Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Transformation to the forest biorefinery could represent an important opportunity for the Canadian forestry industry to revitalize and strengthen its long-term competitive position. At the same time, the forest biorefinery could be an important environmental opportunity for Canada, especially from the perspective of reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, it is not obvious which biorefinery strategies are the most economic for forestry companies to implement, nor which provide the largest GHG reductions. Certainly the impact of government policy should be to influence the selection of biorefinery options that encourage the implementation of sustainable biorefinery opportunities, and specifically, to promote those that are environmentally preferable. The goal of this proposal is to develop systematic methodologies that quantify these important issues. Techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment (LCA) will be used to quantify the sustainability of several biorefinery implementation strategies, under different energy policy scenarios. A systematic LCA-based methodology will be developed that is suitable for achieving this objective, including consideration of social impacts expected from biorefinery implementation. A set of economic, environmental and social indicators characterizing the sustainability of biorefinery strategies will be developed, and then evaluated for different biorefinery process-product options using the case study context of the two participating industrial partners (Domtar and Norampac). Subsequently, multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) will be used to interpret and weight the various indicators in order to identify the preferred technology/energy policy alternatives in each case study. The results of this research project will benefit the industry collaborators directly, as well as the Canadian forest industry sector at large via the systematic methodologies to be developed. Furthermore, the results of this study should benefit government, and other institutions that are interested in energy policy.