Biorefinery strategies: exploring approaches to developing forest-based biorefinery activities in British Columbia and Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT

Forest biorefineries can help revive and diversify a struggling Canadian forest sector while enabling Canada’s transition to an advanced bioeconomy. Two distinct approaches to biorefining – centralised and distributed – are defined and assessed to determine their suitability for application in this sector. A proposed set of critical capacities required for the forest industry to transition to a biorefining business model form the basis of a comparison between the centralised and distributed approach. The potential implementation of each approach in the provinces of British Columbia (BC) and Ontario is assessed based on existing forestry infrastructure and available forest fibre. It is found that biorefinery development is likely to follow a distributed pathway in Ontario. In BC, the distributed model may also be attractive, but two locations are identified where a centralised approach may be successfully implemented.

KEYWORDS:

• Biorefining
• forest
• biotechnology
• emerging technologies
• geography
• qualitative

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from BioFuelNet and NSERC, and thank colleagues for comments and suggestions on this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

M. Jean Blair, MSc. is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University. Her research interests include bioenergy development, sustainability assessments, network analysis, and supply chain design.

Laura Cabral is an undergraduate student of the environmental studies programme at the Université de Sherbrooke. She contributed to this work as part of a research internship in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University. Her research interests include sustainable development, energy use and generation, and geographic information systems.

Warren E. Mabee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University and holds the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Renewable Energy Development and Implementation. His research focuses on the interface between renewable energy policy and technologies, with particular emphasis on wood energy and biofuels.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by BioFuelNet Canada under [grant number WP 9C] and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under [grant number RGPIN/372280-2009].