I remember the 70's pretty well. I waited a total of probably six months in gas station lines, most of it on 98-degree days in Mobile, Ala., where the humidity rarely drops below 100%. You don't run your air conditioner on an eighth of a tank in a three hour gasoline line.
Those days will return. Maybe not because of another Arab oil embargo or a good old fashioned, real shortage of oil, but because it gets Americans angry and upset. Anything that does that will eventually attract the attention of commodity ne'er-do-wells around the world. It's valuable humor if nothing else. Somebody will find a cheap, easy way to get those lines going again-big time, not like this past summer. Mile long gasoline lines are hilarious.
No matter how you look at it, there's no excuse for the foreign oil addiction in this country. Not when there are alternate energy resources running out our ears. The pulp and paper industry sits on probably one of the biggest and richest of these alternates. Well, maybe it's not sitting, just stumbling around in the dark.
The Forest Biorefinery
An article in this issue (Agenda 2020's Forest Biorefinery) explores the significant potential of bio-based energy sources generated from the paper industry's base raw material-wood fiber-without negatively impacting chemical pulp yield or cellulose quality. In other words, there's a lot of energy inside a wood chip that's generally being wasted, or more accurately discarded, in existing pulping and papermaking processes.
There's certainly a lot of bio-energy being left on the ground in forests across North America as well as in sawmills and other wood processing plants. A lot of bark still rots in piles at too many pulp and paper mills, or its higher value is lost by being burned along with waste treatment sludge in combination power boilers. Chemical recovery technologies being used by today's mills are an outdated, outright disgrace. Spent pulping liquors have a much higher value than what is being returned via the industry's conventional Tomlinson recovery boiler approach.
As the forest biorefinery article discusses, significant value can be extracted not only from forestry residuals but from wood chips themselves prior to pulping. New value streams can also be created from spent pulping liquor using commercialized technologies such as gasification.
For example, extracting hemi-celluloses (wood sugars) prior to pulping, a technology in practice at select mills for decades, has a U.S. industry-wide fermentation potential (especially using newer enzyme technologies) of some 1.9 million gal of fuel grade ethanol. Together with some 600 million gal of by-product acetic acid, this could yield an annual net cash flow to the industry of some $3.3 billlion.
Another $5.5 billion return is possible via existing black liquor gasification technologies in combination with a Fischer Tropsch Process to generate a multi molecular weight, renewable feedstock that is more valuable than crude oil. The Fischer Tropsch process is commercially available and is already in use by other industries. The renewable feedstock is commonly known as RFTF (Renewable Fischer Tropsch Fuel).
Together, the $8.8 billion potential return from just these two alternate approaches represents 160% of the historical net cash flow derived from pulp. In addition, a variety of other, even more valuable by-product chemicals would be produced in these processes, taking the total potential return to nearer $10 billion. .
BioOil Fuels
In near future issues, PaperAge will be looking at yet another approach to tapping the true value of biomass. The first report will examine DynaMotive's new technology called BioTherm, which converts forest by-products (including pulpwood logging wastes and pulp mill bark) as well as agricultural wastes into a liquid fuel known as BioOil. A commercial plant based on this technology is currently starting up in Vancouver. Other plants using similar technologies have already started up in Canada
This pyrolysis-based technology is 100% efficient, i.e., it has zero wastes. The environmentally friendly BioOil (CO2 and greenhouse gas neutral) can be used as a direct replacement for diesel fuel and fuel oils used for heating. The yield from biomass residuals and bark alone is phenomenal. It has the potential of fueling a very high percentage of 18-wheeler transport trucks on North American highways on a daily, ongoing basis.
The U.S. pulp and paper industry is definitely in a state of contraction, as David Price wrote in September 2004 issue of PaperAge. Becoming a net producer of energy in the forms of liquid as well as gaseous fuels has the potential of reversing this trend and helping break the North American dependence on foreign oil at the same time.
The stumbling block, obviously, is economics and not technology. Installing some of these newer but fully commercialized technologies would be costly and disruptive. But as the article points out, the U.S. paper industry has an aging fleet of recovery boilers that will have to be upgraded or more likely replaced in the not too distant future, which might be a blessing as well as a curse.
In this regard, the industry here is probably 30 years ahead of newer mills using cloned tropical hardwood feedstocks. That is, we will be forced to do something about our aging fleet of recovery boilers many years before these more modern counterparts will. Thus, we will have the opportunity to consider alternate approaches such as fermentation, gasification, RTFT, and BioOil long before age calls the hands of mills in South America or Asia.
Personally, I wouldn't mind waiting in line for a tank of BioOil in my diesel pickup, or a high-percentage ethanol-gasoline mixture for my car. But, if rough guestimates are anywhere near reality, there is enough RFTF and BioOil capacity lying on today's forest floors or in pulp mill bark piles or sugar factory bagasse piles to make gas station lines a forgotten nightmare forever.
