Pulp and Paper Mills as A Scalable and Cost-Effective Pathway to Atmospheric CO₂ Removal, TAPPICon26

Industrial facilities process air volumes far larger than those addressed by direct air capture systems while operating at carbon dioxide concentrations well above ambient. Pulp mills, in particular, emit large quantities of biogenic CO₂ under conditions favorable for low-energy separation. This paper evaluates the economic, thermodynamic, and operational performance of cryogenic carbon capture integrated into pulp mills and then considers extensions to power plants. Capture costs can fall well below those of amine-based systems, while carbon revenue can exceed conventional pulp margins under conservative carbon-value assumptions. At scale, deployment across pulp mills alone could remove on the order of hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO₂ annually; additional deployment on power plants would primarily reduce point-source emissions and may enable limited atmospheric removal at very high capture fractions. Industrial cryogenic capture therefore represents a potentially scalable, near-term pathway for cost-effective CO₂ capture and, in biogenic applications, atmospheric CO₂ removal.