Something Different
This New Brunswick mill turns hardwood logs and chips into unique products used around the world every day, and by millions of people.
by Bill Tice
Canada's forest industry isn't just about manufacturing solid wood products and pulp and paper. Just ask the people who work at the AV Nackawic mill, which is located about 45 minutes from Fredericton in the small town of Nackawic, New Brunswick. They turn wood fibre into a product that ultimately becomes an integral part of clothing, tires, drugstore goods and many other items.
The plant, which used to be the St. Anne Nackawic pulp mill, is now part of the AV Group, which is a member of the multi-national Aditya Birla Group based in Mumbai, India. The Nackawic plant specializes in producing dissolving pulp, which is a high purity, specialty grade pulp made for processing into cellulose derivatives, including rayon and acetate. The pulp produced at the AV Nackawic mill is sold internally to other Aditya Birla Group companies and ultimately becomes viscose staple fibre, which forms part of consumer products such as fabrics, tire cords and sanitary products.
Yesterday and Today
The AV Nackawic mill was originally built by Parsons & Whittemore (P&W) in the late 1960s, but according to Kevin Jewett, the New Brunswick-based AV Group vicepresident of fibre supply, P&W specialized in building plants, not operating them. "They designed and built plants and they originally built the Nackawic plant as an investment with the intention of selling it," he explains. "They ended up running the plant until 2004 when they went bankrupt and then a joint venture company between the Aditya Birla Group (75%) and Tembec (25%) took over, restarting the plant in early 2006 following some fairly significant rebuilding." Aditya Birla bought out Tembec in 2008, giving them full control of the Nackawic mill.
Most of the upgrading work was done in the digester and liquor management areas of the mill and was necessary to allow the facility to produce the more specialized dissolving grade pulps. "Basically, the biggest difference between our mill and a regular pulp mill is we remove the hemi cellulose from the product," adds Jewett.
Today, the mill runs 24 hours per day, seven days per week and employs approximately 350 people. Production capacity is approximately 500 tonnes per day of dissolving grade pulp.
Fire Supply
The fibre consumed by the mill is a mix of hardwood species, including maple, aspen and birch. "When you produce dissolving grade pulps, the blend of fibres and the consistency of the blend is absolutely critical," Jewett notes. "Once you have a recipe that works, you need to stick with it. In our case, we are fortunate to have a fibre basket in our area that provides us with that consistency."
The company's New Brunswick facilities manage two forest licences in the province - one that surrounds the Nackawic mill and another that is close to AV Cell, which is a second dissolving pulp mill owned by the company in Atholville, N.B. In total, the company manages 680,000 hectares of crown land and 37,000 hectares of its own private land. For the Nackawic plant, Jewett says about 30% of the wood supply is from government allocations with the balance purchased on the open market. He says looking forward, they do have some concerns with fibre supply starting in 2012, but he is confident they can maintain their incoming volumes. "We are forecasting a significant reduction in hardwood due to constraints that will be put in place to protect natural areas and we are concerned, but we are working closely with government to solve the issue and keep the reduction to a minimum. As a company, we have been very careful that we don't overharvest the Crown land, so we maximize the wood we source from private land. That has allowed us to develop key business relationships with private land owners that can supply us with a significant volume of wood and that should also help us get through any fibre shortages that may occur."
The Process
Right now, approximately 75% of the wood fibre coming into the Nackawic plant is round wood with the balance delivered as chips. Incoming chips are sorted into piles of aspen, maple and birch, while incoming round wood is processed through a pair of rotary debarkers from Savico. "We installed the Savico debarkers when we acquired the mill," says Stephane Laflamme, the plant's fibre procurement manager. "We handle a lot of frozen hardwood in the winter months, so we did some modifications to the debarkers to help us with that."
The debarkers were part of a turnkey wood processing facility supplied by Savico that includes the debarkers, loading equipment, conveyor systems and structural components. Both of the Savico debarkers feed one chipper, a Fulghum 8-knife 112-inch model. The chips from the round wood processing are added to the existing chip piles in the mill's chip storage area prior to being fed into the mill.
Chip handling in the storage area is completed with a pair of Cat dozers - a D8 and a D9, and a Cat 988 wheel loader. An older Dresser loader is kept on hand as a backup.
Round wood handling at the AV Nackawic mill is completed with some unique equipment. "We have four custom-built machines that are a combination of Komatsu and Koehring," Laflamme explains. "These were Koehring feller forwarders from the late 1970s and early 1980s that were assets of the woodlands department of our previous owners. They essentially had a felling head with a cab on the front and a bunk on the back so they would fell the logs and then load up the bunk for taking the logs to roadside. Since we owned them, it just made sense to bring them into the yard and use them for moving logs around and for loading the wood processing area of the mill."
To modify the machines for use in the yard, the felling heads and cabs were replaced with Komatsu PC200 excavator bodies. Essentially, the machines are now a Koehring undercarriage with a Komatsu on top. "We actually only use three of the machines on a regular basis and the fourth one is kept as a spare as parts can be hard to come by, especially for the Koehring component," Laflamme says, while adding that the mill consumes approximately 900,000 cubic metres of logs and chips annually.
Once inside the mill, the chips are processed through one of eight batch digesters and cooked in a specialized Lenzing continuous batch process (CBP). The resulting slurry is then processed with a Black Clawson Hydroflyte 250 pulp machine before moving through 99 Black Clawson can dryers, a Flakt dryer, and a baling line prior to shipment.
Markets
The shift to dissolving pulp has helped the mill through the recent worldwide downturn in the economy as many of the products manufactured from AV Nackawic's pulp are essential consumables that are sold in high population areas of Asia and the Middle East. "Like everyone, we did have a severe dip last year, but the market for Viscose has recovered and we are sitting in a fairly good position in the area of the world where Aditya Birla sells its products," Jewett explains. "With Aditya Birla, we are also attached to a very large company with a huge diet for our product. They control the supply chain right down to owning many of the retail stores that sell the finished products, so although we have to be cost effective and produce as many tonnes as we can, we have tremendous support from our parent company."
In this small corner of New Brunswick, the wood processing business is a big part of the economy. However, there's more produced here than standard forest industry products and you may find the next time you buy a piece of clothing, put new tires on your vehicle, or make a purchase at the drugstore, you are actually supporting a homegrown Atlantic Canada wood products processing facility.
