Port Hawkesbury Paper Moves Forward with Sugar Extraction Plant
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Port Hawkesbury Paper, Port Hawkesbury, N.S., is moving forward with a demonstration sugar extraction plant that would "sweeten" its potential for business growth, according to a report this week by The Chronicle Herald, Halifax, N.S. If everything goes as planned, the mill could have the plant up and running within in year, the newspaper reported.
Tom Browne, research manager for Canada-based FPInnovations, said the project began in a lab in Montreal about six years ago. After securing a technology patent, officials with the non-profit research and technology institute felt it was time to start looking for a bigger test space.
"Port Hawkesbury has enough pulping capacity to feed two paper machines but one of them is idle," said Browne. "So there are some idle assets there that could be reused and that is one of the opportunities to save on capital costs," Brown said in the article.
Sugars produced from hardwood would be used for non-food products such as biodegradable plastics. Brown said the proposed demonstration plant would be the first of its kind in Canada. "It’s a matter of shredding the wood through a mixture of chemistry and mechanical action, so that enzymes can access the cellulose portion of the wood and break that down into sugars," he explained. "It is an enzymatic process, and these are fairly well known. The patent that we hold is on the pretreatment stage that prepares the wood so that the enzymes will be particularly happy with it."
Browne said there’s a future for new business growth, as paper and pulp mills around the world are looking to develop new products. However, he said, it could take a few years before a commercial operation gets underway. "If we were to build a demo-scale plant, that could be running in a year or 18 months, and then we have to run that for a couple of years and learn from it, and from that design the full-scale plant. So it’s not going to happen tomorrow." Browne added that the institute will likely know whether its demonstration plant will go ahead at Point Tupper in the fall. If a commercial operation were to develop, FPInnovations would then license its sugar extraction technology to the mill.
Marc Dube, manager of Port Hawkesbury Paper, said a forest inventory system is also being implemented in conjunction with the project.
"We’re trying to do it with the newest and best technologies available for forest inventory to make sure there’s a sustainable supply of wood available for the project after all the other commitments for businesses are met," he said.
Dube said in the newspaper report that about half of the province’s forests are made up of the necessary hardwood, adding that a full-scale project would only go ahead if that supply is available for the long term.
