For up to 50 years, the NorSask sawmill near Meadow Lake has been burning its wood waste, but now the new bioenergy facility aims to create a cleaner and more efficient way of getting rid of the waste without creating carbon emissions. Meadow Lake Tribal Council Vice Chief Richard Derocher said the new facility takes waste materials from the sawmill and turns them into electricity that can be sold back to SaskPower.
“The bioenergy takes waste materials from our sawmill, NorSask Forest Products, that we previously used to burn in a beehive burner, and now we are using those waste materials and burning them up and turning them into energy, into power, and we turn around and sell that power back to SaskPower,” said Derocher.
Wood waste accumulated from the sawmill is now being disposed of in a closed-loop system that can produce heat and energy that allows for the use of 97 percent of the tree. The bioenergy facility also uses air pollution control devices, including an air filter to remove particulate matter and uses extremely high combustion temperatures that break down harmful pollutants into ash that can later be sold to farmers.
“We know we are in the forestry industry, so we looked at covering our footprint in that industry, and the best way we know how is to take the waste material that we have and burn that and turn it into power and create revenue off of that, so that’s one of the biggest pluses to that,” said Derocher. “It’s been around for 10 to 12 years where the Chiefs at that time talked about how we could cover up our footprint a bit in the forestry industry because we want to use every log we take out of the bush; we want to use as much of that log as possible in a good way because, as stewards of the forest, that’s the way we look at it, and we were just burning it up into the air, making carbon emissions and emissions, so the Chiefs at that time said that there’s got to be a way that we utilize this energy to develop something positive, and this is what they came up with at that time.”
The facility is fully operational and produces enough power to run itself as well as approximately 5,000 additional homes.