The most important step, as we proposed today for the budget consultations, is to help the industry by funding activities that will enable it to scale up.
This raises the issue of how to reduce the risks associated with capital investments. As I said earlier, I could conduct a small-scale laboratory experiment in a test tube and it will always work. However, the challenge is to conduct the experiment on a large scale. What are the major risks of scaling up? I must do it to find out.
Before starting a chain on their end to see whether it works, the major chemical companies in this world, such as BASF, Michelin, Dow or DuPont, won't ask me for two grams of a substance for analysis purposes. They'll ask for tonnes. We did this in Thunder Bay when we created the organic TMP process. This process creates a tonne of lignin, sugar and sugar streams with different compositions.
This gives us the opportunity to deal with the major companies in this world and to start technical discussions with them. We show them what we can do with the fibre and how much is needed in order to have a technical discussion at the manufacturing level. We must invest in scaling up so that we can deal with the major players in the sector.