Going Green Gets into Gear
By Rodden, Graeme
Biomass and other “waste” products can raise a mill’s value, but pulp is still the primary concern THE FIRST SOLANDER Symposium on biorefinery research was held in the northern Swedish city of Pitea in late March. The symposium is named after famed Swedish botanist Daniel Solander who sailed on Captain James Cook’s epic around the world voyage in 1768.
Taking advantage of an issue that is high on the industry’s agenda now, delegates also heard about the development of the Solander Science Park, which is a pulp mill/bioreflnery cluster being set up in the area. Among the members are Smurfit Kappa, SCA, Sun Pine, Chemrec and the Lulea University of Technology.
Biomass for power: In future, will all pulp and paper mills also make vehicle fuel and pharmaceuticals?
Sun Pine is a startup company that will manufacture biodiesel. Its technology uses a multi-feed stock process is based on direct esterification of free fatty acid rich materials such as crude tall oil and hydrolyzed jatropha oil. The product is a fatty acid alkyl ester that can be used as biodiesel or as a green base chemical for further synthesis to consumer chemicals.
To open the conference, the Swedish Ministry of Industry’s Ola Altera said the Swedish government is aware of the competition that the pulp and paper industry faces for the biomass resource and respects its concerns. But, he added, the industry has a history of success in meeting challenges.
The Swedish government will invest in new technology but, Altera said, private capital is needed.
Energy and environment director, CEPI, Marco Mensink, who also chairs the Forest-based Technology Platform (FTP), said that biorefining is an opportunity to create value. He reminded delegates that 49.5% of the primary energy used by the industry in Europe is based on biomass, a large part generated by combined heat and power (CHP) installations. There are challenges: not enough wood; subsidies distort the markets already; future options will lie in wood mobilization, i.e., more sophisticated use of land. Mensink noted that 8 million ha of land in Europe are not used and are paid to be out of use because of subsidies stemming from agricultural policies.
The second day of the symposium focused on the more technical aspects of biorefining. Phillippe Schild, DG Research, European Commission, set the stage by stating that by 2030, clean and CO2- efficient biofuels should make up as much as 25% of the EU’s road transport fuels.
Within the EU Framework program (FP 7,20072013), there is a clear focus on biomass conversion to transport fuels. The budget for the new Framework Program is Euro 54 billion ($80 billion), up substantially from Euro 81 million in FP 6.
The University of Maine’s Adriaan van Heiningen is a well-known authority on biorefining. His talk focused on converting a kraft pulp mill into an integrated forest biorefinery. He stated that the industry needs more revenue from higher value-added products besides pulp, paper and board. With real prices of wood pulp falling and energy costs increasing, profitability is being squeezed from both ends.
How to increase revenue? Make ethanol, chemicals and polymers from hemicellulose; make transport fuel from black liquor; use bark and biomass from the pulp mill as fuel.
As van Heiningen said, the forest biorefinery produces pulp as well as the aforementioned products. The hemicellulose should be extracted before pulping with water and chemicals that are compatible with the kraft pulping process. Hardwood and softwood need to be approached differently as their hemicellulose is different.
The benefits to the kraft process include a lower load, organic and inorganic, to the recovery boiler; reduced alkali use; improved delignification rate; and, therefore, increased pulp production. However, van Heiningen stressed, pulp is still the most important product, ahead of ethanol.
He noted that in February, the US Department of Energy chose six ethanol projects. Funding from the DOE will reach $385 million although the total investment is expected to reach more than $1.2 billion. Production is estimated at 130 million gal/yr (492 million L/yr) and, he added, ethanol could be competitive with gasoline by 2012. Three of the six projects will use wood waste. However, none of these projects involves a forest products company.
For hemicellulose conversion, van Heiningen said that novel catalysts and engineered organisms are needed for selectivity.
Peter Axegard, STFI-Packforsk, discussed some of the key components of a pulp mill biorefmery. He reminded delegates that another reason for the rise of the biorefinery concept in the northern hemisphere was the building of the cost-efficient mega pulp mills in South America.
Axegard focused on a particular project being led by STFI, IignoBoost (see pp. 37-39). Iignin from the evaporators with a high dry solids content is treated (precipitated, dewatered, conditioned, washed) and comes out in a cake form. Mill trials were conducted in Portugal in 2006. Trails are also being done atWermland Paper’s Backhammar mill in Sweden. The demonstration plant can produce 10,000 tonnes/yr. The product is sent to a combined heat and power plant where it is mixed with a coal slurry.
Axegard said that Iignin has many potential uses: energy; materials (carbon fiber composites, porous carbon structures); and, chemicals (phenols, binders, dispersants, sequestering agents). But he also reiterated what others stressed: although other opportunities are arising, the primary objective is still to make pulp.
Chemrec’s Ingvar Landalv focused on black liquor gasification (BLG), a field where Chemrec has been a pioneer. Landalv claimed the technology has the potential to generate 30% of Sweden’s current use of auto fuels.
Chemrec has operated demonstration and pilot plants, atmospheric and pressurized, since 1991. The plant (DP-1) at Pitea is a pressurized black liquor gasification plant around which the Swedish national BLG program is centered. DP-I’s goals are to optimize and advance the technology. Opened in 2005, its capacity is 20 tonnes of dry solids/day.
In a project initiated by Volvo, there will be a dimethyl ester (DME) pilot plant opening in Pitea in mid-2009. DME is a synthetic diesel fuel derived from natural gas. The pilot plant is expected to produce about 4 tonnes/day of DME.
The aim, says Landalv, is to startup a demonstration plant that can produce about 25,000 tonnes/yr of DME at the end of 2010. Work is being done with Sodra at its Morrum mill on a BLGMF or multi- fuel system that combines gasification with a chemical synthesis plant for the production of green automotive fuels.
AND IT’S GOOD FOR YOU
It’s not all energy-related when it comes to making use of the byproducts from the forest. Abo Akademi University’s Bjarne Holmbom discussed some of the pharmaceuticals that can be made. For example, one of the first was wood tar. Holmbom gave an old Finnish expression that roughly translates as: “If sauna, tar and vodka don’t cure your disease, then you will die.”
Another example is xylitol, which is a natural sweetener but has also been found to inhibit tooth decay and ear infections in children.
Sitosterol/sitostanol can be extracted from tall oil soap or tall oil pitch. It inhibits cholesterol from being absorbed into the bloodstream. It is used in the Benecol line of food products.
Holmbom said that spruce tree knots contain a lot of extractives. Analysis showed that knots contain as much as 10% by weight in lignin and HMR makes up 70-85% of the lignin. HMR is a strong anti- oxidant, a precursor to the active metabolite enterolactone. Lignin can help maintain good cardiovascular health and moderate other estrogenrelated health problems. A product, Smart, derived from Finnish knot lignin, is produced in Switzerland. HMR lignin has also been found to inhibit the growth of breast cancer cells. It has not yet been tested on humans. The question is: How to produce HMR on a large-scale?
Holmbom also discussed some of the specialty chemicals that can be derived from trees: stilbenes and galactoglucomannans (GGM). These are small volume, but high margin products.
LOOKING AHEAD
There has been a lot of talk about biorefineries recently. Now, actions are beginning to catch up with the words. But, widespread, full-scale commercial operations realizing all the potential benefits talked about are still a ways away.
For more information about the Solander Symposium including some of the presentations, visit: www.nolia.selsolandersymposiunilpresentation.php
By Graeme Rodden, Editorial Director, Magazines
Copyright Paperloop, Inc. Jun 2007
(c) 2007 PPI; Pulp & Paper International. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.