Green Energy future

New recovery boiler at SCA Packaging Obbola and RDF (Refuse Derived Fuels) incineration plant at SCA Packaging Witzenhausen.

SCA Packaging Containerboard is one of the businesses in SCA that is investing in technologies for replacing fossil fuels with “green” fuels. It is more economically favourable and process best practise to utilise our spent liquor from the kraft pulp production process and rejects from recovered paper processing in the stock preparation area for energy generation. It is also environmentally sound as the incineration is clean and does not result in additional greenhouse gas emissions from fossil origin. In the case of the recovered paper processing resulting rejects it also close to eliminates the landfill practise at the same time.

SCA believes that incineration with energy recovery should be considered as a prime option in the disposal of non-recoverable materials, on par with re-use and recycling, provided that all due pollution prevention measures are taken.

In order to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and reducing the fossil CO₂ emissions, SCA Packaging Containerboard continues to invest in technologies increasing our self supply of energy.

The most recent investments are being made at SCA Packaging Obbola in Sweden and at SCA Packaging Witzenhausen in Germany.

New Recovery Boiler at SCA Packaging Obbola

The new boiler will replace the existing recovery boiler which is 45 years old. This recovery boiler, which is also equipped with a turbine, will provide the paper mill with steam and generate electricity. It will go live in October 2007 and have a capacity of 1,000 tonnes dry solids per day, which corresponds to around 300,000 tonnes of virgin pulp annually. The new turbine will generate a maximum of 26.4 MW green electricity. The environmental impact, especially on emissions and noise, will be significantally lower than today.

The main supplier for the turn-key project is Andritz Oy in Finland with Siemens AG, Power Generation division, supplying the turbine.

RDF (Refuse Derived Fuels) incineration plant at the SCA Packaging Witzenhausen

The new plant will replace the natural gas-fired power plant which is more than 30 years old and provide the paper mill with all its electricity and steam needs. The plant will go live mid-July 2008 and have a capacity of 265,000 tons RDF per year. Among the RDF material, the plant is also able to use rejects from paper production as well as sludge from biological treatments. To meet the requirements of the German Federal Emission Protection Law (17.BimSchV) and due to an area of only 0.5 hectares, it has been decided to use a fluidised bed combustion with a thermal energy input of 124 MW.

The plant will be established by B+T Energie GmbH, a 100% daughter company of B+T Umwelt GmbH; their's core business is taking care of rejects from the paper industry and waste from other industries. The German HSH bank is the financing partner and TBF AG Switzerland is the engineering partner of B+T. B+T and SCA will have a long-term agreement (20 years) on deliveries of energy from the new plant.

The supplier for the turn-key project is Austrian Energy & Enviroment in Austria, Siemens AG, Power Generation Division, supplying the turbine, ABB and AREVA responsible for the electrical equipment and Heitkamp Industrie und Kraftwerksbau from Herne, Germany responsible for the building construction.

For further information, please contact:
Ulf Tillman,Technology and Environmental Manager, packaging.environment@sca.com