Old Massett is 50% owners of the sawmill and briquette plant in Port Clements, the only sawmill of note on Haida Gwaii. We are in the final stages of negotiating a new fibre supply agreement with the CHN and so once that’s secure we should be up and running full time.
As a spin off from the briquette plant, we now have a fuel to use in furnaces or biomass boilers as they’re known. These furnaces come in many sizes, from small ones for heating houses to huge ones for heating large facilities such as hospitals and schools or many buildings at once. These large units can heat boilers and the hot water from the boiler can be piped up to 2 kilometers underground to heat whole sections of a community. Port Clements has already installed one of these boilers to heat their multi-plex building, their school, council chambers, fire hall and other municipal buildings. Their savings are impressive!
Old Massett has installed one of these units-a 720 Kw biomass boiler- that was commissioned on March 24th 2017. This new system is now heating all our community buildings. Because the heating is so efficient and cheap, this would then give us the option to heat a swimming pool, which has always been a dream of the community’s. Our boiler is about 7 times the size of the one in Port Clements as we have a larger demand. We estimate that council will save over $100,000 a year in heating costs by heating our buildings with one of these briquette furnaces rather than with hydro and propane. We also reduce our carbon emissions by several hundred tons a year as the furnaces virtually don’t pollute at all.
