The Metsä Group has finalised its major project at the Kemi mill in Finland. The company announced that the new pulp mill and the paperboard mill expansion at the site came into operation today, as planned. Operations will start department by department. Pulp deliveries from the new mill to customers are said to begin in October.
The new Kemi bioproduct mill will produce some 1.5 million tpy of softwood and hardwood pulp, increasing Kemi's pulp capacity by almost 900,000 tpy. It replaces an existing pulp line with a capacity of 620,000 tpy, which was permanently shut down. The new facility will also generate 2 TWh of renewable electricity. It uses zero fossil fuels and will be completely waste-free by 2030, according to Metsä Group.
Metsä explains that thanks to its environmentally efficient solutions, the new mill’s emissions are lower than the limits specified in the currently valid environmental permit for the closed Kemi pulp mill, despite the considerable increase in production capacity. The bioproduct mill will use 7.6 million m³ of wood per year, 4.5 million m³ more than the old mill.
At the paperboard mill, white-top kraftliner capacity has been expanded. Modernisation and bottleneck investments allowed for an increase in production capacity by around 40,000 tpy to 465,000 tpy, says Metsä. The investments made and the integration of the bioproduct mill will reduce the paperboard mill's water consumption by 40 per cent and its energy use by 5 per cent per tonne of kraftliner produced, according to the group.
