A two-second process has put an Ottawa bio-fuel company on the world stage.
In 1984 Ensyn developed what it called fast pyrolosis. In two seconds it can take any kind of biomass material like wood chips and turn it into black oil. With some additional processing, Randal Goodfellow Ensyn's senior vice president tells me, "you can make gasoline or diesel fuel and you won't be able to tell the difference whether it came from below the ground or from a tree." Last week the company entered a joint project with Alberta's largest sawmill operator to build a $70-million facility that will turn out about 535,000 barrels of oil a year. This will be the eighth commercial facility and the world's largest using Ensyn's technology.
"We normally license our technology but this time we wanted to kick-start this in the forestry industry and we thought it would be best to build something we could show other operators," Goodfellow says.
The plant will be in the far north of Alberta in the small community of High Level where partner Tolko Industries operates a huge sawmill. Operating by 2012, the plant will consume 400 tonnes of biomass every day that's currently burned as waste. The fuel will run generators that produce hydro for the plant and the local community.
Ensyn's technology is already in Alberta: Ivanhoe Energy paid $100 million dollars to license the technology and will use it to process the tar sands.
They hope to have a plant by 2013.
Ensyn's technology was ahead of its time but now "renewable energy has gone mainstream," says Robert Graham, Ensyn's founder and CEO. "Petroleum companies and investment banks are interested and we're well positioned to exploit that." Ensyn has been running a demonstration plant in Renfrew for years. The plant is carbon neutral with no emissions as it draws its energy needs from the process. You can also pull out chemicals for a wide variety of uses, including food flavouring. In one day's operation the Renfrew plant can fill more than a large tanker truck with oil. This homegrown success story has been 25 years in the making.
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