The Final Word by Jim Thompson


UPM recently announced the opening of a new Biorefinery Development Centre in Lappeenranta, Finland. We applaud any R&D efforts in the industry anywhere. We caught up with UPM with a few questions (answers by Pekka Hurskainen of UPM):

PM: What are the long-term goals of the Centre?

UPM: The long-term goal of the center is to develop technology that can be applied in our mill sites to produce new kind of products. The products are either biofuels used as transport liquids (bioethanol or biodiesel) or biochemicals (pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, technical applications, or food ingredients).

PM: What is its funding source: UPM, government, a mixture, or something else?

UPM: The funding source is mainly internal, but also government money will be asked to support the joint basic research and development work with universities.

PM: What is the Centre's view of VPP (value prior to pulping)?

UPM: Separation technologies that can be done to wood/chips/biomass before pulping is in our scope (for example separation of hemicelluloses or different kind of HWT methods). They offer very interesting ways to use smaller size processes.

We thank UPM for their answers.