Finnpulp announced this past week it has signed a basic engineering partnership agreement with fellow Finnish Pöyry Oyj for the bioproduction mill planned to be constructed in Sorsasalo, Kuopio. One key factor in the decision-making was Pöyry’s strong, 60 years of experience in thousands of forest- and paper industry projects. This was significant because all basic engineering will be accomplished with the partner company with very limited basic engineering resources delivered by Finnpulp. The environmental impact assessment was also made together with Pöyry, and it gives excellent knowledge of the bioproduction mill and its environmental requirements.

Finnpulp’s bioproduction mill will be the first mill in the world that will utilize intelligent processes and artificial intelligence from the beginning. The basic engineering will take into account the requirements of optimization in the digital ecosystem from raw material, supply chain and back office, to the quality and quantity of production. The basic engineering will include preparation of the construction stage of the mill’s processes, technologies and mill site layouts. This phase, which has now been started, will last to the first quartal of 2019 and after that Finnpulp will have binding offers of bioproduction mill’s main machinery, which allows making the final construction decision.

Finnpulp's bioproduct mill will be the world's largest softwood pulp mill. The annual pulp production capacity of the bioproduction mill is 1.2 million tons. Mill will also produce 60,000 tons of tall oil and one terawatt-hour (TWh) bioelectricity to the domestic power grid. The mill will use 6.7 million cubic meters of raw wood material per year. Once completed, the investment of 1.4 billion EUR bioproduction mill’s effect on Finland’s export income will be +1%.