Manitoba College Using Cattails As Heating Source

Providence University College in Otterburne, Manitoba is using biomass pellets consisting of a mixture of wood chips and cattails to heat its buildings during the winter.

Richard Grosshans is a senior research scientist with the International Institute of Sustainable Development, the organization involved with developing the cattail pellets.

He notes there is a huge environmental benefit to using biomass for fuel.

"By harvesting things like cattails and other plants, we're actually extracting that phosphorus from the environment and then we can remove it and then we can turn that into a product such as these fuel pellets," he said.

Grosshans notes with the elimination on the use of coal for space heating in Manitoba, demand for biomass fuel is on the rise. This has been especially true among Manitoba's Hutterite communities.

"This has been a significant opportunity for the biomass market, which was really struggling to find a foothold," he said. "It was always there, there's always users, but now all of a sudden there's an increase in demand. It's a clean-burning, low carbon energy source. [It's] very sustainable and we have biomass all over Manitoba that could be processed into fuel."

The huge success this year, according to Grosshans, is that they have finally reached a commercial application where they are done with testing and are actually working with industry to create pellets on a large commercial quantity.

Providence University College has been burning biomass since 2011 and burned its first cattail pellets in January of 2016.