Huge Material and Energy Savings at Catalyst Paper

With 2008 sales of a $1.8B (CAD), Catalyst Paper is one of the largest mechanical paper producers in western North America. Its giant Elk Falls Division is located in British Columbia near the city of Campbell River. Catalyst products are used in newspapers, inserts, telephone and other directories, retail promotion, and packaging.

Reduced Product Variance Can Yield Large Savings

Reduced Product Variance Can Yield Large Savings

Catalyst uses the thermo-mechanical pulping (TMP) process. This often requires the mixing of mechanical and kraft pulps in order to meet product specifications. In such mixing, the kraft pulp is far more expensive, so the economic objective is to minimize the amount of kraft pulp added to the finished product.

In order to do this, the highly interactive and dynamic TMP operation needs to be stabilized. This produces pulp with a more uniform fiber length and "freeness". Freeness is the readiness with which water drains through the pulp, as it must do during the paper-making process.

Honeywell's Profit Suite for TMP solution uses the Profit Controller to stabilize the various refiner lines which produce the pulp. TMP refiners have two distinct sets of dynamic responses, so two controllers are used. One Profit Controller provides the control required to control the fast dynamics of each refiner line. A second controller models the remaining process dynamics for control of the final pulp quality. The controllers manage the interactions of refiner feed rates, plate positions, motor loads, consistency and dilution to stabilize the operation and to minimize pulp quality variability and power consumption.

The benefits of advanced control at Catalyst were measured as:

	Freeness variability reduced by 41%
	Fiber length variability reduced by 21%
	Kraft pulp fraction reduced from 30% to less than 2%
	Refiner energy consumption reduced by 2%

The largest savings came from improved quality of the TMP pulp, which dramatically reduced the amount of kraft pulp needed by Catalyst's newsprint machine. This alone saved Catalyst about $3M per year. In addition the refiner energy savings are worth almost $1M per year. Driving this much cost out of their operation has proven timely for Catalyst in today's stressed paper markets.