Prince George is a natural resource for British Columbia
The following opinion piece is being published on behalf of Mayor Lyn Hall to mark the start of the BC Natural Resources Forum in Prince George:
It is time once again for perhaps the most important conference of the year in Prince George: the BC Natural Resources Forum. The Forum is one of the most high profile natural resource conferences in Canada and attracts nearly 1,000 delegates including CEOs and experts involved with Canada’s natural resource industry. The fact that Prince George is the Forum’s long-established host reinforces our role as a centre of growing and progressive resource development at the dawn of a new decade. In fact, with $195 Billion in major projects proposed for central and Northern BC, Prince George is – and will continue to be – an important provider of labour, supplies, technology, expertise, and innovation.
A recent event that demonstrates Prince George’s leadership and innovation with the forest industry has to do with – of all things – the weather. Prince George’s recent deep freeze saw the mercury drop to minus 44 degrees (breaking a 41-year-old record). Through the bitter cold, the City’s Downtown Renewable Energy System heated all of the connected buildings without using fossil fuels.
What makes this possible is that the City works with a local sawmill, Lakeland Mills, to use woodchips to heat water that is circulated through more than three kilometres of underground pipes and heats nearly a dozen buildings downtown with locally sourced, renewable, and low-carbon fuel. That this provided 100 percent of our heat through such a cold period was remarkable and might be a first for Canada.