Canfor Pulp Products and Licella Fibre Fuels enter into a biofuels-biochemicals joint venture agreement
Licella Fibre Fuels Pty Ltd. and Canfor Pulp Products Inc., through its subsidiary Canfor Pulp Ltd., have signed an agreement to form a joint-venture under the name Licella Pulp Joint Venture.
Licella Pulp Joint Venture is a strategic relationship between the two companies that will investigate opportunities to integrate Licella’s unique Catalytic Hydrothermal Reactor (Cat-HTR) upgrading platform into Canfor Pulp’s kraft and mechanical pulp mills to economically convert biomass, including wood residues from Canfor Pulp’s kraft pulping processes, into bio-crude oil, to produce next generation biofuels and biochemicals.
This additional residue stream refining would allow Canfor Pulp to further optimise their pulp production capacity. Upon successful integration of the Cat-HTR technology, the Licella Pulp Joint Venture would look towards offering this solution to other third-party kraft and mechanical pulp mills.
This agreement follows a successful program of preliminary trials conducted on feedstock from Canfor Pulp’s Prince George, British Columbia, Canada pulp mill at Licella’s pilot plants located in New South Wales, Australia.
In these trials, wood residue streams from Canfor Pulp’s kraft process were successfully converted into a stable bio-crude oil.
“Biofuels and biochemicals represent the next frontier in the utilisation of sustainable wood fibre to produce green energy and chemicals,” said Don Kayne, CEO of CPPI. “This initiative underscores Canfor Pulp’s commitment to innovation and the importance of green energy and chemicals in our future product mix, and we look forward to developing this potentially transforming technology with Licella.”
“The Cat-HTR process is a strong technical fit for the kraft process,” said Brett Robinson, president of CPPI. “The opportunity to directly produce advanced biofuels from our existing streams could transition Canfor Pulp from being strictly a pulp and paper manufacturer to a bio-energy producer as well. The Licella technology has significant similarities to our existing processes which makes this partnership a natural fit.”
“Licella’s Cat-HTR technology may add significant value to Canfor Pulp’s kraft process by creating new products from Canfor Pulp’s waste streams,” said Len Humphreys, CEO of Licella. “What we are potentially building towards is a bio-refinery to utilise the entire tree, rather than part of the tree.”
Licella is a subsidiary of Licella Pty. Limited, which in turn is a subsidiary of Ignite Energy Resources Ltd. (IER), an Australian public unlisted natural resource and energy technology development company. IER has developed a proprietary lignite and biomass upgrading platform, the Catalytic Hydrothermal Reactor (Cat-HTR). Through the Cat-HTR technology, IER is re-energising resources and creating a bridge to a lower carbon future. IER operates via three subsidiaries, Ignite Resources Pty. Ltd. (applying Cat-HTR to lignite), Licella Pty. Ltd. (applying Cat-HTR to biomass) and Gippsland Gas Pty. Ltd. (biogenic natural gas resource).
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