Waggeryd Cell invests SEK 60m to replace petroleum gas with biomass

Pulp company Waggeryd Cell in Sweden has invested SEK 60 million (€6.3 million) in a biomass boiler in order to replace liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) with bioenergy as energy source for the flash dryer.

The ground work is just about to start, with the mounting of the boiler scheduled for March 2016 and the start-up for September.

The mill’s emission of fossil carbon dioxide will be reduced by 85 %.

Waggeryd Cell produces bleached chemithermomechanical pulp (CTMP), and ever since the company’s start-up in 1989, the whole production has been flash dried using LPG as heat source.

Once the new 12MW grate boiler starts up in September 2016, it will completely replace LPG with bioenergy.

The equipment will be supplied by Urbas, an Austrian company specialising in systems designed to extract energy from wet and coarse wood fuels from sawmills, woodworking factories, and general forestry thinning.

Urbas is responsible for the whole delivery, including projecting, mounting, and start-up, of this turnkey project.

‘This is yet another of the environmental investments we have done since we began modernising the mill fifteen years ago,’ says Ulf Karlsson, managing director at Waggeryd Cell. ‘The boiler will be fuelled by sawdust, oversized wood chips and fibre residuals from our process as well as bark and fuel wood mainly supplied from our owner ATA Group’s sawmills.’

‘So far we have invested about SEK 500 million, out of which about 95 million are environmentally related, in the mill. It has raised our production level up to 150,000 tonnes of bleached CTMP pulp made from spruce and pine sawmill chips. Last year we scored yet another production record and increased the production by 6,000 tonnes of pulp,’ Karlsson continues.