Biofuel plant could bring the old mill site back to life, create jobs and boost the local economy – from the Fort Frances (ON) Times
7 January 2026
By Andrew Flynn
Editor in Chief
aflynn@fortfrances.com
For a town still feeling the loss of its paper mill more than a decade ago, the promise of new industry is tantalizing; 50 or more new jobs, a much-needed boost to the local economy, perhaps a stepping stone to attract new business or help those already here expand.
According to its principal movers, the plan to build a new $210-million biofuel plant in Fort Frances is coming close to fruition and it could be a game-changer for the region – if it breaks ground this fall as anticipated.
After an exhaustive search, the team behind the project has settled on the former Resolute mill site as the ideal location for its pilot project, a refinery that can turn the byproducts of logging – bark, sawdust, branches and tops, debris that would otherwise be burned or sit and rot – into synthetic gas, diesel and aviation fuel.
The town is close to an abundant feedstock source, in the heart of a small labour market, owns its own affordable power production and is not far from colleges in the region primed to provide essential training. Having secured a major partnership with 10 Treaty #3 First Nations, all of the pieces – complex and intertwined as they are – seemed to fit for Vancouver-based renewable fuels company Highbury Energy Inc.
“Quite frankly, it’s a multitude of partners, and literally it almost takes a village to put these kinds of things together,” Highbury CEO Len Bykowski told the Times. “It began with meeting with all the chiefs and their advisors. And just being frank and open and conversational about what it is that we were trying to do and see how that could fit with them, building those relationships.”
As a result of discussions that began in 2023, Highbury forged a partnership with the First Nations-owned Boundary Waters First Nations Clean Energy Corp. to form the Wanagekong-Biiwega’iganan Clean Energy Corp. (WBCEC). The WBEC is 80 per cent owned by the 10 participating Treaty #3 First Nations and 20 per cent by the Highbury subsidiary Highbury Renewables Inc.
“It’s still in the works,” WBCEC CEO Chief Janice Henderson told the Times. “We’re just in the process of securing final engineering and project construction, [capital expenditure] funding. I really can’t say any more about that right now; it’s a lot of money to raise, but we’re looking at securing that in the next little while.”
Then the warm reception that Highbury received from the town’s civic leadership helped to cement the selection of Fort Frances for its first major project.
“There are communities that aren’t necessarily open for business,” Bykowski said. “And there are communities that, you know, push back, no matter what it is, it’s just the nature of the way they operate. I’m going to say that the mayor, right from day one, expressed the right kind of attitude. It was almost a test, we sort of had a checklist of things, and Fort Frances really passed with flying colours.”
The potential value of the Highbury plant was apparent from the beginning, Fort Frances Mayor Andrew Hallikas said. When Highbury was searching for an ideal site in 2023, its executive met with the mayor and his team to gauge their interest.
“We said, ‘Fort Frances is open for business,” Hallikas told the Times. “This makes Fort Frances attractive to other energy companies and other high-tech companies. So I think there’s a lot of potential.”
“We want to see this project go – whatever we can do to facilitate it, we’re going to do that. And I want to give credit to [Operations Manager] Travis Rob and many employees of the town of Fort Frances, because after Travis and I initially met with [Bykowski] the administration did just that.”
Among the steps remaining is to either purchase or lease the former Resolute mill from its current owner, the BMI Group. No formal negotiations have been announced between the WBCEC and BMI, however such talks are customarily conducted in confidence. BMI did not return requests for comment about whether the company had been approached about a possible deal at time of publication.
The partners had initially looked at a parcel of land near Eighth Street and McIrvine, but tests proved the ground too soft for a large industrial structure – building on what proved to be an ancient lakebed would have required the company to drill piles more than 100 metres into the ground to support the foundation.
That slowed the process somewhat, Bykowski said, but “we always had the old pulp mill site in our line of thought.”
Highbury’s plant, the brainchild of Chief Technical Officer Paul Watkinson, professor emeritus and former head of the University of British Columbia’s Chemical and Biological Engineering department, employs a process called dual-fluidized-bed (DFB) steam gasification.
DFB is a high-tech way of turning solid biomass, like wood waste, into clean-burning fuel. It’s essentially a system that uses two interconnected chambers to perform two separate functions: gasification and combustion.
The first chamber, the gasifier, uses steam and super-heated material such as sand to turn the biomass into a raw synthetic gas (syngas) and a solid residue called char. This reaction needs a lot of heat, which is produced in the second chamber, the combustor. Leftover char is burned with air, which heats up the same sand-like material. This hot material is then quickly circulated back to the first chamber, acting like a heat sponge to fuel the gasification process.
This continuous loop of heating and circulating the material allows the system to efficiently manage its own energy needs. The company claims that separating combustion from gasification produces a higher quality of syngas because it isn’t mixed with nitrogen from the air. The gas produced is a starting material for refining into liquid transportation fuels.
“What we’re doing is we’re converting residue with biomass into renewable, low carbon, transportation fuel, primarily sustainable airline fuel, and renewable diesel.” Bykowski said. “That’s the bottom line.”
One of the big advantages of the Highbury design is that it is modular and flexible – it can be switched quickly to produce different types of fuel within about 48 hours, Bykowski said. The synthetic gas can be used as a fuel source to displace natural gas, or cleaned further through a Fischer-Tropsch process, which converts it into a hydrocarbon liquid that can be refined into other fuels.
“Once that liquid from the Fischer-Tropsch process is hydrocracked, it almost has all the attributes of fossil-based diesel,” Bykowski said.
Highbury has previously constructed a working model of the plant on the UBC campus, which Bykowski said is testament to its ability to run cleanly without any harsh smells or toxic outgassing. And unlike the former mill, it is not expected produce any effluent or noxious byproducts.
“If anything, it’s going to smell like fresh wood, I don’t think it’s going to be anything obnoxious,” Bykowski said. “[Feedstock] is going to be rotated fairly quickly. We anticipate only having maybe 10 days of inventory at any one time, so it’s not sitting here composting or anything of that nature.”
The town also ticked the critical distribution infrastructure box for Highbury, Bykowski said. “Fort Frances is well-located from a distribution network perspective, not only by rail but by truck and has quick access to the U.S. if we needed to go that way.”
After three years of pre-development, the project has now completed a successful front-end engineering design (FEED) study, toward which the federal government invested $2.5 million – a make-or-break stage without which investors won’t commit the hundreds of millions needed for construction.
“That leads into what’s called the final engineering and design, and that’s exactly where we’re at today,” Bykowski said.
One of the key elements driving Highbury to consider Fort Frances was the proximity of the Boundary Waters Forest Management Corp. – a forestry organization licensed to provide forest management of the Boundary Waters Forest, representing local mill facilities, First Nations, Métis, independent loggers and municipalities in the region.
“It was primarily controlled by a lot of the First Nations. So that was an important piece,” Bykowski said. With the help of former Ontario NDP Leader Howard Hampton, the company began reaching out to First Nations involved with Boundary Waters and others in the region.
“You can’t do a project in a resource-based rural area without First Nations participation in Canada – that’s a fact of life,” Bykowski said. “The way that worked in the Fort Frances area was that we approached one or two of the First Nations, and they appeared to be extremely interested and wanting to participate.”
Hampton, a Fort Frances native who now works as a lawyer advising on First Nations issues as they impact resource development, helped to introduce Highbury to chiefs and other influential figures in the Indigenous economic community. “He was really instrumental in being sort of the local kind of boots on the ground and the guy who had the connection,” Bykowski said.
For Henderson, the plant would be more than a source of income and jobs for the region – with 80 per cent First Nations ownership, it would also be a tangible symbol of Indigenous self-determination and reconciliation that First Nations have been fighting for across Canada.
“First Nations own 80% of the project, and the governance will be structured accordingly,” Henderson said, ensuring that the project aligns with Treaty #3 priorities and broader Anishinaabe values. “We did talk to some of our elders and they’re very pleased that we’re going to be addressing all that wood waste in the forest because all of the forest fires that we’ve had. All it needs is lightning and we have a major problem.”
Another key consideration for building in Fort Frances would be the proximity to Seven Generations Education institute and Confederation College. Since plant employees would require specialized training, the WBCEC envisions partnering with these institutions. “It’s still in the planning stages, but I would imagine in the new year we’ll resume formal discussion,” Henderson said. “Once we can secure capital, then we’ll move on these.
All things considered, the company is optimistic that it will make the fall 2026 deadline for breaking ground, with commissioning anticipated in 2028, Bykowski said.
“We’re now sort of at a stage where we have a high level of confidence. But again, it’s not over until it’s over. There’s always moving parts and there are challenges,” he said.