Turning waste wood into clean, renewable energy
One of the largest opportunities for our forest industry is to develop BC’s unlimited potential in bioenergy. We can use waste wood that has been left on the forest floor, and trees ravaged by the mountain pine beetle, to generate new clean electricity that can create new jobs and opportunities for families in forest-dependent communities. That’s what our new $35-million Bioenergy Strategy is all about. Check out: www.energyplan.gov.bc.ca/bioenergy
We can also use that fibre to create new low-carbon cellulosic ethanol that offers about four times more net energy than other biofuels. We can use it to produce biodiesel fuel. Wood pellet production is one of the fastest growing value-added export opportunities. It dries and compresses waste wood into pellets that can be used as fuel in new clean-burning pellet stoves that produce virtually no smoke. It has great potential to maximize the economic value of our forests.
A BC Liberal Government will continue to aggressively pursue these opportunities for clean energy through new tenures that provide new access to waste wood and to stable fibre supplies for bioenergy. It will build on BC Hydro’s recent bioenergy and clean energy power calls, with new measures to make these clean forms of energy more economically viable.
The export of raw logs is only allowed if they are deemed to be surplus to domestic needs. The best way to reduce even the current amount is to create more domestic demand for those logs. We will create that demand by expanding value-added growth in manufacturing and engineered wood products. Our goal is to generate more economic value per hectare of forest-land than any other jurisdiction on Earth, by 2020.
A new Value for Wood Secretariat will be created to provide a one stop access to government agencies aimed at expanding and expediting investments in value-added growth. To help meet that end, we will also establish a new Commercial Forest Reserve that ensures harvested lands continue to be protected as a forest asset.
We will work with First Nations and communities to give them more access to fibre that they can depend upon for value-added growth. We will work to stimulate innovation and commercialization and to promote wood education and culture. We will facilitate the “right fibre to the right process,” to make better use of small dimension timber, different species, and grades of fibre. Our vision is to eliminate waste and to leave no part of the tree unused. To that end, we will also introduce new “lump sum” sales, where licensees can buy an area of timber instead of only paying for the trees they harvest.
