Thank you for the invitation. I am very pleased to be here.
We have circulated a document with pictures, and since a picture is worth a thousand words, I think it will promote discussion.
I will start by saying who we are, what we are doing, and what is the impact on climate change. You'll see some real examples.
FPInnovations is an organization that was created from the merger of four organizations in 2007. It now represents about 400 to 500 researchers throughout Canada, with headquarters in Montreal and offices in Hinton, Alberta, Quebec City, Thunder Bay, and Vancouver, and 40 industrial advisers throughout Canada. It has a budget of about $75 million to $90 million per year, with one-third from the industry, which has 170 members, one-third from governments—nine provinces, two territories, and the federal government—and one-third from contracts, royalty licensing, and so on and so forth. It is a not-for-profit organization with a public charter.
What I want to introduce to you today is how the forest sector impacts climate change. If you look at slide 4, you will see this: “To mitigate climate change, it is necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and store more carbon.” My objective today is to talk about healthy forests, and a healthy forest sector can do both of these things. We'll give you some examples of both.
If you look at slide 5, you will see that the forest carbon cycle is a natural solution: capturing the carbon dioxide from the tree itself, also capturing manufacturing air emissions, using short- and long-term sequestration in the building itself, and then recycling the use of wood into energy or secondary manufacturing.
In slide 6, we see the opportunities for the forests and forest products in the future. It is very important to realize that FPInnovations does the research on the silviculture, the genomics, the forest operations, and the secondary and tertiary transformation of wood, pulp and paper right up to bioenergy and the bioeconomy.
If you look at some of those projects, you will see that the long-term storage of carbon in wood products, such as wood in buildings and infrastructure. You'll see some examples later of wooden bridges, which are a fantastic new market, and also of mid- and high-rise wood building construction.
We also do quite a bit of research in increased forest protection against fires and pests, such as the mountain pine beetle and spruce budworm, but also, as Bob was saying, we help to transform the present forest sector towards bio-sourced products in creating a biorefinery using biomass to create biofuel, biochemicals, or biomaterials. It is obvious also that the forest sector and the bioeconomy that we're producing for our own research and innovation will provide economic growth and green jobs for both rural and urban communities. We work at both levels.
On slide 7, we have chosen to show three examples of the impacts of the forest sector. Some of them are not foreseen. One of them is in transportation and mobility, and others are in the bioeconomy and buildings. When you look at transportation and mobility on slide 8, what you will see is the development of an electric autonomous shuttle connection with four-season mobility for all mass transit.
We do the study on transportation in the forestry sector. Transport represents 45% of the cost of wood. Then we transfer that to the commercial sector. The first picture on the right-hand side is of the electric interior buses at the Calgary airport, terminal 2. If you go there, you will see those have been produced by the technology of FPInnovations.
If you also look at energy use, which I think is very important and we'll come back to biodiesel, we're really looking at 100% electric or hybrid-electric trailer, winterized, as we understand it. There's also new technology, like platooning, which is in the second picture on the right-hand side, in which you have a three-foot van with only one driver and a 0.6-second space in between. Obviously for northern communities like those in the Plan Nord in Quebec or some in the Tuktoyaktuk-Inuvik area, because there are no drivers, this is a very interesting and very cost-saving measure.
Obviously this is not done totally by FPInnovations. It's a partnership, because we don't do everything, but we make sure that everything gets done. In the case of the transport, we have a partnership with ABB, Ericsson, Motrec, and Technoparc Montréal.
If we look at the bioeconomy, biofuels, and biochemicals, we have a major project in La Tuque, which is north of Trois-Rivières. It is a partnership between the Quebec government, the federal government, the Finnish hydrocarbon industry—which is called Neste—the La Tuque area, and us to produce drop-in biodiesel from residual forest biomass product. The research aspect has three phases. The first one is completed. We're on the technology partnership to eventually produce drop-in biodiesel that would be exported from La Tuque to Trois-Rivières and then to the rest of North America. The total investment when going to the commercial phase would be $1 billion.
Currently, as Bob was saying, replacing some of the natural gas being used with biomass under a pilot project in the pulp and paper plant is also a major research program.
The most fascinating aspect of things is the bioeconomy, from wood chips to bioplastics, as shown on slide 10. We have a pilot plant in Thunder Bay with Résolu where we extract H lignin and a sugar stream, cellulose, C5 and C6. The H lignin is transformed first into carbon biochar, but eventually gets into the animal feedstock. I'd gladly explain why pigs like cellulose, but it is a brand new market and it will help in continuing to produce pulp in Thunder Bay. At the same time, the sugar, C5 and C6, will be shipped to Sarnia to be transformed into biochemicals and different acids. The clients there will be Michelin and Lego, because they like to secure their synthetic rubber.
We have given you some examples. I'll start with the high-rise buildings because they seem to have aroused some interest. In slide 12 you see that we already have major projects in high-rise buildings. We have a 12-storey student housing project in Vancouver, and in Montreal, an eight-storey condominium, an investment of $140 million. Those projects also increase the use of wood in bioproducts such as the bridge you see on the right-hand side, which is 160 metres long and 375 tonnes of charge, which has been constructed in the Chibougamau area for the Stornoway mine. Those are examples of what the forest sector is doing in zone transformation, its contribution to climate change, clean tech, and the future of Canada.
Thank you.