Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

We propose to develop a cost-effective industrial-scale ash residual amendment and evaluate its environmental impact on agricultural soils. Combination of wood chips, bark and wood fiber, commonly known as Hog fuel, is burned in biomass-fired power plants to generate electricity and process steam. The by-product ash residuals that are produced, are traditionally stored in an onsite landfill or transported to a permanent landfill at a significant cost to the company. However, utilization of the ash as a fertilizer would provide significant amounts of plant useable nutrients to agricultural lands and prevent a nutrient rich by-product from being stored in a landfill. A partnership between Louisiana-Pacific Canada Ltd., KRL Solutions Ltd. and researchers at Thompson Rivers University has been established to develop a large scale, environmentally friendly, chemical amendment of the ash residuals. Following this amendment, the ash residuals will be applied to agricultural fields on an industry relevant scale and nutrient and heavy metal content will be monitored by soil sampling, crop health/vegetative stress determination by way of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) based sensors and forage analysis of the resulting vegetation. The correlation that we establish between soil nutrient content of agricultural fields modified by an industrial by-product and UAS based crop health monitoring will lead to the development of a novel method of assessing the environmental impact of by-product reuse in an industrial setting. Louisiana-Pacific Canada Ltd. will have a new environmentally and economically friendly use for the ash residuals that it produces, thus reducing the amount of ash stored in landfills. KRL Solutions Ltd. will incorporate this new agronomically and environmentally sound application methodology into their current business model in order to provide this service to similar biomass-fueled power plants throughout the country. Adaption of the technology generated from this project would reduce fertilizer costs for agricultural producers, significantly decrease the amount of ash residuals that end up in landfills and provide a novel, UAS based methodology for assessing the environmental impact of by-product distribution on agricultural lands.