There’s a CDR opportunity hiding in plain sight, and it smells faintly of wood pulp.
Pulp and paper mills have been industrial energy users for over a century. They burn enormous quantities of biomass — wood residues, black liquor, bark — to generate the heat and power their processes require. For climate purposes, that’s been considered roughly carbon-neutral: the trees absorbed CO₂ while growing, the mill releases it when burning.
But what if you capture that CO₂ before it goes into the atmosphere?
That’s the logic of BECCS — Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage. And it turns out pulp mills are close to ideal candidates.
Why Pulp Mills Are Different
BECCS works when biomass burns and the resulting CO₂ is captured and stored permanently underground. Because the biomass absorbed that carbon from the atmosphere while growing, the net effect is carbon removal — not just avoided emissions, but actual drawdown.
Most BECCS discussions focus on purpose-built power plants or large-scale biomass facilities. Pulp mills offer something better: existing infrastructure at industrial scale, already burning biomass, already generating concentrated CO₂ streams from identifiable points like recovery boilers and lime kilns.
You don’t need to build the bioenergy facility. It already exists. You need to bolt on the capture equipment and find somewhere to put the CO₂.
That changes the economics substantially. The capital cost problem in BECCS is usually the bioenergy side. At a pulp mill, that cost is already sunk.
The Projects Taking Shape
The activity is real and spread across multiple continents:
Canada: The Rocky Mountain Carbon project is conducting a Front-End Engineering and Design (FEED) study for carbon capture at a pulp mill in Hinton, Alberta. Early estimates suggest up to 1.3 million tonnes of CO₂ per year could be captured and stored underground. That’s not a small number — it’s the equivalent of taking ~280,000 cars off the road annually.
Finland: Metsä Group, which operates large kraft pulp mills, is examining how to capture biogenic CO₂ from recovery boilers and lime kilns. Kraft mills are particularly interesting because the black liquor combustion process creates a highly concentrated CO₂ stream — easier and cheaper to capture than dilute atmospheric sources.
Sweden: Stockholm Exergi is developing a large-scale BECCS facility targeting 800,000 tonnes of CO₂ removal per year. Sweden has serious storage potential in the North Sea, and the Swedish government has been more aggressive than most European governments in supporting BECCS development.
The Economics Depend on the Market
For papermakers, the business case has two components: compliance (avoiding penalties under tightening industrial emissions regulations) and opportunity (generating carbon removal credits as a new revenue stream).
The opportunity side only works if CDR markets develop further. Right now, large buyers — the Microsofts and Googles of the world — are mostly purchasing engineered removal like DAC and biochar. BECCS hasn’t yet attracted the same wave of corporate procurement attention, partly because there are fewer mature projects to buy from.
That could change fast. BECCS removal credits from verified, high-permanence projects would be attractive to buyers who need to demonstrate real atmospheric drawdown at scale and want a cost point below DAC’s current $300–500/tonne range.
What Remains Hard
Integration is the biggest challenge. Carbon capture equipment has to mesh with complex, continuous mill processes where downtime is expensive. The CO₂ capture systems consume energy — typically 15–25% of the mill’s energy output — which raises operating costs. And transport/storage infrastructure doesn’t exist everywhere.
These are engineering problems, not fundamental barriers. The question is whether the economics work once you account for carbon credit revenue, which depends on credit quality and buyer willingness to pay.
The Underrated Pathway
BECCS has a reputation problem. It got lumped into climate model scenarios in ways that seemed like “cheat code” thinking — assume massive BECCS deployment to justify more emissions now. That criticism had merit for certain modelling choices.
But actual BECCS deployment at real industrial facilities is different. It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s a pathway to convert existing infrastructure into carbon removal assets, at costs that could undercut DAC significantly.
Pulp mills won’t save the planet by themselves. But they might be part of a CDR portfolio that does.
Source: Paper Advance | Rocky Mountain Carbon | Metsä Group | Stockholm Exergi