government support for these undertakings. Most of this industrial activity can trace its roots back to NSERC support and research. I think combining academic and industrial efforts is the way to go for new materials.
There have been many applications suggested for nanocellulosic materials. A lot of them, as was mentioned originally, tend to be of really high value but really small tonnage. It's not going to make much difference to the forest products industry. However, there are a bunch of larger-scale applications on the horizon.
One of them involves these cellulose nano-filaments, which, although they're a product of the pulp and paper industry and can be made with relatively small modifications of current plant, can be used by the pulp and paper industry to improve the properties of paper and board, especially strength and surface properties. These nanocellulose products have been suggested as additives for oil and gas recovery. It looks like they're going to be good for improving the curing properties of concrete. Applications in reinforcement and barrier properties of packaging could be a huge market for such materials and as reinforcing agents in polymer composites.
There is a lot of competence in that area among the gentleman also here at the table.
But we have to face the fact that it will take much more than nanocellulose itself to replace the lost production currently across the Canadian pulp and paper industry, but at least we can hope that these sustainable, carbon neutral resources and materials will contribute to a whole bunch of new markets for Canada's vast forest resources.
I have no recommendations for the committee, but I'd be happy to answer any questions you can pose on this matter.
Thank you very much for your attention.