Feature: Chemical Engineering

Cash Crop

The rags-to-riches story of the Canadian canola industry continues as clever engineering creates new opportunities in the biofuels business.

By Debbie Lockrey-Wessel

It’s a familiar vista: big blue prairie sky draped above a laser-straight horizon that gives way to vast fields of yellow. Canola, that iconic Saskatchewan crop introduced to the prairies just 30 years ago, is coming into its own once again, this time as a feedstock for biodiesel. Foam Lake, Sask., a mixed-farming community situated halfway between Saskatoon and Yorkton, is at the centre of the biofuels buzz. The town of 1200 was settled by Icelanders and Ukrainians in the late nineteenth century. Today it unabashedly deems itself “the best place in the world to live” and celebrates its hockey heroes and protected wetlands. One could argue that the town fits nicely into that bucolic prairie scene, a quaint farming community. But to preserve that stereotype, one would have to ignore the feat of engineering operating at the edge of town for the past year. ...

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