Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you talking specifically about wood pellets being carbon neutral?

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  No, we would say that, as a fuel, if you're trying to count what your emissions are, if you're burning pellets, you would basically count that as not an emission.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In theory you could. You need a regulatory system that's going to make sure the checks and balances are there to be allowed to trade that emission. In Canada, there's no such system. So it would be very difficult or impossible to sell it right now. However, we do buy carbon offsets or credits for our own operations.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The farthest is Prince George, surprisingly. Most of it comes from La Crête, which is in northern Alberta, but we also get some from Prince George.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, the closer you can get them from, the better. Right now, most of the production in Canada is being shipped to Europe. They're putting it on ships through B.C. and the Panama Canal and shipping it to Sweden and Belgium and places like that. They're running them into the power plants.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  No, it doesn't. It takes approximately twice as many vehicles to move the pellets as it does to move the oil, but the net impact is that technically it's 98% carbon neutral. It's something like that. The transportation isn't too bad, unless you start transporting it right across the country or something like that, but then you lose your economics.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'd have to give pretty rough numbers, but I'd say we're bringing in, roughly, five trucks a month.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's something that's happening both in the private sector and in the government. The territorial government has a strategy to try to use more biomass.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Right now I would guess we have about 10 commercial systems running.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Because we're far away from the source of the biomass, we have to use pelletized wood chips, so they're compressed into pellets and then shipped with grain-haul trucks.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It is not. It should be, but right now all the pellets are coming in by grain truck and the storage on-site is enough to hold a whole grain truck. You may see this later on. Each site has a big grain silo that holds the pellets in it. There's a bit of an issue there. When the ice is out on the Mackenzie River, as it is right now, you can't get in a grain truck so you can't resupply, so they bring in enough to last.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It would be similar to the infrastructure that exists now for distributing fuel oil. To do it properly you need a farm with some kind of arrangement of tanks and workers. And you'd find that a tank farm costs a lot of money. It's a good way to develop business, because you have to pay a lot of engineers and a lot of people to develop these very technical pieces of equipment in remote sites, whereas a grain silo can be built for $10,000 instead of $10 million.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's correct, yes.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  My dad was the minister.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thirty years ago, it would have.