Good afternoon, members of Parliament and everybody in the audience. It is a pleasure to be here, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts on the challenges and opportunities for the biofuel industry in Canada and the life-cycle greenhouse gas—that is GHG—emissions of biofuels.
My name is Amit Kumar. I lead a large research program in energy and environmental systems engineering at the University of Alberta, and I am an energy engineer by training. My comments today will be focused on the use of lignocellulosic biomass for the production of fuels and chemicals and its potential to significantly reduce GHG emissions in Canada. I will also focus my remarks on the potential to integrate our energy industry with the forest industry, the agriculture industry and municipalities. I will also also talk about how this integration provides an opportunity to make significant contributions to Canada's net-zero emission target by 2050.
My research group's work includes assessing the cost and environmental footprints of energy pathways, including bioenergy and biofuel pathways, with a focus on GHG emissions in a product's life cycle, that is the entire chain from biomass production, processing, transportation and conversion to the end use. We also assess optimal locations for biomass and waste conversion and processing facilities, taking into account not only biomass availability but also the available infrastructure and municipal guidelines. We also work in the area of thermo-chemical conversion of biomass—gasification and pyrolysis—to produce liquid fuels.
To look at biomass, biomass feedstocks are generally categorized based on their source, for instance, agricultural biomass, forest biomass and waste biomass. Agricultural biomass includes grains—wheat, barley and canola—straw, corn stover and energy crops. Forest biomass includes whole tree biomass, logging residues, mill residues, trees killed by insects like the mountain pine beetle and hybrid species, for instance, willow and hybrid poplar. Waste biomass includes animal waste like manure and municipal solid waste. All of these are available in large quantities in Canada.
Today, most commercial-scale biofuel production uses grains. The production of bioenergy for heat and power uses mill residues, which are mostly spoken for. In my view, there is a significant opportunity to use lignocellulosic biomass—that is straw, forest biomass and municipal solid waste. In Canada, the potential availability of biomass is large from both agricultural and forest biomass. Using them to produce fuels and chemicals is a key opportunity.
There are several lignocellulosic biomass conversion pathways for the production of fuels and chemicals and these are at various stages of research, development, demonstration and commercialization. These pathways are broadly in the area of thermal conversion, thermo-chemical conversion and biological conversion, and include, for example, combustion, gasification, pyrolysis, hydrolysis and saccharification, and anaerobic digestion to produce biogas.
My research group has evaluated several biomass pathways for the production of fuels and chemicals in terms of their life-cycle GHG emissions and costs over several years. These pathways consider the production of a range of fuels and chemicals such as renewable diesel, bioethanol, biohydrogen, bio-oil, biochar, biopower and others.
The life-cycle GHG emissions of bioenergy and biofuels vary with the jurisdiction where they are produced, as the inputs in each jurisdiction have different GHG footprints. In addition, the potential GHG mitigation benefits from bioenergy, biofuels or bioproducts depend on the application and their intended use.
For example, in Alberta, replacing fossil diesel with renewable diesel helps reduce the GHG footprint by 50% to 60% per unit of energy. Replacing fossil fuel-based power, for example, can mitigate GHGs by 80% to 90% compared with fossil fuels. The location of the plant is a critical aspect of the biomass life cycle.
Some key challenges the industry faces are the security of long-term biomass supply, scaling up, a uniform regulatory framework that incentivizes the development of bioenergy and biofuel, and the export demand for raw biomass feedstock from outside.
The scale of processing is critical as the cost to produce biomass-based fuels and chemicals—that is, dollar per litre of ethanol, dollar per tonne of renewable chemicals and dollar per megajoule of renewable gas—decreases as the plant size increases. There is a size for field or forest-based biomass at which the cost of production is lowest. This size we refer to as the economic optimum size. Most of our facilities are below optimum because of the challenges I mentioned earlier.