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  • Pulp mills nominated as biofuel producers

    And possibly as a strong fifth reason, chemical pulp mills already operate as biorefineries of sorts, producing fiber used to make paper and paperboard as well as some specialized dissolving pulps used to make viscose types of “bio-plastics” and rayon materials. Bio-byproducts made from sulfate (or kraft) spent cooking liquors (black liquor) include ingredients used in making coatings, adhesives, detergents, paint, varnish, ink, lubricants, waxes, polishes, gasoline additives, agricultural products, etc. Turpentine is obtained by condensing exhaust vapors during the pulping of softwoods with the kraft process. There also is a spectrum of lignin-based byproducts produced from refinement of black liquors.

    This same black liquor that, in fact, after it is thickened through evaporation and the byproduct streams removed, is currently used as a “fuel” to fire what are known as chemical recovery boilers, so named because their initial, primary purpose was to burn the hemicellulose/wood sugar content of the thickened, spent cooking liquor, resulting in a char bed deposit that can be regenerated backing into fresh cooking liquor chemicals. Heat from the combustion process is used to co-generate steam used in the process and electricity via turbo-generators. Today’s mills produce on the average 60% of their power from wood residuals and spent pulping liquors.

    Cellulosic Pathways to Bioenergy

    Rather than burning these high volumes of spent cooking liquors directly in recovery boilers, integrated biorefineries can process them into an array of value-added cellulosic biofuels, including ethanol, various synthetic gases (syngas), synthetic crude oil and biodiesel. These fuels could be used to offset petroleum-based fuels being burned in the mill and/or to sell as transportation/motor fuels.

    There are as many as 12 clearly defined pathways into integrated biofuel/bioproduct production at pulp and paper mills. These include the thermochemical approaches that generally involve gasification of either biomass and/or spent cooking liquor streams alone or in combination with advanced gas-to-liquid technologies such as Fischer-Tropsch-based systems, and various pyrolysis techniques involving fluidized bed boilers.

    Other pathways involve established sugar platforms and value-prior-to-pulping (VPP) approaches, where hemicellulose content is extracted before cooking of wood chips in digesters in various ways, such as cooking in pure water to produce a “prehydrolyzate” that can be fermented to mixed alcohols or gasified to produce a syngas.

    The American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA) recently conducted a detailed study of the most feasible routes to integrated biofuel production at pulp and paper mills, versus stand-alone cellulosic biorefineries, as part of its Agenda 2020 program. This study is detailed in a two-part series of reports just completed in the July issue of Paper360° magazine, the official publication of TAPPI (the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry) and PIMA (the Paper Industry Management Association).

    A committee of Agenda 2020 CTO’s, representing 90%-plus percent of chemical pulp producers in the U.S., evaluated four general pathways that appear to be most likely for chemical pulp and paper mills based on existing infrastructures and operations. This study focuses basically on thermochemical approaches as being the most feasible, and looks generally at four related pathways.

    The business case discussed in the AF&PA report is based on a post-2010 gasification biorefinery operation at a kraft pulp and paper mill as described in a recent report by Princeton University. The reference mill is in the Southeastern U.S. and produces 1,580 dry tpd of kraft pulp using a 65/35 mix of hardwood and softwood.

    Compelling Payoff Potential

    The main economic benefits of biorefining in the cases outlined by AF&PA for this reference mill include additional revenues from sale of synthetic fuels (511 tpd of dimethyl ether to be used as an LPG (propane) blend stock, or 2,362 barrels per day of petroleum equivalent or 4,757 barrels per day petroleum equivalent of Fischer-Tropsch synthetic crude oil for refining to diesel and gasoline blendstocks at petroleum refineries), as well as a savings of 226 tons per day of pulpwood due to increased pulp yield, and slightly overall lower steam use.

    Considering that there are 200 or more similar chemical pulp mills in the U.S., and at least an additional 100 in Canada, basic arithmetic shows this barrelage capacity for Fischer-Tropsch synthetic crude oil could total somewhere upwards of 420 million barrels per year, or between 15 and 20 billion gallons per year for the entire North American pulp and paper industry, based on existing infrastructure and operations only, without adding any new capacity.

    This is a very significant potential considering that the President’s 2007 renewable fuel standard (RFS) is 36 billion gal/yr by 2022, and that at least 21 billion gallons of this are to be obtained from cellulosic ethanol and other advanced biofuels. This clearly indicates that the forest products industry, and pulp and paper mills in particular, are in a very unique position to help meet this critical national challenge.

    TAPPI Bioenergy Conference

    These issues, and specifically the AF&PA position paper study, will be explored in considerable detail at the TAPPI International Bioenergy and Bioproducts Conference (IBBC) to be held in late August in Portland, Oregon.

    The 2008 Technical Conference Program features 14 sessions that will take attendees through an in-depth analysis of where the industry currently is on the biorefinery front to where it will be in the next five years and beyond. A key issue underlying all sessions is the immediate need to attract investment community involvement on an on-going basis. The intensive program explores not only the latest biorefinery technologies, but also developing markets and the legal-legislative-investment sides of the bioenergy/bioproducts equation

    The IBBC program includes several sessions that examine biorefinery approaches already in commercial operation, with from-the-field updates by those “already doing it.” Systems technologies being reported in these sessions cover pyrolysis, gasification/gas-to-liquid, acid hydrolysis, enzymatic, and other fermentation-based approaches.

    Ken Patrick is Senior Editor for TAPPI and PIMA’s Paper360o magazine.

  • Government urged to keep renewables target

    Mr Wilkins recently told The Australian he believed the Government should not pursue market-distorting forms of industry assistance such as the target.

    But a report for WWF by consultants Climate Risk found that, without an MRET, which requires electricity providers to obtain 20 per cent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, the Government would have no hope of meeting its target to cut greenhouse emissions by 60 per cent by its 2050 deadline, because the price signals to develop the necessary technologies would not be sent in time for those technologies to be commercially ready.

    Climate Risk director Karl Mallon said: “Without an MRET, Australia would run a very high risk of not meeting its emissions targets because industries would leave their run too late and then they would simply not be able to get up and running in time. They wouldn’t be able to get the staff, or the investment.

    “An MRET does make the emissions reduction task more expensive, but without it we can’t meet the deadline.”

    Dr Mallon said the Government also needed to enhance its MRET scheme by keeping aside some of the permits for later-developing technologies such as geothermal, rather than allowing all the permits to be issued to cheaper wind power providers in the early years, as wind power would only ever supply a proportion of Australia’s energy needs.

    Mr Hunt said the Coalition agreed with this view, but believed the renewable energy target should include so-called clean coal technologies.

    “There is strong support within the Coalition for a 20 per cent target, but inclusive of carbon capture and storage,” he said.

    The Productivity Commission said an MRET operating in conjunction with an emissions trading scheme would not encourage any additional greenhouse abatement, but would impose significant additional costs.

  • Farmers say ACCC missed the point

    Farmers had hoped efficiency problems and market breakdown could be pinpointed along the supply chain.

    “There is no across-the-board evidence to suggest that retail prices for fresh products are going up by a greater percentage than farm-gate prices,” the report stated.

    At the same time the ACCC’s investigation into skyrocketing fertiliser prices concluded prices in Australia reflect international costs of crop boosters.

    But when it came to the seemingly disproportionate price between the farm-gate price and packaged groceries on supermarket shelves, the report said this reflected other costs along the supply chain such as processing and advertising.

    “At most, roughly one-twentieth of the increases in food prices over the past five years could be directly attributable to the increases in gross margins achieved by the major grocery players,” the report stated.

    The NFF has, however, welcomed recommendations made for the horticulture industry, including the introduction of penalties and infringement notices for breaches of the Horticulture Code of Conduct as well as audits to check compliance.

    The ACCC also put forward the possibility of changing the code to regulate transactions between growers and retailers, exporters and processors.

  • Marine climate heading south

    From the ABC 

    Marine scientists have found that Australia’s east coast climate zones have moved south by 200 kilometres over the past 60 years.

    Australian Institute of Marine Science researcher Janice Lough analysed ocean temperature records back to the 1950s, and found that tropical ocean climates have changed and that may be one of the causes of coral bleaching.

    Dr Lough says the speed of the change makes it very unlikely coral reef systems will be able to adapt and survive.

    “One of the reasons we have coral reefs is they need a certain amount of light, they need certain water temperatures, but they also need suitable substrate to form on and really there’s not that much of that shallow water substrate south of the Great Barrier Reef,” Dr Lough said.

  • Government buys cotton farm to save marshes

    In a very rare event for the marshes, it was welcomed by all sides of the ferocious water debate that has raged there for decades.

    The federal Water Minister, Penny Wong, said the marshes were in poor shape due to a lack of flood water and she was determined to help rescue them “after 12 years of inaction under the previous government”.

    The NSW Environment Minister, Verity Firth, said, “The Iemma Government has already purchased 15,000 megalitres of general security water entitlement for the Macquarie Marshes and expects to hold at least 30,000 megalitres by the end of this year.

    “These entitlements allow us to orchestrate flood events in the marshes that provide a lifeline to the wetland ecosystem.”

    Richard Kingsford, a wetlands expert with the University of NSW, said the buy was “fantastic”, helping bridge a gap between the north and south marsh nature reserves, established in 1900.

    “It was always a worry that there was a major irrigation area in the middle of the marshes,” he said.

    However, restoring the land to its natural state would be a “major challenge”.

    In the Macquarie, 24pc of surface water has been diverted and the CSIRO has found the average period between important inundation events for the marshes has more than doubled since the construction of Burrendong Dam in the 1960s allowed irrigation to flourish along the river.

    Buying Pillicawarrina will not instantly return water to the marshes as its entitlement is mostly general security, and there is a zero allocation of general security water because Burrendong is only 18pc full.

  • Rainfall patterns on knife’s edge

    In terms of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index, conditions have remained close to neutral throughout July.

    Modelling shows neutral conditions are likely to continue in 2008, with most models showing some warming in the coming season, but none suggesting a redevelopment of a La Niña and only a minority predicting a return to El Niño.

    And since winter is a period of relatively high predictability, the neutral forecast can be viewed with some confidence.

    The Indian Ocean is currently in a positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) (which increases the chance of low winter-spring falls in south east Australia), but the index used to measure the IOD, has weakened considerably since its peak in early June, boosting growers’ hopes for reasonable spring rain.

    The IOD is forecast to persist but moderate further throughout the rest of the year.

    In far western NSW there was a moderate swing towards the chance of below average rain in the coming three months.