报告摘要：

The last decade has been a difficult one for the Canadian forest products sector with the global economic slowdown exacerbating these economic problems. Traditional products such as lumber (going into significantly decreased housing market in the US) and mechanical pulp (going into a rapidly diminishing global market for newsprint) have been challenged by emphasizing the cyclical nature of some markets and the diminishing nature of others. One bright spot that has highlighted the ever-increasing inter-connectivity of the evolving global bioeconomy has been the demand and price for dissolving pulp whose derivatives end up in products such as rayon, car tires and explosives. One of the main reasons for dissolving pulp achieving values as high as more than $2,000 US/tonne has been the high price of cotton (due to poor harvests in many parts of the world). For these and many other reasons the Global forest products sector has realized that the so-called Biorefinery concept will increasingly become a significant component of their survival and growth. Canadian universities, the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC), Natural Resources Canada (NRcan) and FP innovations have worked together with various groups such as universities, suppliers, etc., to develop the “Biopathways” strategy to help identify which technologies are “out there”, where they might be best introduced into ongoing operations and the potential markets for both established products, made from a renewable and sustainable feedstock, and for novel products such as Nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC). In all of the cases that were evaluated, the potential to utilize the low value biomass feedstock for bioenergy applications, both internal to the operation and for export either into the grid or other applications such as bio-oils or “green fuels” such as methanol and ethanol were considerable. The presentation will look at the time frame of the development of the global and Canadian forest products sector, the projections that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has made in terms of the role that bioenergy will play in our attempts to reduce our carbon emissions by 2050 and the potential impact that a forest based biorefinery could play in both reducing our carbon emissions and developing the range of products that could be derived from an integrated biorefinery.