Paper

Countries and regions making notable progress to decarbonise pulp and paper production include: 

• The Confederation of Paper industries in Europe, through their Energy Efficiency Solutions Forum launched in 2020, are encouraging the development and uptake of high-temperature heat pumps to significantly reduce energy consumption in this sector.  
• In Canada, development of one of the largest Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) projects is underway at West Fraser pulp mill in Alberta. This aims to capture between 1-1.3 MtCO₂ per year from the start of operations in 2027. 
  

The declining trajectory in emissions intensity of the past decade has been driven primarily by increasing the share of the less emissions-intensive energy sources, as well as a small contribution from energy efficiency improvements. Between 2010 and 2022, the emissions intensity declined by almost 3% per year on average.  

With production expected to increase in this decade due to an increasing need for packaging paper and paperboard, the emissions intensity of paper production must decline significantly to be on track with the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario. This trajectory sees emissions intensity fall by about 5% annually between 2022 and 2030, which would require a redoubled effort to pick up the pace of the gradual decrease in emissions intensity of recent years. More action is needed in funding innovative technologies and implementing emission reduction policies to ensure that best available technologies and low-emission fuels are widely deployed.

Since 2010 the energy efficiency of pulp and paper production has been decreasing at around 1% per year on average, while in the Net Zero Scenario energy intensity falls by over twice times this annual rate to 2030. Considerable improvements in energy efficiency are needed to get on track. This can be accomplished by increasing the proportion of paper produced from recycled resources and by implementing best available production technologies.  

Another important part of getting on track will be moving away from fossil fuels and towards the use of near zero-emission alternatives. There has been some recent progress in this area, as the share of energy provided by fossil fuels has decreased from one-third to around a quarter since 2010, with a shift in parallel from coal to natural gas. Bioenergy – already a major source of energy for the sector, owing to the use of primary pulp by-products such as black liquor – will be a particularly important fossil fuel replacement. Its proportion standing at 40% in 2022 is already high and had slowly increased over the past decade, but this increase needs to accelerate further to reach 45% to 50% in 2030 in the Net Zero Scenario.

Following several years of modest decline from 2017 to 2020, global paper production reached a record peak of 417 Mt in 2021, a 4% increase compared with 2020. This level of production was sustained into 2022, despite the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions in China continuing for a considerable part of the year, and the continuing digitalisation of printed media. Newsprint and printing paper types collectively saw annual declines of 2.4% on average from 2010-2017, accelerating to 6.2% per year from 2018-2021. However, production of other paper products such as packaging paper and paperboard, and household and sanitary paper more than compensated for this decrease. Over 2010-2021, average annual increases of around 2% were observed for both these types as a result of economic and population growth.  

Looking ahead, paper production is expected to modestly increase, as the decline in printing-related paper production is outweighed by growth in packaging and sanitary paper products, especially in developing economies. In the Net Zero Scenario, paper and paperboard demand continues to grow by about 1% annually to 2030. Material efficiency measures can help limit growth in production.

Paper production is heat-intensive, mainly due to the large amounts of water to be evaporated in drying pulp and paper – drying accounts for 70% of the energy use in the sector. Innovations leading to less water to be evaporated, as well as higher on-site waste heat recovery and co-generation, can increase energy efficiency and reduce emissions.  

Heat pumps that reuse the latent heat from paper drying to produce steam for drying are likely to be a key technology. The Confederation of the European Paper Industries (CEPI), and the European Heat-Pump Association (EHPA) have collaborated to identify how high-temperature heat pumps can be integrated into paper mills. This will not only potentially reduce emissions through fuel substitution, but can also lead to a reduction in energy demand for drying by 50%. It has been estimated that in the European paper industry, 65% of process heat can be supplied by heat pumps that make use of waste heat sources inside the production process. 

Expanding the proportion of pulp produced from recycled sources can also reduce the sector’s energy intensity and has a number of resource efficiency benefits, including a reduction in primary wood inputs, lower water use, and less waste generation. The share of recovered fibre in total fibre furnish (the mix of fibres used in paper production) is currently over half, and increases to over 60% by 2030 in the Net Zero Scenario.

However, increased recycled pulp production will not necessarily lead to reduced emissions even though it requires less energy. This is because primary pulp production relies largely on bioenergy that is available as a by-product from the wood used, while recycled production does not have by-product bioenergy readily available and so currently relies mostly on fossil fuels. It will therefore be important to switch to low-emission fuels such as bioenergy and electricity for recycled pulp production in parallel to increasing the total amount of recycled production.

Papermaking is energy-intensive, and innovation will be needed to increase energy efficiency. Given the significance of drying for energy consumption in pulp and papermaking, opportunities to reduce its energy demand are important. Three technologies have particularly high potential:  

• Superheated steam would enable total recovery of thermal energy to be used in subsequent processes, resulting in massive energy savings. The challenge is to combine the steam-condensation system with a wet paper/water vapour system, requiring advanced steam-cleaning technologies and solutions to prevent steam leakage from the system. 
• Water removal without evaporation would avoid the most energy-intensive part of the drying process, leading to up to 90% energy saved in drying. In 2022, a consortium of technical universities in the Netherlands started an R&D project to develop non-thermal water removal technologies based on electric forces, aiming for theoretical principles to be translated to industrial equipment by 2024.  
• Papermaking without water offers the potential to remove the use of heat for drying completely. The challenge is to obtain inter-fibre bonding and dry defibration of pulp or paper for recycling without damaging the fibre. Considerable research is being done on this innovation in Germany and Scandinavia. Notably, Swedish PulPac and German BIO-LUTIONS have developed Dry Moulded Fiber, a machine for creating paper products without water. Although ready for immediate market deployment, the machine can only create products that make up very small portions of paper demand, leaving much more work to be done to expand to other applications. 

In addition to technologies to improve energy efficiency, innovation is needed to integrate technologies that can fully decarbonise the remaining energy consumption in the pulp and paper industry – such as carbon capture and storage, electric boilers and heat pumps – as well as to reduce their costs to accelerate uptake. 

Several policies addressing emissions from paper production have recently been announced, including the following:  

• China – the world’s largest paper producer – announced as part of its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) that it will prioritise the creation of a circular economy, seeking to recycle 60 Mt of waste paper by 2025 relative to today. Meanwhile, China has also launched the Guideline for Energy Efficiency Credit, encouraging commercial banks to expand their energy efficiency lending for energy-intensive activities, including pulp and paper. 
• Japan released a decarbonisation roadmap for its pulp and paper industry in early 2022, including new decarbonisation targets and steps for achieving them. 
• Indonesia implemented new standards in 2020 for its paper and corrugated paper industry to improve energy and material efficiency in paper production.