When I wrote earlier about Pond Biofuels and its work with St. Marys Cement, I mentioned that Lafarge’s plan to burn biomass fuel in its cement kiln in Bath, Ontario, was on hold because of the financial difficulties of its Kingston-based partner, Performance Plants, which had bioengineered a variety of drought-resistant grass/tree species to grow on marginal farmlands. According to Lafarge, however, the project is continuing on course despite the troubles at Performance Plants. Here’s how Robert Cumming, manager of environmental affairs at Lafarge Canada, explained the situation in a recent e-mail:

Performance Plants is indeed experiencing financing difficulties and they haven’t decided on their next steps yet.  I can only hope that they emerge with a new business plan that would allow their patented plant traits to be applied to purpose grown biofuel crops at some point.  When the time comes that energy crops become widespread, their technologies will be much needed.

However, on a more positive note, their status doesn’t affect the next steps in the project.  We’re still a go for our test at the Bath plant in June.  We have almost 1000 bales stored on our site from the local farm production in 2009 and we also have all of the necessary Ministry permits for the trial.

Also, at the same time we have completed the first year of our 3-year Life Cycle Assessment project with Queens [University]. This LCA is based on real world measurements from our own farm plots on Lafarge land.  Our goal is to confirm preliminary estimates that purpose grown baled crops can produce a 90 per cent NET carbon savings and to learn what would be needed to make that 100 per cent.

For background on what Lafarge is doing, click here. There are many who question the use of biomass as fuel, whether as a feedstock for biofuel or to directly replace the burning of coal and oil. Concerns related to the sustainability of biomass harvesting are real, but not insurmountable. As long as there’s no competition with food crops and as long as the biomass — whether dedicated crops like switchgrass or forest waste — is harvested in a way that doesn’t impact local ecosystems, then biomass can play an important role as we try to lower greenhouse-gas emissions and tackle air/soil/water pollution. No single energy sources is going to do it. We need everything in the toolbox.

Tags: Lafarge, Performance Plants, Pond Biofuels, St. Marys Cement

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 1:02 pm and is filed under biofuels, emissions, Energy-From-Waste (EFW), ontario. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.