Emerson Process Control Network for $1.2 Billion Chilean Pulp Mill

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources Incorporated; Houston, Texas). One of the world's largest pulp mills, under construction near the city of Valdivia, Chile, 800 kilometers south of Santiago will be using Emerson Process management's (NYSE:EMR) (St Louis, Missouri) state-of-the-art process control network incorporating the company's Plantweb digital plant architecture. Contracts worth $5.3 million were awarded to Emerson by Celulosa Arauco y Constitucion (Arauco), which is one of the world's largest forestry companies in terms of plantation size, lumber processing and production of market kraft pulp.

The new mill will produce 600,000 tons of bleached softwood and hardwood market pulp per year from pine and eucalyptus logs beginning in late 2004. Excess electricity generated at the mill will be sold to the Chilean national power grid. Arauco expects the total project to cost $1.2 billion including forest plantations, a sawmill and a panel board mill. A similar pulp mill to be built near Itata in Chile is in the planning stages.

The Plantweb architecture will include more than 3,500 fieldbus instruments and the DeltaV control system, making it the largest such installation of the fieldbus technology in the pulp and paper industry. Project design and execution services will be supplied by Emerson who will also supply predictive maintenance software to communicate with the field instruments installed in the mill to help ensure high plant reliability and availability and performance. Emerson is also expected to provide up to 21,000 hours of engineering services for installation, configuration and startup of the process automation system.

Kvaerner (OSLO:KVI) (Oslo, Norway) is supplying boilers, air pollution control systems and a chemical plant for Valdivia under a $50 million contract. The new recovery boiler will burn black liquor from the pulping process and a thermal 134 MW bubbling fluidized bed power boiler will use tree bark as fuel. The design and manufacture of the boilers has been undertaken in Finland. Kvaerner will also supply a sodium chlorate plant, together with an air pollution control system, comprising of an incinerator for the destruction of strong non-condensable gases and a vent gas scrubber.

The $90 million pulping system for the Greenfield kraft pulp mill is being supplied by Metso Paper (NYSE:MX, HELSINKI:MEOIV) Helsinki, Finland). This consists of a complete pulp mill fiber line and pulp drying system, covering all functions from cooking to pulp baling. The pulping line is designed to produce ECF (Elemental Chlorine Free) bleached market pulp from radiata pine and eucalyptus. The technology has been specially designed for the production of high quality end product with minimum environmental impact. In addition the pulp drying system features the latest developments in the field. The width of the drying machine is 8 meters.

Arauco is installing 300 ABS (STOCKHOLM:CARD) (Stockholm, Sweden) process pumps at the Valdivia mill. The order includes different types of pumps used for various positions in the mill. These include digester circulation pumps, evaporation pumps, fan pumps and some pumps for chemical preparation including pumps in cast titanium for a chlorine dioxide plant. The majority of the pumps are in stainless steel. The ABS flexible sealing system combines minimum downtime with low power consumption.

Arauco currently owns and operates four kraft pulp mills in Chile and Argentina with a combined annual capacity of 1.5 million tons of bleached an unbleached kraft pulp. The company also owns eleven sawmills, four remanufacturing plants, a plywood mill, a medium density fiberboard (MDF) mill and a high density fiberboard (HDF) mill. In 2001 group sales were $1.134 billion of which $961 million (84.3%) were exports to 31 different countries. Net income was $140.1 million registered in the face of currency problems and dropping prices on global markets.