By Ken Patrick >> email: kpatrick@paperage.com

I remember stories from My Weekly Reader in elementary school that painted rosy pictures of the future. I particularly remember the drawing of a bullet-shaped automobile cruising a well-manicured, uncongested superhighway at sunset. Inside was a family dining at a fully set table—with no one at the steering wheel.

The title of the article was something like "Tomorrow's Driverless Cars Will Make Travel Fun and Relaxing." Future highways, the article promised, would have "electrical wires" embedded in the concrete to guide cars smoothly and safely to their destinations, without driver intervention. There would be no accidents, no stress, and no one would be late for work, school, or family vacation.

I recently remembered this article sitting in backed-up traffic along southbound I-75 in middle Georgia, caused by the collision of an SUV with a large pickup truck pulling a horse trailer. Freed by the crash, one horse, trotting up the medium strip for some distance, suddenly crossed untouched through moving traffic on the northbound side, and escaped into the pine trees beside the highway. At least half the cars I could see, including mine, were beginning to run hot on the blistering asphalt. I absentmindedly looked for where the wires might be buried in the highway, if ever they were.

Space Odyssey
In 1969, with humans on the moon, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey painted a believable picture of what space travel might be like in the next century. Mystic symbolism aside, this movie was an acceptable, reasonable portrayal of life aboard a spacecraft under the dubious control of a neurotic computer.

There was little doubt in the late-1960s that this kind of space travel would be commonplace by the turn of the century—probably even more advanced. Certainly there would be colonies on the moon and possibly even Mars by then. Spaceports would be freely circling the earth and other planets.

I remembered this movie while watching the disintegrating space shuttle Columbia burn a streak across the sky this past Feb 1. It was hard to believe that two years after Space Odyssey, we had not returned a human to the moon, much less colonized it. Now there was one less shuttle in a brittle fleet that occasionally goes into orbit on mundane missions that few people care about or understand.

Gasification Dilemmas
In the 1970s, soon after I became involved with the paper industry, I remember hearing rosy presentations about biomass and black liquor gasification technologies that could dramatically reshape the industry. Gasification of black liquor could, and probably would, it was reasoned, replace the aging Tomlinson recovery boiler systems in use at chemical pulp mills since the 1930s.

The result would be not only improved chemical recovery efficiencies, but significantly lower environmental impact and additional power production, as well as much safer working conditions due to the elimination of smelt-water explosion hazards. Gasification had the potential to deliver the industry to a new, higher level of performance almost overnight. By the turn of the century, gasification of black liquor would be the dominant technology, experts at the time harped.

Some 30 years later, I remembered these projections while reading about the current state of recovery boilers in the paper industry, particularly in the U.S. Very little money has been spent in the past 10-15 years to keep these boilers operating at a productive and safe level. Not only is the industry being severely stifled and bottlenecked by its aging recovery boilers, but potential explosions represent a real and imminent danger to employees working around them on a daily basis.

Although several prototype black liquor gasification units were tested in the 1980s and early 1990s, with varying degrees of success, including Weyerhaeuser's New Bern, N.C., trial, no commercial units in the paper industry have yet been put into permanent operation. However, three new commercial scale programs are currently in startup at mills in the U.S., including a modified/rebuilt system at Weyerhaeuser's kraft mill in New Bern (late June startup), Norampac's Trenton, Ont., soda process containerboard mill (July startup), and Georgia-Pacific's Big Island, Va., mill, also a soda/no-sulfur process (scheduled for startup this month). An article on page of this issue examines the two basic technologies being used in these projects.

In the near future, considerable money will obviously have to be spent to upgrade chemical recovery operations at pulp and paper mills around the world. It will be several months or perhaps a year before any meaningful results can be obtained from the three projects currently starting up. But regardless of their successes or failures, most experts expect any increased spending to nevertheless go toward upgrading conventional recovery boiler operations, at least for the next five to ten years. Not one additional dime is expected to be spent for biomass or black liquor gasification in the pulp and paper industry for quite a few more years, if ever.

Now well into the 21^st century, the future still doesn't look too rosy for black liquor gasification, despite the many promises it represents. Whatever the driving force, or lack of it, that continues to work against gasification technologies in the pulp and paper industry, it undoubtedly is related to those that retard space programs and prevent wires from being imbedded in highways.