Alberta-Pacific (Alpac) and Sappi Fine Paper North America
(Sappi) will separately idle two market northern bleached hardwood kraft (NBHK)
pulp mills in Canada and the USA in April.
In Canada, Alpac is scheduled to idle production at its
650,000 tonnes/yr market pulp mill at Boyle, AB, on April 30. Workers will
perform annual maintenance for 14 days before restarting the facility
in
mid-May, a contact said.
Vancouver-headquartered Alpac will trim an estimated 25,000
tonnes of market NBHK output duringthe outage. In addition to aspen grade NBHK, Boyle makes northern bleached softwood kraft (NBSK).
Meantime in Minnesota, Sappi will idle its 455,000 tonnes/yr Cloquet pulp mill in April for 28 days as workers finish the last tie-ins of a major project that will make it a dissolving pulp (DP) mill.
Cloquet is scheduled to shutdown NBHK production in the first week of April and restart on May 5, when it will produce kraft pulp for a month while officials test the new system.
The outage will shed 1,450 tonnes/day of pulp output with an estimated 41,000 tonnes of total pulp getting clipped. Based on its typical 250,000 tonnes/yr of market NBHK output, the downtime will cut an estimated 19,000 tonnes of market NBHK production.
