Developing LignoBoost for the end user lignin quality requirements, 2017PEERS

Several pulp and paper manufacturers have publicly stated a strategy to producelignin and other bio-products from their wood resource in addition to pulp. Kraft ligninis already sold globally by Stora Enso, Domtar and UPM for several differentapplications. There are two full scale LignoBoost plants operating in the world.Domtar started up the first one at their Plymouth, NC mill in 2013 with a productioncapacity of 25.000 mtpa of purified lignin. In 2015, Stora Enso started up the secondplant at their mill in Sunila, Finland with a capacity of 50.000 mtpa. Both companieshave expressed intent to build additional lignin plants to increase their ligninproduction.

Several other companies are also exploring lignin separation and there is a need tosupport customer’s performance by continually developing our processes to bring abetter return on investment (ROI). While lower Capex and Opex are helpful today, thekey to achieving a viable project pro forma is obtaining a suitable “off-takeagreement”. In support of this, a logical next step is to use lignin refining to providemore end market uses for lignin. Through internal R&D and collaborations with bothcustomers and end users, Valmet is also developing add-on processes to tailor theextracted Kraft lignin to the quality required to produce different higher value ligninproducts. These add-on processes range in maturity from lab testing and pilot trials tocommercially ready concepts like odor-free lignin.

This paper will give an update on the current developments in providing lignin qualityoptimizations for higher end value products to our customers and the importantdesign considerations that were learned during commercialization of the LignoBoostprocess.

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