The newly formed sustainability partnership
Sappi Gratkorns goal was to reduce their steam consumption and therefore reduce their annual cost of lowering their environmental impact. In the year 2021, Sappi Gratkorn entered into a sustainability partnership with Heat Management to investigate ways of furthering their eco-effective journey.
It was determined that Heat Managements High Impact Sootblowing System™ was an appropriate solution to implement into the boiler’s superheater, in order to achieve more sootblowing with less steam. Sappi Gratkorn, like most red liquor recovery boilers, operates the steam sootblowing in separate cycles. This makes the HISS™ operation comparable to power boilers with various fuels like biomass and waste.
Sappi Gratkorn is renowned to streamline its mill for a better environment. Other than implementing HISS™, they have driven several initiatives regarding renewable energy and reducing waste. Furthermore, they have been awarded multiple awards for their continuous strive for green operations.
The calculated action that lead to less waste
The mill has 13 sootblowers in the superheater. They wanted to reduce their steam consumption and stabilise their sootblowing steam flow to avoid pressure variations on the steam net. The environmental investment in HISS™ was therefore a calculated action to further evolve their operations.
The benefits for the environment by saving steam is linked to conserving more energy and reduced fuel- and water consumption when producing the steam. After installing HISS™, Sappi Gratkorn concluded that they had saved 43% of their annual sootblowing steam and had halved the time for their cleaning cycles which is higher than the initial guarantee from Heat Management.
Thomas Ladinek, Production Engineer says, “Sappi Gratkorn’s continuous strive for improvement, including the optimized steam sootblowing technology HISS™, makes us highly competitive in unlocking the power of trees to make every day more sustainable and to continue solving sustainability challenges with innovative partners.”
Comparing the costs of implementing the system and their savings in annual costs linked to steam sootblowing, Sappi Gratkorn had a return on investment in less than a year after commissioning. Due to increasing the load of their boiler, their savings can even go beyond what was initially expected from the savings of steam costs. This is what Heat Management means with the slogan, “Beyond Technical Specification”.
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