Innovation Anthology #205:

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With all the wheat grown on the Canadian Prairies, there’s plenty of straw to furnish its use in making pulp and paper.

According to Wade Chute of the Alberta Research Council, he and his colleagues have overcome an important technical challenge in processing wheat straw for pulp.

And that’s the removal of silica from the raw furnish.

As Wade Chute explains, silica is absorbed from the soil into the plant, helping the stalk stand straight. But when processed, first, silica inhibits water from draining from the wheat fibres. And second, it forms glass.

WADE CHUTE: Silica in a pulping feedstock will wind up reporting to the black liquor recovery loop. And in the recovery furnaces it tends to form glass which makes it very, very difficult to recover the cooking chemicals, which is a very important part of the economic viability of an existing pulp mill. Top it all off with the reduction in heat transfer efficiencies, mills would be shutting down and chipping out their recovery boilers on a regular basis. And obviously that interrupts production.

The Alberta Research Council has recently patented a new technology that effectively removes silica from the wheat straw before it is processed as pulp.

Thanks today to the Alberta Research Council.

I’M CHERYL CROUCHER

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Alberta Research Council

Established as the first provincial research organization in Canada, the Alberta Research Council is 85 years old. The Alberta Research Council (ARC) develops and commercializes technologies to give customers a competitive advantage. A leader in innovation, ARC provides solutions globally to the energy, life sciences, agriculture, environment, forestry and manufacturing sectors.
ARC performs about five per cent of the roughly $1.5 billion in R&D done in Alberta each year, and generates revenues of approximately $84 million per year. ARC operates from five sites across the province in Edmonton, Calgary, Vegreville and Devon and employs more than 600 highly-skilled people.

In January 2010, under the new Alberta Innovation Framework, the Alberta Research Council was restructured and incorporated into the new provincial agency Alberta Innovates Technology Futures.

Program Date: 2009-02-24