Coureurs de Bois: Haffner Energy, INCAD find the right value equation for the forest bioeconomy
From beaver pelts to pulp and paper to carbon, Québec’s forests keep finding something new worth carrying to market.
Joachim LeBer has been paddling since dawn. Imagine him in 1685, twenty-one years old, his paddle finally resting across the gunwales of a birchbark canoe somewhere near Trois-Rivières. Behind him lies the St. Lawrence, the great watery highway that carried him here. Ahead are the rivers and the immense Québec forest. He has been paddling twelve hours today, much of it against the current. His shoulders ache. There are mosquitoes—there are always mosquitoes. Tomorrow there will be more river, more forest, more portages, and more uncertainty, which gives a man plenty of time to contemplate economics.
Every pound in Joachim’s canoe has to pay its way. Food pays by keeping him alive, while a musket pays by keeping him alive somewhat more emphatically. Trade goods have to come back as something worth far more than the enormous trouble of getting them there. And what pays spectacularly well, pound for pound, is beaver.
This much about Joachim is not imagination: his first surviving fur-trade contract dates to May 1685, when he was twenty-one. He was paid the same wage as a thirty-year-old engagé—evidence, historian Linda Breuer Gray argues, that his employer already regarded him as experienced. He was hired with others to go to the Ottawas; three years later he was hired again, and in 1690 contracted for the much longer journey to Michilimackinac.
The romance came later, but the economics were there from the beginning. Somewhere in that enormous forest was something sufficiently valuable to justify the journey. Three centuries later, Québec faces precisely the same problem. The forest, the St. Lawrence, and the rugged individualists are all still there. The only remaining question is what to put in the canoe.
The forest needs another beaver
Beaver had its century. Then timber had its century as sawmills multiplied and pulp and paper followed, turning Trois-Rivières into one of the great centers of the North American forest economy. It was different cargo, but the governing equation remained identical:
And then the equation changed again. There is plenty of energy in woody biomass, but there isn’t necessarily enough money in it. You can make renewable natural gas from wood—the chemistry is not the fundamental problem, the economics are. A forest residual is a dispersed, heterogeneous solid. Somebody has to collect it, process it, put it on a truck, and haul it to a conversion plant. There, it must be fed into equipment, converted, and cleaned, only to compete against natural gas that comes out of the ground concentrated and travels through a pipe.
That’s a lot of paddling before you sell the beaver. Which is why the emerging Québec forest economy isn’t merely about extracting the energy in wood—it is about extracting more value from every tonne that makes the journey. Every molecule counts when you’re paddling against the current.
2023: What’s in the forest?
In June 2023, Trois-Rivières began by answering the first question Joachim LeBer would have understood: What’s out there?
The Trois-Rivières Biofuel Development Opportunity (BDO) Zone received an A rating after examining a 150-kilometre driving-distance supply shed. On a risk-adjusted basis, the assessment identified 475,000 dry metric tonnes per year of woody biomass available to new projects: 250,000 tonnes of sawmill residuals, 115,000 tonnes of forest residues, and 110,000 tonnes of pulpwood. It found 34 sawmills generating roughly 750,000 dry tonnes of residuals annually, though only a portion could prudently be considered available to a new entrant.
And here is where the romance encounters the log truck: a tonne of residual sitting beside a Québec sawmill is one thing, but a tonne scattered through the woods is quite another. Much of the recoverable forest residue identified in the study was more than 100 kilometres from Trois-Rivières. Forest-residue supply chains needed investment to scale, logging equipment was getting more expensive, the workforce was aging, and the assessment warned that a large new buyer relying solely on sawmill residuals could push delivered costs higher.
That is why forests are not feedstock. Feedstock is forest material with an economic route to a conversion plant. The BDO Zone wasn’t discovering that Québec had trees—it was mapping the route.
2024: Where is the market?
Then came the second question: Who wants what is out there?
In late 2024, Trois-Rivières came onto BDO Zone Connect to show developers what the region had assembled. This was not simply a story about wood; it was a proposition. They brought together forests, sawmills, highways, rail, ports, industrial skills accumulated through generations of forest industries, Québec’s low-carbon electricity, and the St. Lawrence running through the middle of the whole thing.
The point was no longer merely that the forest contained biomass, but that the biomass might have a new route to value. And now, somebody has come looking.
2026: What goes in the canoe?
Cross the St. Lawrence to Bécancour. Haffner Energy has announced a firm €3.2 million equipment and engineering order from INCAD (Centre d’Intégration de CArburants Durables) for the first phase of a Multi-Energy Hub.
Firm is a lovely word in project development. Not an expression of interest, nor another feasibility study, but an order. Six major pieces of Haffner equipment already manufactured in Europe are scheduled for delivery before the end of this year, together with engineering services, targeting commissioning in Q2 2028. The initial installation is designed to produce 400 normal cubic metres per hour of renewable natural gas from residual biomass.
If all it did was make gas, this would be a much less interesting story. But the canoe has more than one compartment. The process also produces biochar, retaining a portion of the biomass carbon in solid form, and thermolysis oil, a portion of which INCAD plans to use in SB-HEFA demonstrations aimed at renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel.
Now the economics become interesting. One part of the biomass becomes renewable gas, another becomes biochar, and another becomes an intermediate for potentially higher-value liquid fuels. Furthermore, biochar opens another ledger altogether: durable biogenic carbon, valuable not for the energy it releases, but for the carbon it keeps out of circulation—provided, of course, that somebody certifies it and somebody pays for it.
In the old canoe, value was concentrated by leaving behind everything you couldn’t profitably carry. In the new one, the trick is almost the opposite: find a market for everything you can make.
The payload equation
A canoe is not merely transportation—it is a balance sheet. Every pound loaded into it consumes carrying capacity, every mile upstream consumes human energy, and every portage adds labor and risk. The cargo at the end of the journey has to be valuable enough to pay for everything the journey consumed.
A truckload of forest residual is a balance sheet, too. Every kilometre, handling step, processing loss, and capital outlay subtracts from it. RNG puts value back, biochar puts value back, and thermolysis oil puts value back. Carbon value may put something back as well—when there is a methodology, certification, and a buyer willing to write the check.
The project works when enough of the tonne pays its way. That is what makes the Bécancour project interesting beyond Québec. It is not evidence that somebody has finally discovered how to make cheap natural gas from expensive wood; it is an attempt to change the equation by making more of the wood valuable.
There are still feedstock contracts to secure, product markets to establish, off-take to lock down, equipment to install and commission, and carbon attributes that have to become actual revenue rather than arrows on a PowerPoint slide. There is plenty of white water between an equipment order and an operating business. But that’s precisely why the order matters: someone has put a canoe in the water.
The runners of the woods
Gray’s history of Joachim LeBer’s world provides a useful corrective to the romantic image of the solitary woodsman. The trade wasn’t merely furs—it was a network of goods, currencies, credit, information, relationships, and skills. The rivers and lakes were its highways, connecting French settlements, Indigenous communities, and competing markets across a landscape whose commercial geography did not always correspond neatly with the political one.
Joachim grew up at La Prairie in precisely that world. Gray notes that the documentary record places him in the fur trade, traveling to Montréal, the Ottawas, Michilimackinac, and, under circumstances that remain uncertain, into Iroquoia and New York. His life disappears from the record around 1696 with the kind of uncertainty that attended many lives spent moving through those borderlands. He was not merely finding beaver; he was navigating a network.
Three centuries later, the pattern around Trois-Rivières and Bécancour feels strangely familiar. In 2023, the region measured what the forest could supply. In 2024, it went looking for developers and markets. In 2026, somebody ordered equipment intended to turn that resource into several things people might be willing to pay for.
None of that guarantees Bécancour succeeds. INCAD envisions something much larger after this first installation, and veterans of the bioeconomy know the considerable distance between Project One and Project Twenty. A route on a map isn’t a successful voyage, nor is an equipment order—but both are considerably more useful than standing on shore.
Against the current
Imagine Joachim again on the river in 1685. The sun is dropping and his canoe nudges against the bank. Tomorrow morning he will pick up the paddle and head farther into the country.
Beaver makes the journey worthwhile—until someday it doesn’t. Timber will, then pulp, then paper. And now Québec is asking the forest to pay again: in renewable gas, in liquid fuels, in biochar, and, increasingly, in carbon itself.
The forest hasn’t moved and the St. Lawrence hasn’t moved. What changes is what the world values enough to carry home. At Bécancour, six pieces of equipment are getting ready to test the latest answer.
Joachim LeBer understood the payload equation three centuries ago: when you’ve paddled twelve hours against the current, every pound in the canoe had better pay its way. Beaver did. Now we’ll see about carbon.
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