Posted on 05/02/2020 3:04:37 PM PDT by crz
Maine mill explosion most likely will end the economy for an entire community. WARNING! Colorful language.
Don’t go scuba diving near a pulp mill. The scent will stay with you for days.
I spent 35 years in the wood pulp industry. Mostly in export sales. But lots of time in pulp mills touring customers around.
A digester is essentially like a kitchen pressure cooker. Except it holds 25 tons of chipped wood and is full of sulphur based chemicals, among others. Drive near (like with in miles) of a moden pulp mill and you smell rotten eggs. Or as pulp and paper makers say "the smell of money"!
There were two places that always had me edgy. The digester room and the recovery boiler. (recovers waste chemicals to use them again). One guy described the boiler as "it's essentially a managed bomb"
Now I am no longer a complete ignoramus about something like pulp processing!
It is what I love about the Internet, and is what Vannevar Bush had in mind back in 1945 when he published his famous "As We May Think" essay which foresaw the Internet.
I am currently trying to learn celestial navigation via YouTube, which has always fascinated me. I doubt I'll ever have to use it, but being an amateur naval historian, it is one more thing I will at least have a clue about. I just finished listening to Shackelton's "South", and boy, when you understand a little bit about celestial navigation, you realize just how absolutely astonishing that is!
Five men, Arctic Winter, 22 foot lifeboat with partial canvas covering, 800 miles, three celestial fixes in seventeen days, and they hit a speck of an island they were aiming for.
But anyway, that is why I love the Internet. Next time someone mentions "black liquor" in pulp processing, I will have a conversational clue...:) Hooray for the Internet!
My first thought was that people better start taking cover. You could see some of the debris coming down in the distance, and at about the 40 second mark the first debris started hitting the truck with the camera, and continued for about 30 seconds.
Man, I’ll just bet it does! Worse than my hockey gear!
A fire broke out in a Kraft paper mill in Coosa, Ga. earlier this year. 10:30 pm Sunday 03/18/2020. Right about shift change. Is it negligence or what?!
Tryin’ to crank out that pulp for more toilet paper... kaboom.
But the guy opened the book in the first chapter talking about how dangerous boilers of any type were, and all the steamship and train disasters with huge loss of life caused by boiler explosions.
Great read!
Anyway, your wariness of those digesters is likely well rooted in your knowledge and experience.
Got pulp?
A lot of times it amounts to that-if the bull gang isnt doing their job and cleaning up. Then there are times when it isnt anyone’s fault but mechanical.
I have never seen a whole pulp mill blow like that-EVER.
Now I have seen boilers blow. The one where I used to live blew and killed a couple guys. I cant remember what caused that.
For instance. This past year the guys up north told me they were doing work on the drum debarker at the local mill were I used to live and deliver wood to. The maint’ crew told the mill managers that the upper part of the debarker needed work real bad. Guess what? They told them to forget it and two weeks later the debarker went down for good. They have been working on it for a month now.
The problem is with these N American mills is that they are for the most part older mills. If not older, then they are run down because these mills are being bought and run by investment companies that could give a rip. Run em, get the money out and re sell them.
Lots of blame that can be thrown around.
Was a pressure vessel rupture. Water/pulp and heat, basically a steam vessel.
Remember the Boston Bombers a few years ago and what they used?
I asked one of my cousins who work at a mill in WI just a few hours ago. I got two who work at mills.
He said it looked to them that the one digester blew and knocked a stack down into the other digester.
I guess that mill had two digesters side by side or something.
Also, I wonder if that mill was a direct feed from the ground wood dept. I didnt see any chip piles round there in the drone footage. Also, I wonder if they used Roberts Grinders instead of chippers, which would explain the direct feed.
They can still run the papermill if they havent had any damage in it-beside the boilers and those looked to me they were still going.
They’d have to put in beaters and all, and purchase bailed pulp in the meantime though.
If I were the owners, in no way would I let the permits go on that pulp mill. I’d put in a new pulping process and get it back up and running.
I work in a Kraft paper mill. We hear it was a Kamyr digester that blew. Thank God there wasnt more injur8es.
per that article.
“Approximately 7 tonnes of black liquor are produced in the manufacture of one tonne of pulp.
A tax credit created by the U.S. Congress in 2005 as part of the 2005 Highway Bill to reward and support the use of liquid alternative fuel derived from hydrocarbons in the transportation sector was expanded in 2007 to include non-mobile uses of liquid alternative fuel derived from biomass. This change meant that, in addition to fish processors, animal renderers and meat packers, kraft pulp producers became eligible for the tax credit as a result of their generation and use of black liquor to make energy. For one large company (International Paper) this could amount to as much as $3.7 billion in benefits.[7][12] Weyerhaeuser announced in May 2009 that it was also pursuing the tax credit.[13] While some[who?] have criticized the paper industry’s eligibility for the alternative fuel mix tax credit on the grounds that it is increasing fossil fuel use, the industry has countered that adding a fossil fuel is actually a requirement of the law and that, regardless, this does not result in a net increase in fossil fuel use since companies are merely replacing the existing fossil fuel they already mix with black liquor—natural gas—with one of the three fuels specified by the law: gasoline, kerosene or diesel. The bio-fuel credit for black liquor ended on January 1, 2010.”
That explains why the Escanaba Mich mill dropped its plans to use Spent Black Liquor for bio energy. They had planned to let a Swedish company come in and refine that stuff down for Bio Fuels and sell it on the market. OR, use it in NEW boilers that the electrical company had planned to put in for co-generation. Rules, regulations and no tax incentive prevented that. BTW, that mill produces enough power to provide the city of Green Bay Wisconsin electricity per day. If they simply ran for power. But they use that power to run that mill. A new co-generation plant would have provided about the same amount of power. The thing is, this fuel would have provided ON SITE and no transportation of fuel to that electrical plant.
Its a miracle nobody was KILLED.
We've seen almost everything so we know how to cover almost anything...
Looked it up on the map—US Route 2 goes through the area, heading toward NH. One of the towns west of there is Newry, home of that brewpub that lost their license for daring to serve a dining public.
in case you are wondering, paper mills often blow up - due to the large boilers they have
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