Quebec paper mill world’s first to test new industrial carbon capture technology

A Quebec pulp and paper plant will test the world’s first industrial-scale use of a novel carbon capture technology that could slash emissions from heavy polluting factories, refineries and generating plants.

The near-$24 million project at the Kruger Wayagamack mill in Trois-Rivieres will install a system developed by Mantel Capture that promises to straightaway cut CO₂ by 2,000 tonnes a year, a five per cent reduction, by absorbing then “boiling off” the emissions for use as an industrial heat source.  

"This project has the potential to offer a sustainable carbon capture, utilization and storage solution for the entire manufacturing sector," said Justin Paillé, senior vice president of manufacturing at Kruger Pulp & Paper, in a statement. 

The project, which received nearly $18 million in federal and provincial backing, provided the company with an opportunity to take part in high-level research and development that would benefit the wider sector in its decarbonization efforts, he added. 

Kruger expects to capture up to five tonnes of CO₂ per day from the Wayagamack mill once the two-year demonstration project starts operating in mid-2025. A company spokesperson told Canada’s National Observer that the technology would “absolutely” be rolled out across its 10 mills in North America if the test phase was successful.

Mantel’s carbon capture technology, based on molten borate salt, has been in development at lab-scale for several years. But the Boston start-up, founded by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, appears to have cracked the code to commercialize it: an ultra-high-temperature system with very low total energy losses.

How it works

Mantel’s concept, which received a US$30 million investment in September from a Shell-led venture capital group, consists of two phases. 

First, flue gas from an industrial facility is channeled into a liquid boron salt-based absorber unit running at 600 C to capture the emissions. The removed CO₂ is then transferred to the desorber, where it is boiled off at 800 C to generate heat or steam, for use in industrial processes such as pulping. 

The game-changer is the fluid used to absorb CO₂ — high temperature liquid borate salt — which is much more efficient than conventional amine-based solvents used in other systems to capture CO₂ from flue gas.  

“We are absorbing and desorbing at very high temperatures — unlike conventional carbon capture systems which do this at low temperatures — with a lot of energy loss,” said Danielle Rapson, Mantel’s chief operating officer. 

"We lose as much energy on desorption but recover it all on absorption, as an exothermic [heat-generating] reaction which can be turned into steam and used on site as useful energy," she told Canada's National Observer. 

“This material makes that possible,” Rapson said. 

Fuel for the system, which captures over 90 per cent of its own emissions, can range from fossil gas and waste fuels to biomass — and will be convertible to work with hydrogen in the future, said Rapson.

Although the demonstrator project will capture a small volume of CO2, the technology requires vastly less energy – about 0.1 gigajoule per tonne versus 2.5 gigajoule per tonne for other carbon capture methods. This greater efficiency will mean the cost of decarbonizing big industrial facilities becomes economic.

Shift industry thinking

“This will allow industry to completely shift the way it thinks about carbon capture, away from being seen as a parasitic process” in cost-of-energy terms, said Rapson.

Carbon capture has been a technology linked almost exclusively with the oil and gas sector. But the Wayagamack project could awaken industry to the wider potential for decarbonizing heavy-emitting sectors, she said.

"This technology is applicable anywhere there are emissions linked to steam or heat production on site," Rapson said. "Pulp and paper, yes, but the petrochemicals, power generation, and the food and beverage sectors are also ideally suited."

Mantel has said its system could capture carbon for about US$30-50 a tonne at a scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of tonnes, making it economically viable in countries with carbon capture incentives or emissions taxes.

The company sees Canada as an initial $6 billion market for the technology, said Rapson, adding it could expand to be worth $50 billion “if the entire industrial landscape here were to be decarbonized.”

A major commercial-scale project based on Mantel’s molten borates technology could be online within three years in Alberta, she said. 

The prairie province is already home to one of the world's largest carbon capture-outfitted biomass plants at forestry giant West Fraser's Hinton pulp mill, where a project with Nova Scotia-based TorchLight Bioresources aims to capture 1-1.3 megatonnes of CO₂ a year starting in 2027.

Canada’s pulp and paper industry produces 7.6 million tonnes of the country's total 685 million tonnes of CO₂ a year. 

Globally, pulp and paper production accounted for two per cent of all emissions from industry, according to 2022 data from the International Energy Agency.