Image Credit: CFJC Today

By Adam Donnelly

FIBRE UTILIZATION

Skeetchestn Indian Band partners with industry to make better use of slash

Jan 31, 2024 | 6:00 PM

KAMLOOPS — For as long as Mike Anderson can recall, slash burning has been the way you clean up a cut block once all the timber has been harvested.

“I’ve been working for Skeetchestn for about 27 years now,” Anderson recalls. “What we’ve seen for the last 10, 15, 20 years is we’ve seen an awful lot of what was termed ‘waste wood’ go up in smoke.”

As an advisor and negotiator for Skeetchestn Natural Resource Corporation, Anderson saw that a significant amount of usable fibre wasn’t being used, so suggested a way for some industry partners to salvage that fibre.

“We kind of pushed on Kruger and Arrow to figure out what they can do with these waste piles,” Anderson says. “I knew they were looking for wood.”

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Kruger generates power at its Kamloops pulp mill operation by burning biomass, in the form of hog fuel. Historically, this fuel came from sawmills that operated in the region. However, the closure of those sawmills saw the amount of material available drop off. That’s where Arrow Transportation Systems figures in.

‘Kruger needed more fibre,” Greg Kilba, manager of the program with Arrow Transport, explains. “Because of the recent mills being shut down, Kruger needed more fibre to run their [cogeneration] plant. We were able to do that by getting a grinder — two, in fact. We’re actually grinding brush piles and delivering to Kruger, versus burning the piles.”

Funding for the program came from the Forest Enhancement Society of BC and Senior Manager Gord Pratt.

“Our big focus recently has been fibre utilization, increasing the utilization of fibre that’s normally burnt in the bush,” Pratt explains. “We want to ensure the highest value used out of it, but also the value is more than just timber. We have value in the saw log, which is the lumber producer, we have value in the pulp which is produced here in Kamloops, and then the value of energy — electrical energy — is a relatively new one.”

So far, more than 25,000 cubic metres of wood — the equivalent of 450 truckloads — has been ground to provide fuel for the biomass energy plant at the pulp mill. While that material still gets burned, the harm to the environment is much less when that takes place in one of Kruger’s boilers.

“The temperature is very high and the emissions are minimized, so the reduction is significant,” Tom Hoffman, Manager of Fibre for Kruger in Kamloops explains. “It depends on species, moisture content and all of the other above, but the amount of particulate released into the atmosphere through this process is significantly reduced from the way it historically has been done.”

For Anderson, collaborations like this represent economic reconciliation with First Nations communities in the region, who can get a say on how the resources taken off their lands are harvested.

“I see a tremendous role for First Nations in coordinating these kinds of activities within their territory,” Anderson says. “It gives them a management position onto their lands and it resonates with their cultural values.”