A free course on biomass, biogas and biofuels: wood and pellet heat, renewable natural gas, the carbon debate, and energy for remote communities.
Bioenergy is the oldest form of energy people have used, and it is still a big part of life in much of Canada. Many Canadian households, especially in rural areas, heat with wood or pellets at least part of the time, farms and landfills are turning waste into renewable natural gas, and much of the gasoline and diesel sold in the country contains some renewable fuel. Yet bioenergy is also one of the most debated parts of the clean-energy picture.
This course gives you a plain-language foundation. You'll learn what biomass, biogas and biofuels are, how wood and pellet heating works in a Canadian home, what affects cost, efficiency and air quality, and how certified appliances differ from older ones. You'll also learn how renewable natural gas and biofuels fit into transport and industry, and how communities in the North and in remote regions are using local wood to cut their reliance on diesel.
We also take on the hard question honestly: is bioenergy really carbon-neutral? The answer depends on what is burned, where it comes from and what would have happened to it otherwise. Sundamentals is an independent non-profit. We don't sell stoves, fuel or equipment, and we don't take commissions, so our only goal is to help you understand the trade-offs.
The course is free, self-paced and takes about 50 minutes. It has three modules with short knowledge checks, followed by a 10-question final exam. Score 80% or higher on the exam and you'll be able to download a PDF certificate of completion with your name on it.
Bioenergy is energy that comes from biomass, which simply means material from plants, animals and other living things. Trees, crop residues, sawdust, manure, food scraps and even the organic waste in a landfill all count. Plants capture energy from sunlight through photosynthesis and store it in their tissues as carbon-rich compounds. When we burn or break down that material, we release the stored energy, along with the carbon the plant took from the air.
That link to the carbon cycle is what makes bioenergy different from fossil fuels. Coal, oil and natural gas also came from ancient living things, but their carbon was locked away underground for millions of years. Bioenergy, by contrast, recycles carbon that was in the atmosphere recently, sometimes within a single growing season and sometimes over many decades. As you'll see in Module 3, that difference in timing is at the heart of the debate over how climate-friendly bioenergy really is.
In Canada, bioenergy supplies a small but meaningful share of total energy, in the range of a few percent. The largest user is not homeowners but the forest products industry. Pulp and paper mills and sawmills burn bark, sawdust and other leftovers to make heat and electricity for their own operations, and some sell surplus power to the grid. Canada is also one of the world's major producers and exporters of wood pellets.
For households, bioenergy most often means a wood stove, a fireplace insert or a pellet stove, especially in rural areas where natural gas lines don't reach. For farmers, it can mean a manure digester, a field of canola or corn sold to a biofuel plant, or crop residues used as fuel. For remote communities, it can mean a local wood-fired heating plant that replaces trucked-in diesel.
It helps to sort bioenergy into three broad families based on the form the fuel takes. Each family uses different raw materials, called feedstocks, and different technology to turn them into useful energy.
Solid biomass is the simplest. Firewood, wood chips, pellets and agricultural residues such as straw are burned directly to make heat, or sometimes to raise steam that drives a turbine to make electricity. Pellets are made by drying and compressing sawdust and other wood residues into small, uniform cylinders, which makes them easy to store, transport and feed automatically into a stove or boiler.
Biogas forms when bacteria break down organic material without oxygen, a process called anaerobic digestion. It happens naturally in landfills and can be done on purpose in sealed tanks called digesters, fed with manure, food waste or sewage sludge. Raw biogas is mostly methane and carbon dioxide. It can be burned on site for heat and power, or cleaned up and upgraded into renewable natural gas, often called RNG, which is chemically almost identical to fossil natural gas and can be injected into existing pipelines.
Liquid biofuels are made mainly for transport. Ethanol is usually made by fermenting the starch in grains such as corn and wheat, and is blended into gasoline. Biodiesel and renewable diesel are made from vegetable oils such as canola, animal fats and used cooking oil. Renewable diesel is chemically very close to petroleum diesel, so it can be used at high blends or on its own in many engines.
Wood and pellet heat comes in several forms. A freestanding wood stove heats the room it sits in and, with good air circulation, nearby rooms too. A fireplace insert is essentially a stove that fits inside an existing masonry fireplace, turning an inefficient open fire into a real heat source. A pellet stove burns wood pellets fed from a hopper by an auger, so it runs for many hours on one load and can be controlled by a thermostat.
Central systems heat the whole house. Wood and pellet furnaces push warm air through ducts, while wood and pellet boilers heat water for radiators or in-floor heating. Pellet boilers can be highly automated, with large bulk storage bins that are refilled a few times a season. Masonry heaters burn a hot, fast fire inside a heavy stone or brick mass that slowly releases heat for many hours.
Outdoor wood boilers, which sit in a small shed outside and pipe hot water to the house, are common in some rural areas. Older models in particular can be very smoky, and many municipalities and some provinces restrict where and how they can be used, so check local rules before buying one.
Each option involves trade-offs. Firewood can be very cheap if you cut your own, but it takes work to cut, split, stack and carry. Pellets cost more per unit of energy than self-cut wood in many areas, but they are clean, consistent and much more convenient. Pellet stoves need electricity to run their fans and augers, so plan for a backup during power outages, while a wood stove keeps working when the grid goes down.
Comparing heating costs means looking at the cost of useful heat, not just the price of fuel. That depends on both the energy in the fuel and the efficiency of the appliance. An open fireplace is often only around 10 percent efficient or less, and on a cold night it can even pull more warm air out of the house than it adds. Older stoves often fall roughly in the 40 to 55 percent range, while modern certified wood stoves and pellet stoves are typically in the range of about 65 to 85 percent.
Firewood is usually sold by the cord, a stack measuring 4 by 4 by 8 feet, or 128 cubic feet, though many sellers offer a face cord, which is smaller, so always ask what you are buying. Prices vary widely by region and season. Pellets are usually sold in bags of around 18 kilograms (40 pounds) or by the tonne. A home that relies mainly on pellets may use a few tonnes per heating season, depending on climate and house size.
Fuel quality matters as much as the appliance. Freshly cut wood can be roughly half water by weight. Burning it wastes energy boiling off that water, produces more smoke and builds up creosote in the chimney. Firewood should be dried, or seasoned, to below about 20 percent moisture, which usually takes six months to a year or more when split, stacked off the ground and covered on top. An inexpensive moisture meter takes the guesswork out of it.
For pellets, look for a recognized quality certification such as CANplus or ENplus, which set limits on moisture, ash and fines. Poor-quality pellets can clog burn pots and raise maintenance. Whichever fuel you use, contact your insurer before installing, and have the installation inspected. In much of Canada, WETT-certified professionals inspect and install wood-burning systems.
Wood smoke contains fine particulate matter, tiny particles that can travel deep into the lungs, along with other pollutants. Health Canada identifies residential wood burning as a major source of fine particle pollution in many communities during winter, especially in valleys where cold air traps smoke near the ground. Smoke is a concern for your own household as well as your neighbours.
The good news is that appliance design makes a huge difference. Modern certified stoves use secondary combustion, either with a catalyst or with preheated air tubes, to burn the gases and particles that older stoves send up the chimney. In Canada, wood-burning appliances are tested to the CSA B415.1 standard or to the U.S. EPA standard. The EPA's 2020 standard limits particle emissions to about 2 to 2.5 grams per hour depending on the test method, while the CSA limit commonly cited is 4.5 grams per hour. Older uncertified stoves can emit many times more.
Rules vary across the country. British Columbia and Quebec require new appliances sold there to meet the stricter 2020-level limits, while other provinces accept the CSA standard. Some municipalities go further, restricting older appliances or calling no-burn days during poor air quality. Check provincial and local rules, and ask about any change-out programs that help replace old stoves; the Sundamentals rebate finder is a good starting point.
Good habits matter too. Burn only dry, untreated wood, never garbage, painted wood or plastics. Build small, hot fires rather than letting a load smoulder overnight with the air turned all the way down. Have your chimney inspected and swept at least once a year, and install working smoke and carbon monoxide alarms on every level of your home.
Renewable natural gas is made by upgrading biogas from landfills, wastewater plants, food-waste digesters and farms. Because it is almost identical to fossil natural gas, it can flow through existing pipelines and be used in the same furnaces, water heaters and engines. Some Canadian utilities offer customers the option to buy a share of RNG, and Quebec and British Columbia have set targets for growing the renewable share of gas in their networks. The main limit is supply: there is far less waste-based RNG available than the natural gas Canada uses today, so most experts see it as best used where alternatives are hard.
For farmers, an on-farm digester can turn manure and crop or food wastes into biogas for heat, electricity or RNG. The leftover material, called digestate, can be spread as fertilizer, and digestion can reduce odours and capture methane that would otherwise escape from manure storage. Digesters are costly and need careful management, so they tend to suit larger farms or shared community projects.
In transport, most gasoline in Canada contains some ethanol, commonly up to about 10 percent, and diesel often contains some biodiesel or renewable diesel. Canada's grain and oilseed crops, especially corn, wheat and canola, are important feedstocks. The federal Clean Fuel Regulations require fuel suppliers to gradually lower the carbon intensity of gasoline and diesel, and blending more low-carbon biofuel is one way to comply. The rules were adjusted in 2025, and policy continues to evolve, so check current sources for details.
Biofuels are especially useful where electrification is difficult, such as aviation, marine shipping, some heavy trucking and existing vehicles that will be on the road for years. For most new personal vehicles, electric cars are generally a more efficient path. Biodiesel can also gel in severe cold, which is why blends are often adjusted for Canadian winters.
Bioenergy is often described as carbon-neutral because the carbon released when biomass burns was recently absorbed from the air, and new plants can absorb it again. That idea is true over the full cycle, but it leaves out two important questions: how long it takes for the carbon to be reabsorbed, and what would have happened to the biomass otherwise.
Timing matters. Burning wood releases its carbon immediately, and per unit of useful energy a wood fire can release as much carbon dioxide at the chimney as fossil fuels, or more. If whole trees from slow-growing forests are cut for fuel, it can take decades or longer for regrowth to pay back that carbon debt. If the fuel is sawmill residue or slash that would otherwise be burned in piles or rot quickly, the payback can be much faster.
Accounting adds another wrinkle. Under international rules, emissions from harvesting forests are counted in the land-use sector, not at the smokestack. That avoids double counting but means a power plant burning imported pellets can report low emissions even when the forest impact is uncertain, which is why pellet exports from Canada are debated. For crop-based biofuels, lifecycle studies find a wide range of results depending on farming practices, fertilizer use and whether new land is cleared, and there are concerns about competition with food production.
The strongest climate case is usually for waste-based bioenergy: capturing methane from manure and landfills, and using residues that would otherwise be wasted. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in the short term, so capturing it brings real benefits, as long as leaks from digesters and pipelines are kept low. A fair summary: bioenergy can be low-carbon under the right conditions, but it is not automatically carbon-neutral.
Hundreds of remote communities across Canada, many of them First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities, are not connected to the main electricity grid or natural gas networks. Many rely heavily on diesel for electricity and on heating oil for buildings. That fuel often arrives by winter road, barge or aircraft, which makes it expensive, exposes communities to supply disruptions and spill risks, and sends money out of the local economy.
In forested regions, local biomass can replace a large share of that imported heating fuel. A common approach is a small district heating system: a central boiler burns wood chips or pellets and sends hot water through insulated pipes to schools, offices, health centres and homes. Oujé-Bougoumou Cree Nation in northern Quebec has heated its community with biomass district energy for decades, and Teslin Tlingit Council in Yukon runs biomass heating for community buildings and sells heat to the territorial government for a local school.
When communities own and run these systems, the benefits go beyond carbon. Money spent on fuel stays local, harvesting and operating the plant creates jobs, and fuel can come from forest thinning, salvaged timber or wildfire-risk reduction around the community. Many projects are Indigenous-led and tied to broader goals of energy sovereignty and stewardship of the land.
There are real challenges. Projects need upfront capital, a reliable and sustainable wood supply, dry storage, trained operators and good maintenance. Air quality near homes must be managed with well-designed equipment. In treeless Arctic regions, local biomass is generally not available, so other options like wind, solar, storage and efficiency matter more. Bioenergy works best as one part of a local plan, alongside better insulation, heat pumps where they suit the climate, and other renewables.
Next step: Explore bioenergy →
