Sappi Reschedules $37 Million Recovery Boiler Project from Spring to Fall

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Sappi Fine Paper North America, a division of Sappi Limited (NYSE:SPP) (Johannesburg, South Africa), has rescheduled plans to modernize a recovery boiler and chemical recovery area at the company's Somerset mill in Skowhegan, Maine.

The company's initial plans were to commence with a 30-day outage this April to rebuild the recovery boiler and convert two evaporators, in addition to installing two new concentrators. Sappi plans to execute the 30-day liquor-to-liquor project on October 1. Sappi's $37 million investment will allow the company to increase the capacity for burning black liquor, which is a renewable energy source that will replace consumption of more than 100,000 barrels of oil per year.

The mill's recovery boiler, a two-drum Combustion Engineering unit, started in 1975 and was designed for 5 million pounds per day and 600,000 pounds per hour of solids, and 1,050 pounds-force per square inch gauge. The unit was rebuilt by Alstom in 1991. Sappi will modernize the air-handling system and complete generating bank replacement.

Evaporators #5 and #6 will be converted from falling film to low-energy, high-recirculation units, and will operate in a series as opposed to one or the other. Two new concentrators will be added.

URS Washington Group (Skowhegan, Maine) and the Atlanta, Georgia, office of Alstom (Paris, France) are providing engineering and support services to the project.

The Skowhegan mill employs approximately 840 workers, and produces 795,000 metric tons of paper and 490,000 metric tons of pulp. Major operations at the site include three paper machines and a power plant with the ability to produce 108 megawatts.

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