VANCOUVER – At a pilot plant located on an isolated corner of the University of B.C. campus, researchers are converting trees killed by the mountain pine beetle into high-grade ethanol, a green alternative to gasoline. Four hundred kilometers away, north of Kamloops, waste bark fed into a high-tech burner comes out as synthetic natural gas for heating water and drying veneer at a plywood mill.
And in BC Hydro's Vancouver office, staff are sorting through more than 80 expressions of interest from energy and forest companies. They want to produce power from mountains of wood going to waste alongside British Columbia logging roads.
All over the world, scientists, businesses and governments are looking for ways to produce energy without increasing greenhouse gas emissions that are contributing to global warming.
Governments are already spending billions of dollars on clean coal research, on ramped-up nuclear energy programs, on hydro power, on energy efficiency and power-saving strategies to put the breaks on climate change caused by greenhouse gases.
In British Columbia, there is no more obvious source of green energy than wood.
Radical shifts in thinking about the value of wood are underway that could transform this province's antiquated pulp mills into bio-refineries, producing carbon-neutral fuel and chemicals in the same way that oil refineries break down crude.
This focus on bio-energy and biofuel is one of the first visible responses in the British Columbia economy to something that is becoming increasingly clear: our province is getting warmer and climate models tell us the warming is accelerating.
Bio-refineries and bio-energy can mitigate the impact of future greenhouse gases. But no mitigation strategy can save us from temperature increases already under way. By 2050, Greater Vancouver's average temperature will be where northern California's is today.
"Whether or not you believe in global warming, we cannot afford to take that risk," B.C.'s deputy forests minister Doug Konkin told a recent Vancouver audience.
How the warming will occur shows why smaller organisms will thrive while larger ones will disappear. It's not just warmer summers that will drive the change. Greenhouse gases dampen heat loss, so B.C. will have higher lows in winter, improving the survival rate for insects, fungi and moulds that can attack existing species. Winters will be warmer, wetter and shorter.
Warming will more pronounced in the north and the Interior than on the coast, where warming will lead to increased frequency and severity of storms.
Savings on heating costs will be spent on air conditioning. During summer heat waves, air-conditioned shelters will aid people at risk of heat stroke.
These changes will be the visible signs of the wholesale destruction of existing species and the introduction of new species as the matrix of our biosphere is ripped apart. The Pacific Northwest stands to lose 47 per cent of its plant species, according to a study in the International Journal of Plant Sciences. And nobody can say exactly what will move into those holes in our ecosystem. One thing appears certain: it won't be an orderly transition.
By 2050 ,the equilibrium of ecosystems that have taken millennia to fine-tune will be under attack.
At the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Richard Hebda, curator of botany and Earth history, has created climate change models that are now on display at the museum. They show the province's forests and the species that live in them moving as far as they can up mountainsides and retreating north.
It's not just temperatures that will have changed. The pattern of precipitation will have changed as well. How much falls, when it falls and how quickly it evaporates can make the difference between a cool forest, grassland or arid desert.
Changing patterns of rainfall and snowfall will affect rivers, lakes and groundwater. Communities and farmers will fight over access to water that was once taken for granted.
Hebda refers to 2050 as a time of great ecological flux. We have already entered that period today and by 2050 it will be in full bloom. His modeling shows that by 2080, the changes will be even more dramatic.
"The rate of change is so rapid that no equilibrium will be reached for a century. It will probably take centuries," Hebda said.
The change has begun and Hebda said people need to understand just how dramatic it will be.
"British Columbia is going to be transformed into something very different in geologically very short order within the lifetime of a human. Something will happen that is just not normal," he said. "The question is: What do we do about it? How do we respond?"
The giants of the coastal old-growth rainforest will be among the first to go, Hebda said.
The threat of changes of that magnitude coming at us coupled with this province's forest resource make B.C. uniquely positioned to take a lead in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change has added laser-sharp focus to the search for sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels. Canada represents 10% of all the world's forests, much of that is in B.C., and a lot of it is currently going to waste.
"Some official estimates show that B.C.'s pine forests represent a potential of 95 billion litres of ethanol," said Ross MacLachlan, chief executive officer of Lignol Energy Corp., the company with the ethanol plant at UBC.
Ethanol is usually made from corn and blended with gasoline, a less-than-perfect solution because corn is a food and secondly, the energy output is only one-third more than the energy it takes to make it. Depending on the tree species used, the energy output from wood can be eight times more than the energy it takes to make it.
No matter who develops them, by 2050, industrial-scale ethanol plants are expected to be part of a new generation of pulp mills called bio-refineries, harvesting timber from "fuel wood plantations." The fibre will be converted into a substitute for gasoline and a myriad of other industrial products that today come from oil refineries.
"We are on the cusp of a sea-change," said Graham Kissack, of B.C. pulp and paper company Catalyst Paper. "One can imagine a mill in the future not only making pulp and paper products but fuel products and chemicals like formaldehyde and sorbitol that would have much more value than pulp and paper does today."
Fuel and chemicals wouldn't replace pulp and paper but could double the value stream from wood chips.
In the immediate future, however, instead of wood-based ethanol, bio-energy plants converting the 1.2 billion cubic metres of dead and dying Interior pine into electricity are likely to be the first practical mitigation strategy in B.C. Higher energy prices have opened a business opportunity to convert wood into a renewable alternative to fossil fuels.
That's the green direction the B.C. government has chosen for now.
"We have a whole different shift taking place in the forest sector today," said Forests Minister Rich Coleman. "Our major players in the Interior that have tenure today are looking to do joint-ventures in another line of business. They will have their mills, they will have their pulp and paper and they will have their bio-energy side."