Another wintry day in Halifax, Nova Scotia, students and residents who live near Dalhousie University scurried towards the warmth and comfort of their homes and apartments, all heated by fossil fuels.

One local resident has a lot to say about lowering heating costs, alleviating climate change and creating a new stimulus for Nova Scotia's economy.

He's a mechanical engineer and he has a plan.

His name is Duncan MacAdams.

We have two, two 60 kilowatt boilers.

And they are, you know, being used right today to heat small buildings in our Halifax Peninsula here, using firewood from going in and doing sustainable forestry practices.

It's the it's the stuff that there's very little value.

If we take that wood now and we actually use it in our very, very high efficiency boilers to produce the hot water which heats the buildings and through heat exchangers, heats the domestic hot water use at your kitchen sink in the showers.

And and we do that in place of burning fossil fuels.

Hidden away in the adjacent houses are a natural gas furnace, a geothermal installation, a high efficiency wood burning furnace, and a resident genius who helped put it all together.

His name is Doug Deveau.

The the hot water from the heating side and the water storage side comes from here.

Goes up.

That pipe goes through, that valve goes along where I can bleed the air out, goes down over here through a filter, and then it goes into, I guess I enjoy technical work.

I trained in physics.

I trained in electronics.

I've got a computer technology background, and and I grew up in a farm where I did many different types of different, different kinds of work.

This this is a a pulse width modulation circulator means that you can you can change the flow rate by the computer.

And then this is the mixing valve.

And it allows the water in the building to circulate.

And then depending on how the mixing valve is set it will inject a flow of hot water into the the circulating water in the building so they can set the temperature of the water you want.

I burn the wood and and then that that wood is used to heat the building.

I have to control that heat and burn it as efficiently as I as possible.

And then it goes up the.

It goes up the chimney.

And it's recollected by by the trees.

Taking natural gas, or coal or oil from the ground where it's been stored there from life forms in ancient past history where it's been stored there from life forms in ancient past history.

That stored carbon is then released in the atmosphere.

And they would take a very, very long time to take that CO2 in the atmosphere and put it back in the ground.

So what it's going to cause are some very drastic short term problems.

We will have an increase in our carbon dioxide level, it will cause a climate change to get worse.

So all our tenants and our buildings have got, I guess, bragging rights that they're living in a building which is not contributing to climate change.

So we're putting no new carbon in the atmosphere.

We've got a few small buildings that are connected together with heating pipes underground that form what's a very small district heating system.

We're burning wood that was cut from our sustainable forest in 2018, and we're bringing it over load by load, from a central storage yard in the Halifax Peninsula and burn it down as demand basis.

And it's pretty nifty, really, because we were saving money.

Wood is less than half the cost of natural gas.

You're not just taking out the best wood to go to a sawmill to, to make hardwood flooring and, and hardwood for kitchen cabinets.

You're also taking out the firewood, which has got a very valuable use in terms of being a replacement for fossil fuels.

We have boilers that are compliant with German standards, which are the highest on Earth.

The technology is quite simple.

It simply means that when you burn the wood, you bring it up to a temperature that's very, very high.

And it gasifies.

That's good enough.

So.

Allow that to come up.

When that hits 101, then it'll give a symbol to close the door.

So this is where the gasification takes place.

Air comes in on the sides gasifying the wood.

And then the gases go down through three holes.

And then air comes in around those three holes, and it causes a flame to go down into the combustion chamber.

There it is.

See that little thing there?

So now I can close the door.

The computer automatically keeps it at 6% for that gas to burn, 100% to guarantee there's no unburned products of combustion going up the stack.

That's why when you look at the top of the stack, you can't see anything.

You might see some water vapor, but that's that's about it.

It actually began in 2003, when a neighbor of mine, who was a chap who came to Nova Scotia from Germany, he was an architect, and he organized a trip for about a dozen architects and engineers to go to Germany to take a look at high efficiency buildings.

And he invited me along, and I joined the group.

And and for about ten days we looked at several high efficiency buildings, all different designs using different materials, different technologies.

And we actually toured some of the factories that produce some of these materials and, And pieces of equipment.

So it was a very enlightening trip.

To see the history of energy in Europe the past several decades.

They had their various energy crises long before we did in North America.

That was the driving force for for them to to look at ways to, to deal with, with, with high energy costs.

Would energy has been used in places like Austria become experts in in the whole process of transforming wood energy, wood biomass, whether it's pellets or chips or small logs like we use, transferring that into heat energy in a very, very efficient and environmentally sensitive way.

Doug takes healthy, green based activity to heart.

Biking to work every day.

His commitment to the future of the planet runs as deep as his understanding of it.

And among his friends and fellow workers, his laser like focus is near legendary.

Science has been my fascination.

Understanding how things work.

Understanding the universe and an interest in physics and electronics.

Computers?

Yeah.

I've always done research and learned off the internet.

All the information anyone needs is on the internet.

And anybody with motivation.

You just have to go online and everything is there.

Just sitting there waiting.

So I had to find something to enjoy my life with.

So yeah, I started working with heat over downtown, and then I came over here and I like to go through the iterative process of, of of making mistakes and improving upon them, make things better.

And Duncan brought me here to do building maintenance, and I knew how to deal with the heating system, so I did.

I worked on the oil burners, and then we kept upgrading the systems to more, more efficiency.

Better efficiency.

So I've been connecting one building at a time, using biomass burning wood with these high efficiency wood boilers with a central district heating system where I distribute heat to different buildings.

And then I have I have modules in each building to isolate and to get to heat each building that way and then using Technologies iPhones to be able to have better control.

We've also had some wells, heat pumps in that involved in there as well.

And we're talking about placing thermal panels on the roof.

So it's been changing over time.

If you're thinking about maybe sources of energy, solar energy, like ground source heat or geothermal air, like wind farms or direct energy from photons from the sun with photovoltaics.

Have three, three sources of energy that I see would be the fusion energy from the sun.

You'd have momentum.

Energy from the Earth's rotation and the Earth's rotation around the sun and the moon going around the Earth, causing the causing tides and changes in the shape of the Earth, which will generate heat within the Earth's core.

And then you have radioactive decay in the ground, which is also a big source of geothermal heat or current flows within the ocean.

The idea would be to capture from all all of those to be able to supply energy to the world.

Here.

This is a firewood pile of of trees that are really too small to make sawed logs and the highest and best use of them is firewood.

And that's what we're doing here.

This came from Cumberland County in part of the Cobequid Mountains.

He always wanted the latest in technology, the most efficient, well researched.

What's out there?

What's the best?

He's always pushed in that direction.

And so that made it more interesting.

Working with him is, is the technology is a moving target.

It keeps getting better, and you have to keep up with it.

At 81 years old, Duncan rises every morning at 6 a.m. and heads off to Dalhousie University.

For a 30 minute workout in the pool.

He's a staunch advocate of the old maxim slow but steady wins the race.

Well, I came to Nova Scotia.

1963 to study mechanical engineering.

When I finished that up around 66, I had a few engineering jobs around Halifax.

Then I went down to Princeton, new Jersey with a hospital consulting firm.

Moved back.

Even though I was from British Columbia, I really liked Nova Scotia.

Land was affordable, certainly wasn't in British Columbia.

So that's that's how I actually ended up permanently in in Nova Scotia.

Bought a farm up in Cumberland County.

Our space with another four or 5 or 6 years expanded the woodland associated with it.

So we had about a thousand acres in one block.

Well, this is some of the the flatland at the base of the, of the of the mountain.

And it's woodland that was cut over years and years ago.

We've thinned it out recently.

And so there's really good merchantable wood that will grow over time.

It, it has to have several more thinnings to get it into a, a proper renewable forest.

It's a process that takes decades.

You just keep at it.

Well, this one little blueberry field here, this is a two acre field that I cleared 25 years ago, and it's in high production right.

Now.

It's only a couple acres.

And again, all this land on the left, that's that's going to take a few more decades before it's properly thinned out and managed.

The vast renewable woodlands of Nova Scotia cover 75% of the province.

That allows for a locally harvested source of heating fuel.

Using the district heating technologies developed in Europe, it can be ecologically harvested and consumed with minimum carbon release.

This is exactly what we had in mind 40 years ago when we started to thin the woods.

What you see here is just the mostly the firewood.

What's been taken off is some saw logs.

They've already been trucked and the best are still growing in the woods.

It's going to be harvested over the next several decades, so it'll be a sustainable forest.

We started out with a cut over land, almost valueless, you know.

40 years later, we've got a sustainable forest that's producing revenue.

Duncan is a member of the North Nova Forest Owners Cooperative, which represents the interests of 353 members with 80,000 acres of privately owned forests.

The manager is Greg Watson.

On behalf of the landowner and the person that cut it.

We we scale the piles of wood because they're not going to a facility to be processed.

In his project, he's trying to replace using forest products to heat his building versus foreign oil.

Or so he's looking at that import substitution model, you know, wood products valued at the same value for the same heat energy as, as the oil.

And so that would help a lot for forestry companies like ours trying to do sustainable forestry, like thinning and doing restoration type treatments.

That looks really good for the province as far as as far as jobs and tax revenue generating.

So.

Well, I was always discouraged about getting into forestry, not so much from my parents, but just, you know, in the forest industry, you know, it's kind of a rough thing.

And it's always been kind of a rough career, Years ago, it was rough in the sense that it was dangerous and maybe not the best pay.

And you had to go away for the whole winter away from your family.

And I'm talking, you know, 100 years ago.

And it's evolved.

It's still although it's not as dangerous and not as hard physically.

Mentally, it's a challenging sector.

It's also rewarding though, and we need like any industry where there's issues and there's problems.

We need new and young people coming in with new ideas and energy to to help carry the sector forward.

It's a challenge because it has been depleted.

It's been forests have been degraded in Nova Scotia.

Then they were clear cut heavily to fix that high grading system, which is what we were told.

It's so hard.

And I think it was just a mechanism to to cut more wood.

It's so hard to get the truth.

That's right.

That's like so.

We don't have to do anything with the forest they look after themselves.

But as long as the humans are going to use products from the forest, we need great minds and people and diversity with those ideas to to do it better.

We need this forest and we need the the water that the forest filters and purifies for us.

Like we need everything from the environment.

So we need smart people to figure out how to do the how to extract forest products, but also maintain the forest for the ecological value that that it has to sustain life and sustain humans that are a part of that life.

Both Duncan and Doug understand the desperate need that exists in our world for an enlightened and unified way to deal with global warming and both in their own way, are hoping to encourage people on both sides of the cost benefit equation to see that small and steady steps do exist.

We're not inventing anything here.

We're just using technology that's been around for about 50 years.

Some of the solar thermal technology.

The evacuated solar tubes we have is a little bit more recent.

It's been around for 10 or 15 years now.

It's rather interesting because we started this in 2004 to lower our heating costs.

But in the meantime, we've had the whole recognition that we have to stop putting new carbon in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels to avert the climate change catastrophe that we and everybody else in the world is going to have unless we do that.

Yeah.

And the optimum systems are going to be very dependent on if you've got an old construction or an old building that has a lot of air infiltration and maybe very poor insulation, or if you if you're thinking about building a brand new building.

So there's a lot of old buildings in Halifax.

So I mean, to me the main priority would be to knock out the air infiltration, improve your insulation so that your BTU requirement or your energy requirement to heat the building can be minimized.

And then you want to replace whatever heat loss that is with the most efficient system you can put in.

Efficiency can be a combination of what's the initial capital cost and then what is the annual running cost.

Optimizing those two, those two requirements, minimizing heat loss and finding the cheapest solution.

These things are not obvious.

And a lot of the information that people get has come from manufacturers trying to promote or sell a certain type of heating appliance.

So, you know, they're not going to tell you all the permutations and combinations that are available by having, say, 1 or 2 different systems, which may be more appropriate for your location depending on your available fuel supply or configuration of your house, it's a brand new house under construction, or it's an older house.

It's got to be retrofitted.

It's a little bit complex.

It's not rocket science, though, you know, it's not brain surgery.

It's pretty straightforward.

But you have to have someone who really kind of understands the advantages and limitations of each of the systems.

So we're kind of what you call early adopters before the the government even thinks about coming up with a policy.

Well, we've done it.

We've done it just out of cash flow and realize it'll take a long, longer time to pay back.

But ultimately it will.

It's nothing that no one else can do.

It's nothing.

If any government wanted to really push it, they can do it and they would be promoting sustainable forestry in Nova Scotia.

They would be producing huge numbers of new jobs and making way better use of a lot of land, which is very, very underutilized.

Ultimately as people and communities.

If we want to change things, we've got to look really at ourselves.

And I mean, the change is going to come from the small areas and that's just going to grow.

I think the thing that governments have to do is provide good regulatory framework that we all understand that leads us in the right direction.

Governments, in my experience, typically look for the big fix.

So the big company to come in and provide a solution.

I don't know if that's going to work for in the future that we're heading towards.

Its well known that any of the companies that are in the in the business of importing fossil fuels in the form of, say, oil, they're big companies and they they know how to lobby government.

They're all behind the scenes.

They're quietly trying to dampen any initiatives to promote competition.

They like their little their little almost monopoly situation right now.

Who wouldn't?

I mean, that's that's just the nature of companies.

They, they they have a monopoly or a duopoly.

Well guess what.

They'll do everything they can to maintain that status quo.

And and they're doing a fine job.

Right now, with the increasing world population, people needing energy pulling out carbon from from the Earth and putting it back into the atmosphere.

That can only go for so long.

So, yeah.

Global temperature increase, ocean temperature increase, ocean acidification.

It's just a multitude of problems that will come about.

Yeah.

People are too distracted by what they do at home.

Wars, politics greed.

Too much greed.

Basically, there's an entrenched bureaucracy in most of the government departments.

You know, if you look at any of them, there's big heavy chairs there with people that have been in them for a long, long time.

And the status quo is kind of the the norm.