Good or bad, big changes are stressful. So, even if it’s growing, when an industry like pulp and paper experiences fundamental transitions, it helps to have a partner who’s been in it for decades.
“Honeywell has been digitalizing the pulp and paper industry for 50 years, and it presently supplies more than a third of global paper manufacturers,” said Kimmo Koivula, business development manager for pulp and paper at Honeywell, who presented in the demo center at the 2024 Honeywell Users Group in Dallas. “We have a large, worldwide network of mills at the cutting edge of new machinery and automation.”
Koivula reported that Honeywell has implemented about 500,000 process control points at 30 greenfield mills over the past 10 years.
Despite these gains, Koivula reported that the pulp and paper industry still faces several major challenges, including:
- Increasing costs for raw materials, production and maximizing overall equipment effectiveness (OEE);
- Personnel capabilities and effectiveness that are impacted by retiring veterans and high turnover, in turn fueling an overall loss of skills and capabilities;
- Continuously changing markets due to grade transitions, fluctuating prices and costs and demand for newer products and revenue; and
- Environmental compliance that requires staying within permit limits, replacing fossil fuels with alternates and addressing carbon sink issues.
“Digitalization can help with all these issues by adapting the mill to process automation,” said Koivula. “It’s already gone on for a long time elsewhere, but now digitalization is bringing more value to the pulp and paper industry by making more data available and accelerating innovations.”
Benefits of transformation
Koivula reported the primary advantage of adopting digitalization in pulp and paper processes is that it lets them migrate from siloed operations to achieve greater collaboration and data-based decision-making. More specifically, people in siloed facilities are at greater risk and harder to retain, while their operations are more variable and prone to losing opportunities, and their assets risk downtime when replacing obsolete devices. Meanwhile, digitalized processes experience fewer incidents, enable more competent and productive workforces, increase throughput and reduce costs, emissions and downtime.
“Removing silos beings data together, joins people, processes and assets more closely, and also improves cybersecurity, analytics and the performance of automation solutions,” explained Koivula. “Digitalization also improves cost disciplines that increase the bottom line.”
In fact, digitalization can increase a pulp and paper unit’s margins by 10-15%. This includes increasing worker productivity by 10-40% and reducing NOx and CO emissions by 7%. Further, digitalization reduces maintenance and downtime costs; energy consumption by evaporators, recovery boilers and lime kilns; fiber costs of digestion and O2 delignification; and by 2.3 USD/ADt; and chemical consumption associated with O2 delignification, bleaching, CIO2 and recausticizing.
“Digitalizing also enables advanced process control (APC) for individual units, which allows mill-wide optimization, as well as adding machine learning (ML) for even more optimization,” added Koivula. “This is like mastering APC on top of asset performance management (APM).”
