Refe­rences

Metsä Fibre, a part of Metsä Group, is building a new kind of bioproduct factory at Äänekoski in Central Finland. At EUR 1.2 billion, it is the largest investment in the history of the Finnish forest industry. The project will provide over 2,500 jobs in Finland throughout its value chain. Around 1,500 of those jobs will be entirely new. For IKP, the construction project will significantly boost employment. IKP has provided the site with large, process technology-related equipment requiring high dimensional accuracy. These items include 900-ton debarking drums and a large-scale chip silo.  For IKP Group Oy’s installation and maintenance company IKP Service Oy, parts of the project will last for at least a year. The main phase is construction of a 2000-ton lime kiln and its accessory equipment. IKP won the tender because the client organisation wanted the most reliable supplier. As a Finnish company and leader in its field, this made IKP an obvious choice. The world’s first new-generation bioproduct factory In addition to high-quality pulp, the factory will produce a wide variety of other bioproducts. These include tall oil, turpentine, biocomposites and biogas, product gas and sulphuric acid. Possible new refined products from the production side-lines include textile fibres and processed lignin product. The factory is designed from scratch to enable a wide and varied product range. It will be sustained by a unique bioeconomy ecosystem consisting of various companies. The bioproduct factory’s annual pulp production capacity will be 1.3 million tonnes. The factory will begin operations in the third quarter of 2017.