When we talk about biomass utilization, we look at forest or field-based biomass. What I mean by forest-based biomass is this: Let's say that you're looking at forest residues. You have these in the forest. You have to bring these to a location to process them and convert them into different fuels. It is similar for straw. You have to bring straw to a centralized location and then convert it into different types of products and fuels.
The challenge is that if you look at biofuels, the cost of producing liquid fuel or gas or any product is directly related to what the area is that you are trying to bring it into, so that the overall cost of production for a smaller size of biomass facility is much higher. If you are using biomass—let's say 100,000 tonnes compared with half a million tonnes—the dollar-per-litre cost of production of fuels or chemicals is much lower for a size that is at a larger scale, such as half a million tonnes.
The optimum is scale. What I mean by that is the maximum size at which the cost of production is minimal. A lot of these facilities that you see today exist on the smaller side, so the cost of production is higher. If you get to an optimum scale, you can bring down the overall cost of production. That potential is there in Canada because you have large amounts of this biomass available. You could build to scale to where you could get the maximum benefit from economies of scale.