Interview with Grundberg Hans

10 February 2010

Interview with Grundberg Hans, a speaker at the Biorefining for the Pulp and Paper Industry conference

Q: How is biorefining changing the pulp and paper industry?
Biorefining is changing the PP-industry a lot! It is not enough to come up with better pulp and paper products, they need to come up with new products in completely different business areas. We have seen a decreasing demand for newsprint and an increased competition from more efficient mills for copy paper. The PP-industry has to re-focus and make more than just paper from the tree!

Q: What are the biggest technical challenges in biorefining?
The biggest challenge is to separate the components from the tree into as pure streams as possible. From there you have large possibilities to develop new product, which is very difficult if you have a mixture.

Q: What do you see as comeptitive technologies to biorefining?
In one way, biorefining is such a wide area that only oil refining can compete (but now is it the biorefineries that competes with oil.You can say that you have a possibility to have either a biochemical biorefinery, a thermochemical biorefinery or a combination. All the combinations have advantages and draw-backs, and it depends on the surrounding which one is the best. You need all of them to replace oil!!

Q: What presentations are you most looking forward to at the conference?
I'm looking forward to Prof Ragauskas talk, as well as Bob Crawford's one! But there are a lot of interesting speakers, well done!