Domestic Energy Parks: An Approach to Producing Low Carbon Energy Products from Domestic Resources by Leveraging Infrastructure at Existing U.S. Pulp and Paper Mills

Faced with growing energy demand, national energy security concerns, and looming legislation to regulate CO2, the U.S. must grapple with a multitude of issues when examining its future energy supply. The current political focus is on a strong push to develop an industry around domestically sourced and produced, low-carbon liquid fuels and electricity. In this essay, we investigate the potential to retrofit the equipment of an existing pulp and paper facility with gasification technologies to create an “Energy Park” that cost effectively blends coal and biomass to produce a suite of low-carbon energy products in addition to its core fiber industry outputs. Historically, the pulp and paper industry has been one of the most energy intensive industries in the U.S, and currently confronts increasing competition in the expanding globalized marketplace. The system model presented here explores options for the industry to become a first mover of a technology platform that offers significant potential benefits but currently faces deployment hurdles.. By utilizing existing infrastructure and energy handling capabilities, and taking advantage of important access to transmission, rail, and markets, the pulp and paper industry could provide a unique, albeit limited, opportunity to commercially demonstrate advanced gasification technologies that could then be applied on a larger scale in new greenfield applications.