“Our starting point is the sustainable and efficient management of forests, which helps us to ensure that our forests serve as sufficient carbon sinks.”
Thinning wood can be converted as competitively as pos- sible in the bioproduct mills, given that sales proceeds are generated by other bioproducts as well, in addition to pulp. “The aim of the highly automated and very fast next-gen- eration sawmill would be to ensure that Metsä Fibre can operate profitably in the mechanical forest industry.” Hämälä says that both investments also make sense from the perspective of forest management and combatting cli- mate change. “Our starting point is the sustainable and efficient man- agement of forests, which helps us to ensure that our for- ests serve as sufficient carbon sinks. We can make wood- based products that replace fossil-based raw materials or store carbon for long periods of time.” The Kemi and Rauma investments would furthermore reduce the use of fossil fuels and increase the production of electrical energy. ACTIVE FOREST MANAGEMENT SECURES WOOD GROWTH The wood supply in Metsä Group is based on close coop- eration with forest owners. Systematic forest management and regular thinning accelerate a forest’s growth. The pulpwood resulting from thinning is an excellent raw material for pulp mills. Following a thinning, the trees left in the forest grow into sturdy logs, suitable for sawn timber. It is intended that the Kemi bioproduct mill will primar- ily use the pulpwood generated in the thinning and regen- eration fellings in Northern Finland as its raw material. The mill would be able to make use of every part of the tree. Locating a new sawmill next to Metsä Fibre’s Rauma pulp mill would be sensible.
The bark, sawdust and chips produced in the sawing would be used as bioenergy and as a raw material for pulp in the pulp mill, which is located on the same plot of land. The sawmill, on the other hand, would get all the en- ergy it needs fossil-free from the pulp mill. In the future, the entire integrated mill’s operations could be entirely fossil-free. THE BEST POSSIBLE BIOPRODUCT MILL Metsä Fibre intends to build the Kemi bioproduct mill according to the model implemented at Äänekoski. “We have a good bioproduct mill concept and a project implementation model which we can repeat in Kemi. It’s important for us to build the best possible mill on the basis of these lessons. We’ll be taking Kemi’s special char- acteristics and the technological advancements that have taken place since Äänekoski into account,” says Project Director Jari-Pekka Johansson . He is in charge of the Kemi bioproduct mill project. The bioproduct mill’s key product is pulp, and it would produce 1.5 million tonnes of pulp a year. This is slightly more than at Äänekoski, where the annual production of pulp amounts to 1.3 million tonnes. The side streams of the pulp production are used in the production of bioproducts, such as tall oil, turpentine, product gas and sulphuric acid. “We’ll be making a reservation for the production of, for example, lignin and textile fibres as early as during the pre-engineering phase,” says Johansson. The process creates so much renewable bioenergy that the mill’s self-sufficiency rate would reach 250 per cent.
Jari-Pekka Johansson Project Director of the Kemi bioproduct mill project. The investment decision will be made at the earliest in the summer of 2020 and the new mill would be started in the first half of the 2020s.
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