Natural Resources Committee on Nov. 30th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Kurz.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I apologize for interrupting.

Thank you, Mr. Cannings.

We're now moving into the second round for five minutes each.

Mr. McLean, you're starting us off.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses.

I'm going to be quick today. I'm going to ask a handful of questions here, and I only have five minutes.

My first question is for Madame Rancourt and Monsieur Arsenault of Biomasse Québec.

You talk about the environmental effects of burning biomass versus gas or liquids. My science background indicated that the most residue comes from solid burning as opposed to gases or liquids. I'm wondering how this mitigates the greenhouse gas and other pollution effects associated with hydrocarbons.

[John Arsenault]

There is a difference between solid, liquid and gaseous fuels, but it's at the margin. Coal—solid fossil fuel—has a 94% or 95% carbon content; oil has 90% or 92%, and gas has 85% or 87%. They're still very high-carbon fuels. Yes, there is a small reduction, depending on which fuel you use, but biomass can move all of these energies and reduce greenhouse gases.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Okay. You talked about a 20- to 30-year investment for conversion of systems. Do you recognize that the conversion itself will have massive CO2 emissions associated with the build-out?

[John Arsenault]

Massive is probably not the right term. Yes, there is investment required in equipment and insulations, but a typical home will generate probably 10 tonnes of CO2 emissions, if it's burning fossil fuel, per year. Over 30 years that's 300 tonnes. A conversion, even taking into account the greenhouse gases involved with the equipment, is not close to that range at all.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Okay. Thank you very much. It's much appreciated.

I'm going to move to Mr. Kurz now.

Mr. Kurz, you talked about the issue around slash burning. What percentage of a harvested tree goes towards a final wood product, and what part is actually slashed?

[Dr. Werner Kurz]

When we refer to slash burning, what we're talking about are the branches, the tops and broken pieces of wood that stay behind. I would estimate that, depending on the area in which we harvest, it will be between 5% and 25% of the carbon in the above-ground biomass that is not removed from the site. The remainder goes into the harvested wood product sector, and depending on what we produce from it, we must discount the bark. The carbon in the bark is often used as hog fuel or other energy source.

Depending on the product, 40% to 50% ends up in long-lived wood products and the remainder often goes into pulp or bioenergy.

These are all very round numbers, because it really depends by sector.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Sure. As a range of which ones are going to be used for fuel, in the process of burning the biomass in order to power the operations, what percentage do you think would be in the burn-off versus that which is sequestered in the final product?

[Dr. Werner Kurz]

Again, depending on what the product is, I would say between 30% and 40%, or sometimes 50%, of what is harvested ends up in the final product, remembering that some of these products themselves could be short lived. For example, if the final product is cardboard for packaging, it's still a short-lived product.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Okay. Thank you, Mr. Kurz.

I'm going to move now to ERS.

Mr. Small, thank you very much for your presentation. I really appreciated the detail you gave.

On the 5,000 BTUs versus 12,000 BTUs for other carbon products, I want to hear more about your innovation and what it costs on a user basis to get your product up to the 12,000 BTUs that would normally be part of an earth-produced carbon product.

[John Small]

I'm going to answer you in terms of cost per gigajoule, because that's the worldwide reference. I'm going to answer in two ways.

Our system allows the user to produce our fuel for approximately $60 Canadian a tonne. What that means is that the cost per gigajoule is something like $1.60. If I compare that to gasoline, for example, where it's $28 per gigajoule, you can appreciate that our gas isn't that inexpensive after all.

The magic here is that we found a way to use what we call a binder that is available in every landfill worldwide, and I'm going to use the evil word “plastic”, LLDPE. There are three trillion—that's with a “t”—shopping bags and garbage bags thrown away per year. We found a way to combine LLDPE with biomass, and it can be any type of biomass, and produce a fuel that's 12,000 BTUs. That is—

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Small. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to cut you off and move on.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Thank you.

[John Small]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. McLean.

We'll go to Mr. Sidhu for five minutes.

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all our witnesses, Mr. Small, Dr. Sain, Ms. Rancourt, Mr. Arsenault, Mr. Paradis and Mr. Kurz, for being here.

My question is for Dr. Sain.

I know you're in my neck of the woods. You're close to Vaughan. Your company does interesting work in finding new applications for wood pulp. The funding you received from NRCan, $1.2 million under the investments in forest industry transformation program, is for a scale-up production of a composite material that can be used in auto manufacturing.

Can you share more about how that works? What types of products can you create for cars?

[Dr. Mohini Mohan Sain]

Thank you for having me here.

The way it works is we use wood pulp and forest residue. We have two different processes. One is a chemical pre-treatment and a laminate pre-treatment, depending on the application, which allows us to reduce the amount of energy we need in order for us to produce nanofibres from wood pulp. Normally this is an energy-intensive process because of the pre-treatment it uses.

The second thing is, once you have these, the most challenging area of the technology that we have developed is how to disperse these very small nano-scale fibres, such as recycled polyamides, into recycled plastics material that is coming from some of the disposal sources. Polyamides are a high-temperature polymer for the automotive industry; normally, what will happen is that this kind of material, like biofibre, usually tends to burn. However, because of our pre-treatment process, we found an extraordinary improvement in the heat-resistant property of these nanofibres. Also, our institute's defibration process is a very surplus-energy-based process, which allows it to be dispersed very uniformly in one single state and makes the product a high-performance one, comparable to glass fibres.

That's how this material is being made, and these compounds are now valid to use for applications like EV batteries, battery casings and battery packs.

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Do you have any estimates on how this technology and the products you create can help reduce GHG emissions?

[Dr. Mohini Mohan Sain]

Definitely. There are three aspects.

The first one is that the automotive industry is mostly using metals, and in most cases they are very high-density composites. By doing this, we can reduce the weight of the parts by about 50%. That keeps about 10 metric tons of vehicle parts [Inaudible—Editor] lifetime. If you look at 50,000 vehicles for a single time it will be about 50 times five metric tons, which can give only a single part. We are expecting about 20% replacement in the next seven to eight years' time, so that would be a significant impact for the transportation industry.

The second thing is, because it is replacing fibreglass and plastics, there is an additional greenhouse gas reduction from those particular industries' emissions.

The third important component is that it is storing biofibre in the car and it's recyclable, so therefore we have a carbon storage value as well.

Those are three aspects we can get out of it.

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

That's great to hear.

Following the completion of the new production facilities, what's next for your technology?

Do you see other opportunities to expand?

[Dr. Mohini Mohan Sain]

We are looking at smart material right now.

We have a carbon technology where we are generating our next product, which is a self-generating power-based mask, which means that if you cough, it will turn it automatically to energy and that energy can be transferred and give you sensing. This is a unique product known as a nanogenerator. This kind of product is because the fuel biomass carbon can be transformed in a catalytic way to a nanostarter. We can generate power just from sound or from some sort of vibration.

These are some of the examples.

We are also advancing our technology towards giving applications in the area of smart packaging and also bioprinting. Bioprinting is a scaffold. Nanocellulose and this biomass will be used for in situ scaffolding for remote sensing of our present system.

Those are the three new technologies we are looking forward to.

I think biomanufacturing will be the base and the fundamentals of the next generation of the forest production industry.

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Sidhu. I'll have to stop it there.

Mr. Simard, you have two and a half minutes.