Buying into the belief that there is always more than one way to get a job done, the paper industry, in its quest to turn a profit, should seriously consider a few of the untapped value streams sitting in its lap.

The expression “more than one way to skin a cat” obviously means there are at least two ways to do something. Its origin likely derives from an English term referring to a gymnastic maneuver in which a person hanging by his hands from a horizontal bar pulls his legs through his arms and over the bar into a sitting position. This probably was seen as similar to turning an animal's pelt inside-out to remove it from the body.

But how could there be more than one way to gymnastically skin the cat? Any other way would seemingly break your arms. Some linguists think the term could be related to the various techniques of skinning a catfish, but this is probably just a localized adaptation of the expression. Whatever, it really doesn't matter unless you're a cat or a catfish.

The expression came up recently in two separate meetings with some pulp and paper people exploring the industry's bio-fuel possibilities. If you're working in a real-world, problem-filled mill environment, the “forest bio-refinery” probably seems pretty blanking remote. New value streams have little meaning when you're struggling to keep the ones you have running and occasionally profitable. Agenda 20/20 might as well be the Horsehead Nebula.

But skinning the cat (or the tree in this case) in more ways than one is critical to the long-term survival of our mills and the paper industry as a whole in North America. Producers in this part of the world simply can't remain competitive with mills in South America and Asia, or Europe for that matter, making commodity grades of paper, paperboard, and pulp, even though the relatively depressed dollar has helped out some recently. They've got to find new value streams, and bio-fuels, no matter how you figure, are clearly the best if not the only answer.

Hydrolysis Possibilities
As discussed and analyzed in papers, articles, and presentations all over the place these past few years, there are basically four scenarios for new bio-fuel streams—pre-extraction, (removing wood sugars prior to pulping for subsequent fermentation to ethanol), hydrolysis (cooking in a digester or other vessel to remove sugars and organics for fermentation), gasification (wood chips and black liquor) to produce a syngas, and fast pyrolysis (extraction of bio-oils from biomass using oxygen-controlled fluidized bed technologies). Each has its advantages and drawbacks.

Pyrolysis has moved quickly onto the commercial stage, while gasification seems bogged down in capital cost quagmires On the surface, hydrolysis would appear to be the most practical with minimum new investment. Excess mill digester capacity (and there's plenty of that around these days) could be used to hydrolyze, or cook, recovered biomass residuals or even chips (depending on a mill's inventory balances). This probably could be accomplished with plain water, as done by some dissolving pulp mills since the Paleozoic Era. The sugar-rich hydrolyzate can then be fermented to produce ethanol alcohol.

IP's former Natchez, Miss., kraft dissolving pulp mill, for example, cooked with pure water (in 26 batch digesters when on full dissolving pulp production) to remove wood sugars and hemicelluloses that could clog-up and gum-up spinnerets and other equipment used to make rayon fiber. The pre-hydrolyzate was either evaporated and burned in the mill's recovery boilers, or for a while was used to produce wood molasses added to commercial animal feed. On a trail basis, it was even used to make a xylitol sweetner used in chewing gum.

Although there might be some loss of recovery boiler fuel credit, any chemical pulp mill, especially kraft mills with batch-type digesters, could as easily do a double cook, extracting the pre-hydrolyzate and sending it to a fermentation plant, operated either by the mill or a third party. Many, many millions of gallons of wood sugar-rich liquors could be produced and fermented to ethanol annually, potentially replacing millions of barrels of petroleum equivalent oil. The 40 - 50 million tons of chemical pulp capacity in the U.S. today, plus the 10 million or so tons in Canada, represent a healthy universe of fermentable hydrolyzate derived via double cooking with an infrastructure already in place.

But as mentioned above, low-quality biomass can also be hydrolyzed using excess digester capacity, and the hydrolyzate fermented to produce ethanol. There are unbelievable biomass wastage and residuals available throughout North America, the only hurdle being collection and delivery. In Canada, for example, the forest products industry produces some 18 million tons of sawmill residuals annually, of which 6 millions tons are currently being landfilled or incinerated at a very high cost. Many times more than this in biomass wastage is left to rot in the woods across North America each year.

To most efficiently hydrolyze biomass and residuals, some new enzymatic and/or chemical processes are needed to convert the cellulose and hemicelluloses to fermentable 5-carbon sugars with good yield. But most of these technologies already exist in one form or another. It's just a matter of bringing them together, along with investors of course. In fact, right now third-party investors are basically the only missing element in successfully moving the industry into the bio-energy arena.

The Melaleuca Factor
On the subject of available biomass, it seems the mischievous melaleuca tree is continuing to devastate the Everglades in Florida. A decade or so ago I wrote a column about the great damage this nuisance tree is doing, literally eating up thousands of acres of the big bog and threatening its very existence, and that of surrounding wetlands.

Related to the eucalyptus tree, the melaleuca is a native of Australia where it has been used to soak up water in unwanted areas. Fifty or so years ago, it was introduced to Florida for a similar role in the Everglades, but quickly grew out of control. The exotic tree attains maturity in just a few years, reaching heights of 80 ft and growing so thickly that giant “walls” are formed, blocking the passage of deer and other wildlife through the swamp. The melaleuca can thrive equally as well in land areas or dense swamp, destroying all competing vegetation in its path.

Today melaleuca forests consume most of the Everglades and scientists are trying various techniques to control them, including herbicides, purposely set fires, and biological control insects, but the battle is far from being won. In fact, the melaleuca is a heavy odds-on favorite against the genetically engineered insects.

One formidable foe, however, could be pulpwood dealers. Turned loose in the Everglades, these warrior harvesters could make mince meat of a melaleuca stand in no time. In effect, the Everglades is a giant fiber plantation that desperately needs to be culled and thinned. There are massive amounts of good fiber and biomass available just for the taking, to produce pulp, paper, and especially bio-fuels using any or all of the four techniques described above, especially hydrolysis.

Why complain about the lack of plantation fiber in this country when almost a quarter of Florida is already one of the most prolific “natural” plantations in the world? It has the bio-fuel capacity to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil almost overnight, if not our dependence on petroleum based fuels altogether—and it's completely renewable through basic forestry management practices.

Plus, environmentalists would love the industry for doing the Everglades ecosystem a real favor. What a strange but welcome reversal that would be.

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