A trio of bioenergy facilities proposed for three north-central B.C. communities are just a few steps away from reaching the construction stage after BC Hydro offered energy purchase agreements for the projects late last week.
Executives and directors at Western BioEnergy Inc., behind a 40-megawatt plant in Fort St. James, and West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd., working on 12-megawatt projects for Fraser Lake and Chetwynd, are now in the process of deciding whether to accept the offers.
Western BioEnergy vice president Fred Scott said it's a matter of making sure the financing is in place. The company also received an offer from Hydro for a 40-megawatt facility in Chetwynd.
"We have our equity already in place and we're working on our debt financing right now, so it's a very high likelihood that they will go ahead," Scott said Monday.
A final decision to sign the agreement will be made within the next three weeks and after that the project remains subject to acquiring an emissions permit and a public consultation process.
But Scott is confident it will clear those hurdles, noting the particulate emission will be less than one per cent of that from a beehive burner or open burning of slash.
Given that there are three beehive burners in Fort St. James, "that's a huge positive impact on the air quality," Scott said.
The plants are designed to incinerate wood waste at high temperatures and power a boiler to produce electricity for the Hydro grid and include electrostatic precipitators.
Scott said the Fort St. James project will require 80 full-time tradespeople to build and 16 people, most of them with steam engineering tickets, to operate.
A further 50 to 60 people will be employed in collection of wood waste from roadside slash piles, which should provide about half the 200,000 tonnes of year the plant would require. Scott said Western BioEnergy, with a budget for wood fibre in excess of $10 million per year, also has agreements in place with three Fort St. James mills to provide the remaining 50 per cent.
"We can't use anything that has a coating or a treatment to it whatsoever," Scott added. "All of our material is limited to and exclusive to residue or fibre from forestry operations."
Western BioEnergy, owned by Dalkia Canada, a Canadian subsidiary of Dalkis International, a Paris-based energy company, is also working towards equity ownership agreements with three area Indian bands, Scott noted.
West Fraser chief financial officer Larry Hughes declined to provide details on that company's projects pending approval of Hydro's offer by the board of directors in the next few weeks.
Hydro said the four projects amount more than $300 million in capital spending, would create 1,500 person years of employment and be in-service by Nov. 1, 2016. Each of Western BioEnergy's projects would produce 289 gigawatt hours per year and West Fraser's would add 88 gigawatt hours annually.
