Q&A Gord’s Gold
Canada’s most passionate advocate for wood pellets, Gordon Murray, identifies the opportunities and challenges awaiting his members in a rapidly expanding global marketplace. Vast forest resources, a strong wood products industry and maritime access to both Asian and European pellet markets have Canadian producers ideally situated for strong industry growth. As the executive director of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada, Gordon Murray necessarily maintains a high degree of global visibility. His constituents’ pellets find their way into British power stations, Italian bungalows and South Korean test burns. This market momentum has carried Murray into the heart of a global dialogue about the role of wood pellets in a future with a mandate for lowcarbon heat and power.
sustainably and great care is taken with the forest practice. From a domestic market point of view, you’ve got a much greater population. In the northeast United States, where there is not a very large natural gas distribution network and a lot of the homes have historically relied on heating oil, that population has really enabled the wood pellet industry to make inroads. We haven’t got the same kind of population density. Pellet export numbers in both Canada and the United States are in a period of robust growth. What are the unique challenges for an industry during a boom?
How long have you worked as executive director and how did you come to this role?
One thing is that the scale of the customers is so large. You take one customer offline for any reason and you’ve got all of this product sitting around. It can distort the market in a hurry. The other thing is liquidity. The bigger the industry grows, the more we have to make sure that everyone’s pellets are made to a consistent set of standards, which we’ve got now through the Initiative of Wood Pellet Buyers group of utilities and pellet producing associations. We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got consistent grades and consistent sustainability standards so that the product can be easily traded.
I started as the executive director in 2009. I was working as a corporate finance advisor and was working on selling a sawmill. I ended up selling this sawmill to a wood pellet company that was a member of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada. [The association] asked me to come in three or four days a month to help them with some organizational things on a consulting basis and then the gentleman who was the executive director at the time, John Swan, resigned in 2009. I took over in a caretaking role and just grew into it after that.
Your members in western Canada are ideally located to serve Asian markets like Japan and South Korea, yet demand from those markets lags behind the market potential that you and many industry observers believe is there. Can you share your thoughts and observations on the emerging Asian marketplace?
Are there aspects of the Canadian pellet industry that are different from the pellet industry in the U.S.? There is probably more that unites us than divides us. Both the U.S. and Canadian wood pellets—despite the criticisms and misinformation of environmental NGOs (nongovernmental organizations)—are made very PHOTO: TYLER MEADE PHOTOGRAPHY, KAMLOOPS, BC
32 PELLET MILL MAGAZINE | Q3 2014