A Montreal construction materials plant will completely shift from natural gas-fired equipment to renewably sourced electrification, the company announced Tuesday.
Saint-Gobain, through its building products subsidiary Certain Teed Canada Inc., will invest $91 million (Canadian) in the plant-wide decarbonization plan. Some $40 million CAD is in grants from government of Quebec via the EcoPerformance incentive program.
Certain Teed will upgrade equipment at the Montreal wallboard manufacturing facility. Currently all of the production equipment is powered by natural gas, but will shift to electrification.
Construction on the project is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2023 and the new equipment will come online in late 2024.
“Today we begin a historic new chapter at our Montreal gypsum plant, leading our industry towards a more sustainable future while increasing our production capacity at a time of unprecedented customer demand,” said Dennis Wilson, Vice President Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) North America and Managing Director, Saint-Gobain Circular Economy Solutions. “We thank our partners in the Quebec Government, the City of Saint-Catherine and Hydro-Québec for their support, and we thank our team for pushing the limits of technology and imagination to bring this bold project to life. The electrification of our Montreal plant is a massive step forward in our broader goal to decarbonize construction materials and a significant step towards our global goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.”
Saint-Gobain predicts that the equipment electrification upgrades will reduce the Montreal gypsum plant’s energy usage by 30 percent. Furthermore, the company says, CertainTeed’s production capacity could grow by 40 percent to serve the construction industry in Quebec, Atlantic Canada and eastern Ontario.
Provincial utility Hydro-Québec will supply carbon-free energy for the plant.
The investment in Montreal follows nearly two years of project design, engineering and planning by the Saint-Gobain teams. The CertainTeed Montreal plant began operations in 1973 along the St. Lawrence River in Ville Sainte-Catherine, Quebec.
It employs about 120 people and will add several additional full-time jobs as part of the upgrade, according to the release.
The broader Saint-Gobain decarbonization plan includes upgrades at multiple plants. In March, the company announced it would install heat recovery technology at the CertainTeed plant in Vancouver.
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(Rod Walton, senior editor for EnergyTech, is a 14-year veteran of covering the energy industry both as a newspaper and trade journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]).
