There is a real “tide” rising today, especially in North America, that the paper industry could, with some timely, opportunistic, and fortuitous actions, easily take on to fortune.

The short time I worked at a paper mill, I never saw a worker with a Shakespeare play (quarto edition) stuffed in his back pocket. Only gloves and Beech-Nut chewing tobacco. Something about a pulp mill is just not conducive to iambic pentameter verse. Elizabethan theater and Petrarchan sonnets probably aren't hot topics around paper industry corporate offices these days, either.

The Bard, however, probably knew more than a little about papermaking. Stromer's paper mill had been up and running in Germany more than a hundred years before he was born, and the art (by then a science) spread quickly throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. There were paper mills all over England when his quarto editions went into print, followed in 1623 by the first printed Folio editions after his death just a few years earlier.

Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar contains the lines: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” Brutus is urging his comrades to seize the moment through military conflict. Shakespeare wasn't referring to the paper industry with these lines, but he well could have been.

Rising Tide
There is a real “tide” rising today, especially in North America, that the paper industry could, with some timely, opportunistic, and fortuitous actions, easily take on to fortune. And, yes, this industry is neither known nor prone to such action, and could as easily let that tide flood and fall without realizing the difference. After all, this is the same industry that is just now discovering Asia and South America.

Obviously, this tide is the rising need for alternate energy fuels derived from renewable sources such as agricultural products and wood. It's finally time to do something about this country's dependence on foreign petroleum. Did it really take the president's declaration on TV last month to wake us up to the horror that “this country is addicted to oil?” Come on! Not our little country! This sort of thing only happens to other countries, or in the movies. What will our good neighbors Canada and Mexico think?

An article in this issue by Dr. Stephen Kelley, head of the Department of Wood and Paper Science at North Carolina State, looks again at opportunities rising in front of the paper industry's face. Professor Kelly does a good job of summarizing the four basic scenarios that could be used to produce alternate fuels from wood feedstocks. The paper industry has been messing with wood feedstocks since long before Stromer. By now, it should be King Kong of wood feedstocks.

The four scenarios involve the production of ethanol via fermentation of wood sugars extracted from chips before they are ever cooked in the digester, hydrolysis of wood and then fermentation of the sugar-rich hydrolyzate to produce ethanol, gasification of wood and biomasss wastage and even black liquor to produce a syngas that can be converted into a variety of fuels, and finally fast pyrolysis technology to produce a form of crude oil that can be used with or without further treatment (e.g., bio-diesel). PaperAge will be looking closer at bio-diesel opportunities later this year.

These scenarios were examined in great detail in the October and November/December 2004 issues of PaperAge. As Dr. Kelly's article in this issue and the two-part series in 2004 both emphasize, many pulp mills (running or recently idled) could be perfect homes for some or all of these technologies.

Dr. Kelly notes that pulp mills have existing feed and collection infrastructures, boilers, waste treatment, etc., that could reduce capital needed for a greenfield ethanol plant as much as 20%. Considering that these mills also have existing rail, truck, and naval distribution facilities, as well as administrative space and all related support, that figure might actually be more like 30% or 40%.

Stage is Set
Recent studies show more than 1.3 billion tons of forest and agricultural biomass available in this country for production of bio-fuels, representing the energy equivalent of 3.5 billion barrels of oil, which Dr. Kelly says is about 75% greater than our current domestic oil production of 2.0 billion barrels. So long petroleum dependence.

Yeah, yeah, a lot of hurdles have to be cleared. Where will the capital come from? More boring studies will be needed. Markets will have to develop and mature quickly for sustainability. Who will lead? Government support will have to be much stronger and better organized than it ever has been. A tall order.

But imagine directing the flow of a woodyard conveyor in either of two directions-to the digester room or to an on-site bio-fuel production plant, depending on what market conditions happen to be at the time. No more market related downtime. No layoffs. No red ink. Happy stockholders. What more could the industry want? What are we waiting for?

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