Climate ambitions from Norske Skog Saugbrugs
02/11/2021
Norske Skog Saugbrugs has integrated the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as a key part of its business strategy. Head of HES & QA Lisa Grimstad is also responsible for sustainability and for reporting on emission reduction. “For us at Saugbrugs, it starts with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We report every year on our ambitions, specific targets and performance for each of the relevant SDGs, including SDG 13 on climate action,” says Lisa Grimstad.
Reduced footprint by 97% since 2004
Norske Skog has worked on reducing climate emissions over many years, and has achieved significant reductions. In 2020 the mill reached a level of 1185 tonnes CO2–emissions. based on the EU ETS regime. This is a reduction of 97 % since 2004. The shut down of the mill’s oil boiler in 2021 will reduce the carbon footprint with another 20% compared to 2020 performance.
“One of the main reasons behind achieving such large emission cuts is the energy recovery from our thermal mechanical pulping (TMP) process. This process is the largest electricity consumption at our mill, and over the last decade, we have been able to reduce the specific energy consumption through this process by 37 %. Today the generation of thermal energy consist of 99.8 % renewable energy; mostly heat recovered from the TMP process and, combustion of both internal and external bio-fuel,” Lisa Grimstad explains.
Climate and circular economy integrated in the business plan
And the long-term ambitions at Saugbrugs are even higher.
“We have set a specific target to reduce the CO2 emission according to the EU ETS regime by 20 % compared to 2020 and to have a net zero CO2 emission kg/ton paper in 2030,” Lisa Grimstad says.
To achieve this, alongside other environmental and energy efficiency benefits, Saugbrugs has an integrated plan for circular economy at the mill.
“We are already working on several circular economy initiatives, and we see that the use of resources and energy is tightly connected to business results. We work on reducing, reusing and recycling all the resources we use at our mill, including energy,” says Lisa Grimstad.
After extensive development work and successful investments over several years, Norske Skog Saugbrugs has created one of the world’s most energy efficient processes to produce thermo-mechanical pulp (TMP) for SC- and UMI-paper. With the NEXT and Therminator projects that were implemented in the beginning of 2021 the mill has improved their processes further. These projects were funded by ENOVA and the NOX-Fund with a total of NOK 66 million. Norske Skog Saugbrugs is investing a total of NOK 165 million in these energy-efficiency measures at the plant.