The film will look at opportunities in biomass supply for power generation. There are many companies that are currently working on ways to use forest biomass to create feedstock for electricity generators. The film will focus on MGM Electric with plans for Atikokan, ON.

OPG has announced plans to shutdown their three coal-fired generation plants by 2014. Two of these plants are located in Northwestern Ontario, one in Atikokan (ATGS) and one in Thunder Bay (TBGS). The other plant is the Nanticoke GS in Haldimand County which OPG eventually wants to convert to biomass as well.

One solution has been the use of wood pellets as a feedstock in these plants. Preliminary tests have been highly successful with little adjustments required to the existing generation facilities. OPG will require 2 million tones of biomass feedstock per year.

Ed Fukushima and his partners are owners in a group of Thunder Bay companies that include MGM Electric, Mahan Electric and Automation Now. They have a separate U.S. business in Park Falls, Wisc., called Renewable Densified Fuels, which makes wood pellets from sawmill residue. They are working on several projects that will create a biomass fuel supply for Northwestern Ontario including the conversion of the former Fibratech mill, an oriented strandboard (OSB) plant, which went into receivership in 2007.

Initially, the pitch by potential biomass feedstock providers involved using waste-wood, like slash and de-barking from the timber and pulp and paper industries. However, the decline of those industries has lowered the supply of such waste and it is unclear even how costly it would be to extract, process and use such waste. Furthermore, research into wood-pelletization has since shifted the focus onto using higher quality roundwood for wood-pellets rather then waste. There is also the question: Is there even enough affordable wood biomass available to fire the 230-megawatt ATGS? OPG has commissioned a study to find out.

This has become a controversial subject as that many believe, including many academics, that this would be a waste of the valuable resources being made available by Ontario’s tenure reform process. This is the same wood-supply that would fuel a recovery of the timber industry and provide the materials for the emerging value-added economy.

However, there is still opportunity in biomass generation, particularly if it is run sustainably and something must be done to address the need for power that these plant closures will create. Furthermore, OPG is using the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) definition for renewable biomass. Burning renewable biomass does produce greenhouse gases, but it is still considered better for the environment than burning coal because of zero upstream carbon emissions and the containment of carbon emissions with a closed-loop carbon cycle.