Officials from a company that wants to turn wood into gas stopped in Terrace last week.
CORE BioFuel Inc.’s vice president of corporate development Doug Sheppard and chief financial officers Don Sigler took a tour of the area and met with members of city council May 27.
The company is looking at using heat to convert waste wood into high octane gas. It would licence the technology to an unnamed developer, who would handle the financing and manage the plant.
“They are experienced plant operators on an international level,” Sheppard said, saying the developer has decades worth of experience. “They will be running it, they have experience with fibre and plant operations,” he said.
CORE has signed an memorandum of understanding to develop at least four wood-to-gas plants in the next four years, and it’s looked at numerous sites in Canada and the United States.
“Obviously, we have done a lot of work in this area of B.C., the corridor from Burns Lake to Terrace,” Sigler said. “We’ve looked at numerous sites, we’ve determined a couple of sites that we think are very advantageous for the developer to move forward on.”
During their time here, Sigler and Sheppard toured the city’s planned airport industrial park.
Each plant requires a 75 to 200 acre site, would cost $100 million and require 220,000 tons of fibre a year to produce 67 million litres of gas.
The product will then go into the wholesale gasoline chain, with transportation by tanker truck, port, or rail depending on the fuel distributor.
CORE is expecting to announce locations of the plants in the next two to three months.