Pulp friction
A day in the life of those working in Northern Pulp’s Abercrombie Point operation
Editor’s Note: This week, journalists of SaltWire Network were given an opportunity to do a tour of the Northern Pulp plant and sit down with the people who run it to talk openly about how the mill operates, the concerns people have in the community and the future of the business as well as the replacement of the existing Boat Harbour Treatment Facility. The articles that appear in this issue and in Monday’s edition are a result of those discussions as well as independent interviews and research done by our reporters. We hope these articles will provide a closer look into a company which, for many years, has been shrouded in controversy and address the concerns of people in the community head on.
On Wednesday Jim Crockett had 5,000 tonnes of northern bleached softwood kraft pulp and room for only 2,000 more.
“This is what happens when you have a snow storm on a weekend,” said Northern Pulp’s machine room superintendent.
An average day sees his crew cut and stack the sheets of kraft pulp (the stuff that gives toilet paper and tissue its strength) into 3,300 bales that weigh in at 625 pounds apiece, load them into 50 shipping containers and wave good-bye.
A third of Nova Scotia’s total exports to China goes through his warehouse daily, making the Pictou County pulp mill the Port of Halifax’s biggest shipper.
“The whole idea is to keep the cans flowing,” said Crockett.
“This place is like a great big loop. You don’t like to shut down because it puts your equipment sort of in harm’s way.”
So if his warehouse fills, they have a problem.
If any of the complex mechanical, chemical or biological processes at this immense mill at Abercrombie Point hits a snag then everything grinds to a halt.
Since opening in 1967 Northern Pulp has been both a source of economic activity and controversy in Pictou County. Both will be addressed by this series over the coming days as it attempts to lay out the facts in black and white to inform an important discussion about the mill’s role and future in this province. But beyond the headlines Northern Pulp is also a community of 339 Nova Scotians who make 270,000 tonnes of kraft pulp annually. This is how they do it.
“He doesn’t have a deal with Irving so he comes all the way down from the Miramichi because we’re the only other customer,” said wood yard supervisor Blaise O’Laney. He watched the driver of the tandem 18-wheeler unhook his tractor from the trailer, pull it off the ramp and then go into a little building.
Two massive hydraulic rams tipped his truck up to near a 90-degree angle and dumped its load of woodchips like a child would empty a box of Smarties into her mouth. Three 18-wheelers sat waiting for their turn.
In total 70 trucks carrying wood chips and 60 carrying logs arrive to feed Northern Pulp daily.
Logs are sorted with the twisted, too small, or rot-bearing ones getting chipped onsite and the good ones going to saw mills.
In a dark room Sandy MacDonald watched the chips carried into the mill via conveyer belt.
It’s one of the many screens ringing the pulping technician’s control station — flow rate, temperature, pressure and chemistry are his tools.
“There could be snow coming in on the chips, there could be rotten chips, the strength of the liquor could change or a pump can just quit,” said MacDonald.
“This is not an exact science. You kind of feel it. But you can’t not do anything right.”
MacDonald’s job is to separate the fibres of the wood chips from the glue (lignin) that binds them together in the tree.
He starts by digesting them under heat in a big pressurized tank filled with sodium hydroxide, sodium sulfide and water.
The long fibres of the spruce and fir tree are why Northern Pulp is still here while so many other mills around North America have been driven out of business by newer facilities in Asia and South America that have cheaper labour costs, less environmental regulation and access to faster growing (cheaper) Eucalyptus and Acacia wood fibre.
But the fibres of those hardwoods are about half the length of that of the varied spruces and balsam fir because they grow in a gentler climate – meaning they make a weaker paper. No one likes it when their toilet paper tears at an inopportune moment, so markets for this plant’s northern bleached kraft pulp remain strong.
From his touch screen monitors MacDonald flows the brown goopy liquid coming out of the digester over big cylinders wrapped in canvas that have something like a giant Shop vac hooked up to them. The now liquefied lignin is sucked out of the mixture … making it less goopy.
Now the wood fibre is Dave Wheadon’s responsibility.
At a glowing ring of screens across from MacDonald, Wheadon’s job is to make the wet cardboard-looking stuff into white, fluffy stuff.
His tools are chemicals – he funnels the fibres through five big tumblers where they are bleached using chlorine dioxide, hydrogen peroxide and oxygen.
Through these processes the seemingly convoluted maze of pipes head in different directions.
The sulfides and lignin all head to the recovery boiler.
Robert Fry was waiting for them with his own bank of computer screens.
His team runs the two giant furnaces that are responsible for the mill’s two big smoke stacks.
In one, known as the recovery boiler, they burn the mixture of lignin and sulfides known in the industry as black liquor. The smoke travels up past the recently completed $35 million precipitator that uses static electricity to remove the solid chemical particles, which are then combined with the sulfides (which don’t burn) at the bottom of the furnace, and sent to a lime kiln before being reused.
Using some of the 80,000 cubic metres of water pumped into the plant from the Middle River, the boiler produces 400,000 pounds of steam an hour.
Fry’s other stack comes from the power boiler.
It uses natural gas to fire a furnace that burns bark waste purchased from 16 sawmills around the province.
It’s this giant woodstove that has brought the mill heat of late. In October the mill was fined $697.50 by the Department of Environment for having too much fine particulate matter in three of its past ten stack tests.
Amongst its many uses, the steam produced from the recovery boiler and power boiler runs a 25-megawatt generator that supplies 90 per cent of the mill’s power.
Fry’s steam also headed to Kevin MacLaughlin.
“Usually Robert sends it to me with a smile,” said MacLaughlin.
The pulp machine operator was squishing the moisture out of the pulp while forming it into a fast-moving continuous sheet 208 inches wide by 2,600 feet long. He used Fry’s steam to heat air blasted onto the sheet by 256 fans that brought it down to a moisture content of 5 per cent by the time it was chopped up and landed in Crockett’s rapidly filling warehouse.
But it’s not the stiff white sheets of kraft pulp coming out of the plant that has raised the storm.
It’s the 70,000 cubic metres of effluent flowing through a pipe under the East River to the Boat Harbour effluent treatment facility.
In 2014 the 36-inch pipe leading to the facility burst, spewing 47 million litres of untreated effluent into a wetland. Within hours the Pictou Landing First Nation had blockaded the ruptured pipe and kept the mill shut down until the province relented and passed legislation demanding a new facility be built by 2020.
The province owns the existing treatment facility and leases it to Northern Pulp for $25,000 a month.
What that new facility will do
and who pays for it will be discussed in other articles in this series.
Mike Pidgeon knows what many of his Pictou County neighbours think of where he works.
He wasn’t keen on having reporters visit or his picture taken but the facility operator was willing to talk.
After the effluent which carries all the chemical components of trees not turned into pulp or burnt for energy along with remnant chemical additives arrives it spends 12-16 hours in a pond where particulate floats to the top or settles to the bottom. Once a year the pond is emptied and the bottom dredged of settled chemicals that are taken back to Northern Pulp and landfilled.
After its time in the settling pond, the water flows into another large pond that has dozens of big electric motors churning the water to hyper-oxygenate it.
Ultimately, Pidgeon’s job is to keep the bacteria in this pond happy so they eat all the organic residue flowing into it. He manages the oxygen concentration, nutrients and the pH level of the effluent coming through the pipe.
Through his microscope he watches little organisms, daphnia, philidina, amoebas and ciliates that prey on the bacteria that are too small for him to see.
“On a slow day you might see some little ones come along,” said Pidgeon.
“Ideally you like to see the bulk of your (bacterial) activity up front and want to see the bacteria eat bacteria, die and settle to the bottom by the end of the pond.”
Pidgeon maintains that what flows out of his facility into the larger Boat Harbour lagoon and thence through a dam into the Northumberland Strait is clean and passes Department of Environment testing.
But the mill, under different operators, dumped untreated effluent here for five years before the province built Boat Harbour in 1972. And there was Canso Chemicals, which also used the facility for about a decade and rumours persist of mercury leak from it during the 1980s.
“That was before my time and I can’t speak to it,” said Pidgeon.
“But I’ve got the key to the gate and I know what has come in during my time here. This is a good facility.”