"GLOBAL CARE AND ECONOMIC CRISIS DO NOT CONTRADICT EACH OTHER"

Interview with the members of the ANDRITZ Executive Board on the importance of "Global Care" for the ANDRITZ GROUP, the contribution ANDRITZ is making for its customers in this area, and why the global economic crisis and environmental/climate protection do not contradict each other.

ANDRITZ offers a broad range of products and services for renewable energies as well as environmental and climate protection. Is this still appropriate in times of global economic weakness and declining capital investments?

Wolfgang Leitner: Especially in times of economic difficulties, many of our customers will strive to increase their competitiveness in order to retain their market position and to emerge from the crisis even stronger. The main goals are a further reduction of raw material and energy use or – with the same raw material and energy input – increased productivity of the invested capital. Due to our successful research and development work, we can offer improved technologies that help our customers achieve these goals, both in new projects and in the services area.

With "Global Care" we focus on climate protection and the question of what contributions ANDRITZ can make, all the while taking into account the goals of our customers with respect to efficiency and productivity increase. Saving raw materials and energy is a very pressing topic, especially in times of economic crisis. In difficult economic times, many of our customers use our newest technologies in order to secure a good competitive position for the future. Thus, "Global Care" and economic crisis do not contradict each other.

Global warming – even though its true causes have not been determined with absolute certainty – is a topic that concerns every one of us in his or her daily life and one which will be felt even more heavily by all of us in the future. Every individual and every company should, therefore, take up this challenge. The Kyoto Protocol was the first international agreement to formulate binding goals on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The European Union is relying on energy efficiency and the increased use of renewable energies in order to achieve its climate protection goals. In the USA, too, there is a trend toward utilizing more renewable energies.

What goals and strategies does ANDRITZ pursue in the "Global Care" area?

Our focus is on energy efficiency and renewable energies. This focus is an integral part of our corporate strategy, which has remained successful for over ten years without major changes. We achieve our strong organic growth also through intensive research and development work, which is often carried out in close cooperation with customers and yields new technologies that help increase our customers’ competitiveness. Thus, products and technologies for renewable energies already account for some 50% of the ANDRITZ GROUP’s total sales. Our goal is a further increase during the years to come.

You mentioned that the climate protection policy of the European Union and the USA, besides supporting energy efficiency, is favoring renewable energy sources. Where has ANDRITZ been active here?

Where renewable energies are concerned, we focus on hydropower and biomass. ANDRITZ is among the three leading suppliers of hydropower equipment in the world. As many as 150 million people receive their electricity from hydropower plants delivered by ANDRITZ. Our globally installed hydropower equipment helps to reduce CO₂ emissions by approximately 38 million tons per year.

Our drying and pelleting plants convert biomass to fuel pellets. ANDRITZ recovery boilers are used in the pulp and paper industry to generate energy from black liquor, a waste product from the pulping process. This enables modern pulp mills not only to fully cover their own energy needs but to sell excess energy to the public grid. Pulp mills will, thus, become increasingly independent of fossil fuels. Some mills have even started to built their own power stations to generate electricity from biomass for the grid. For these applications, ANDRITZ also has the appropriate technology – fluidized bed boilers – which are being supplied for a number of projects, some of which are on the Iberian Peninsula.

We are cooperating with the Finnish forestry company UPM to develop technology for forest residue gasification to produce biofuel. Forest residue is one of the most promising materials for sustainable biofuel production. If the pilot tests are successful, UPM plans to build an industrial plant for which ANDRITZ is providing design work.

Which technologies does ANDRITZ PULP & PAPER offer in this area? What are the savings and efficiency increase potentials for the customer?

Karl Hornhofer: As a full-line supplier, ANDRITZ is able to offer greenfield pulp and paper mills that are optimized energy-wise right from the start. In the process design and layout stage, ANDRITZ will do mill-wide energy balance calculations, thus simultaneously optimizing the individual process steps. Our research and development work has a very favorable effect on the investment, operating, and energy costs of customer plants. In this context, I would like to mention three examples of technologies that massively boost energy efficiency, thus improving the CO₂ balance while at the same time leading to increased profitability for our customers.

Our HERB (High Energy Recover Boiler), in particular, operates at maximum pressure and temperature, thus achieving significantly higher thermodynamic efficiency, which helps to maximize power generation. This has been proven with the HERB at SCA’s Östrand mill, Sweden, which generates 500 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year – enough to make the mill virtually energy self-sufficient.

The only consumer of fossil energy in a pulp mill that remains is the rotary kiln for burnt lime production, which is usually gas- or oil-fired. To become independent of fossil fuels for the kiln as well, it would be possible to use wood gas produced by the gasification of waste wood and bark in a modern fluidized bed gasifier.

Quite new in our portfolio are fluidized bed boilers, which are used to produce electricity from biomass such as wood and waste wood. Five boilers are being delivered to customers in Spain, Portugal, and Estonia to produce ‘green’ electricity for the public grid.

What role do energy topics play in services for the pulp and paper industry?

Humbert Köfler: Energy has become an essential cost factor for our pulp and paper producing customers. In times of high energy prices and in view of the call for sustainable production, energy consumption has become key. We are aware of the importance of energy efficiency and have for many years worked towards further reducing the energy consumption of our products and of existing customer plants. We offer technologies and services that enable customers to significantly reduce energy consumption, to recover even more energy from the production process, and to increase the generation of electric power.

Services, in particular, can achieve significant savings at comparatively low costs. Take the production of mechanical pulp, for instance. There are still production lines running without heat recovery. By installing a heat recovery system, we can recover one ton of steam for every one megawatt of applied energy. This translates into possible energy savings of up to 30%. In thermo-mechanical pulp production, we have helped customers achieve energy savings of up to 10% by advising them on the right refiner plate design for their application.

How do you expect the hydropower segment to develop in view of the current economic crisis and increased environmental protection efforts? What technologies does ANDRITZ HYDRO offer?

Friedrich Papst: The importance of hydropower as the major renewable energy source will further increase due to the international efforts for climate protection. Currently, the share of renewable energy sources in global power generation is approximately 20%, almost 90% of which comes from hydropower. However, only about one-third of the realistic hydropower potential has been harnessed globally, and existing hydropower stations still offer considerable potential for capacity and efficiency increases.

Due to the economic crisis, many governments have initiated intensive infrastructural measures, which include – in many cases – investments in the construction of new, or the upgrade of existing, hydropower plants to support the economy. Thus, the increased use of renewable energy sources – with its positive effect on the environment – is coming as a favorable side-effect of the economic crisis. We are, therefore, optimistic that ANDRITZ HYDRO’s business will develop favorably.

In hydropower, there is also considerable potential for output increases through the rehabilitation and upgrade of existing plants. For instance, the general overhaul that we carried out in a power station on the Danube in Romania boosted its output from 1,068 to nearly 1,200 megawatts. This corresponds to the construction of a new midsize station.

What developments can be expected in the METALS and the ENVIRONMENT & PROCESS business areas? How can ANDRITZ contribute to a sustainable development and minimized use of resources?

Franz Hofmann: Saving raw materials and reducing emissions play an essential role in the production and processing of steel strip. ANDRITZ METALS is one of the very few suppliers worldwide capable of providing all technologies and processes involved in the manufacture of stainless steel strip – rolling, annealing, pickling, finishing. This includes the recovery of acids, which has reached a very high level. With our zero-effluent mixed acid process, almost 100% of the acids from the pickling process are recovered and can be reused. All of our processing lines are equipped with technology that minimizes or even eliminates emissions. Our DeNOx systems for nitrogen oxide removal in stainless steel pickling lines and acid recovery plants deserve special mention here. The plants that we have supplied reduce emissions of nitrogen oxide – one of the so-called indirect greenhouse gases – by over 30,000 tons per year.

ANDRITZ ENVIRONMENT & PROCESS has been a successful supplier of sewage sludge drying plants for many years now. Our plants convert liquid sewage sludge into granulate, which can be used to replace fossil fuels in heat and power generation. For instance, in a German cement factory, sewage sludge from several European wastewater treatment plants is dried in an ANDRITZ belt dryer using waste heat from the clinker cooler. The granulate produced has a calorific value of 10 to 13 megajoules per kilogram and is used as fuel in the cement production. To meet the increasing demand for plants to dry wood chips and sawdust, we have adapted our belt drying system for biomass applications. ANDRITZ is supplying two belt drying systems for sawdust to the German Pfeifer-Heggenstaller group. Another belt dryer for sawdust is being supplied to Sweden; this major delivery also includes ANDRITZ pelleting machines.