Wood residuals could reap rewards for mines.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: THUNDER BAY

Years of discarding his wood chips at a Thunder Bay sawmill and not seeing a dime in return got Vince Rutter thinking.

The founder of Rutter Urban Forestry, a Thunder Bay tree care company, views his segue into a biomass energy company as a viable avenue to make better use of wood residuals.

"When you create as many wood chips we do, you start to think about fuel and how better to use it," said Rutter, a professional forester and a certified arborist.

Through a spinoff company, Biothermic Renewable Energy Systems, he's in the early stages of a proposal to use biomass to heat surface buildings on mine sites.

"I didn't create this because I want somewhere to put the wood chips. I'm an entrepreneur, and when you see an opportunity you go for it."

Biothermic is an Ontario dealer for Froling, an Austrian manufacturer of clean-burning home and commercial-scale wood chip, pellet and firewood combustion boilers. Froling also specializes in fully-automated wood boilers for large buildings and district heating plans.

"I like this because this is a business and market that has a lot of potential for very good growth and makes sense," said Rutter.

He has a verbal agreement with a northwestern Ontario mining company to do a pilot project involving a heating retrofit to a large industrial garage of more than 20,000 square feet.

The biomass-generated heat would serve as a replacement fuel for propane.

An unexpected spike in the price of propane two years ago prompted the miner to look at more stable and secure energy alternatives that are immune to market fluctuations.

The mining company has harvesters on their expansive property, but much of the wood residuals were going up in smoke.

"When you look at the fundamentals," said Rutter, "you have a big mine in the middle of a giant, productive industrial forest that has residual fibre that is wasted. It's burned on the roadside and you're trucking in propane."

His concept would take advantage of excess fibre not being harvested and could conceivably employ First Nations to harvest for a chip-and-burn boiler operation.

"They (the mining company) were spending $200,000 a year on propane every year. With wood chips, they would spend $20,000."

A pre-feasibility study examined the heat demand for the building and the cost comparisons with propane to other fuels.

The next step is a more detailed $30,000 feasibility study, but the money has yet to be scrapped together to do that.

Rutter said a logical extension...