Biomass Feasibility Project Final Report - Xcel Energy

pulp from logs. Minnesota’s two chemical mills, Sappi in Cloquet and Boise in International Falls,
burn black liquor in recovery boilers and wood waste in combustion boilers.
Table VI-4: Minnesota's Five Papermills Burning Wood Residues to Generate Power
Name Location Type Headquarters Primary Product
Boise Paper Int‘l Falls Chemical Chicago Business papers
Sappi Fine
Paper
Cloquet Chemical South Africa Coated publication paper
Stora Enso Duluth Mechanical Finland Catalogue and insert paper
UPM Blandin
Grand
Lightweight coated magazine
Mechanical Finland
Rapids
paper
Verso Sartell Mechanical Memphis
Lightweight coated magazine
paper
Opportunities to Increase Power in Minnesota Mills
As the headquarters listed in the above table show, Minnesota mills are part of a global industry.
Therefore owners of Minnesota’s mills make investments based on global strategies, not local
loyalties; they send their capital to any point on the globe where they find financial advantage.
Stora Enso, for example, the Finnish owner of Duluth’s super-calendered papermill, recently
announced it will build the world’s largest pulp mill in Chile. And Stora Enso’s Duluth mill has
to compete for investment capital against sister mills around the world.
Minnesota’s Chemical Paper Mills
Because mills vary in engineering design, financial circumstances and business strategies,
specific prospects for biomass power investments can be identified only on a case-by-case
basis. Sappi and Boise Cascade, Minnesota’s only chemical mills and therefore our only
candidates to gasify and/or biorefine black liquor, exhibit basic differences.
Sappi Fine Paper, Cloquet. Sappi’s pulp mill is more modern than its paper mill. In the 1990s, the
pulp mill’s former owner, Potlatch, invested more than $500 million to rebuild it. Potlatch later
sold the pulp mill and its adjoining paper mill to Sappi North America. Sappi’s president,
Kathleen Walters, called the pulp mill the “jewel” that attracted her to the deal.
One of the most modern pulp mills in the U.S., Sappi Cloquet has made itself nearly self-sufficient
in energy. The huge investments that already have been made in the mill make it unlikely that
the company would install new technologies. But the energy landscape is changing quickly,
and since Sappi does a lot of business in Europe, where modern gasification was first developed,
the company must be aware of its potential.
Boise Cascade, International Falls. Boise’s mill is the opposite of Sappi’s – a modern paper mill
linked to an old pulp mill. Two of Boise’s five boilers were installed in 1927, and the other three
date from 1947, 1948 and 1957. Three burn natural gas, one burns bark and wood waste, and
the fifth, a recovery boiler, burns black liquor. The recovery boiler received a $30 million
refurbishing in 2002, but its basic technology remains traditional. The papermaking side of the
mill, on the other hand, was modernized in 1990 with a huge new $1 billion paper machine
which at the time was the fastest in the world.
The corporation once called Boise Cascade, then just Boise, and now Office Max, sold the mill to
Madison Dearborn, a Chicago investment group, in 2004. The new owners restored its original
name of Boise. It’s hard to divine whether the new owners will want make major new
Identifying Effective Biomass Strategies: Page 77
Quantifying Minnesota’s Resources and Evaluating Future Opportunities