Kap Paper could soon be coming out of idle thanks to the provincial and federal governments agreeing to a path forward that provides near-term stability to the mill while partners continue working on a long-term solution.
Last week, hundreds of people from the towns of Kapuskasing, Hearst, Cochrane, and Chapleau came together for a rally urging the two levels of government to work together for a solution to keep the plant in Kapuskasing open and secure upwards of 2,500 jobs in the region.
Hearst Mayor Roger Sigouin said this is what collaboration looks like.
“Today’s step gives our communities the time we need to keep moving forward calmly, deliberately, and with people at the centre,” Sigouin said.
Kapuskasing Mayor Dave Plourde said things are not official yet, but there appears to be an understanding of an agreement of government support.
“There used to be 16 paper mills, if not more, and now we’re down to three, including Dryden,” Plourde said. “These mills consume the byproduct of making lumber. They take the best of what’s left and they make paper, and then they burn the rest of it to make energy. We use 100 per cent of the log.”
If this cycle doesn’t happen, chip piles will grow and become landfill.
“It means instantaneously that the sawmills then start to shut down because they have no place to get rid of their chips,” he said, adding that Kap Paper is the essential connection in that process.
With newsprint on a decline, Plourde said the paper mill needs to find a solution to pivot its production to perhaps a combination of other things.
“To solve that problem, we need the operating dollars to stay operational while rethinking what we do,” he said. “The road we’ve been going down for the last two years involves a power purchase agreement to take biomass, and burn it to make energy to help power the paper mill, which is a high energy consumer.”
He added that any profitable paper mill that exists today is located next to a power source.
“When the paper mill was originally built at Spruce Falls, it had a power plant called Smokey Falls Power Generating Station that provided power for the mill to operate. Then, during the buyout in 1991, Ontario Power Generation took over that power plant,” Plourde explained.
He said the town was supposed to build a cogeneration facility to generate electricity needed to run paper machines, but never did and used power from the OPG facility.
“The cogenerating facility would be assisted (by another power source) and would be fuelled by biomass,” he said.
This opens the door to the development of a neighbouring agricultural project involving the development of greenhouses fuelled by steam from the biomass cogeneration plant.
“That would really assist in food security,” Plourde said. “Growing our own food in Northern Ontario can provide employment and food sustainability and has been done successfully in Saint Phillippe, Que., which produces 20 per cent of the province’s cucumbers, using the byproduct of steam to fuel greenhouses.”
He said this is one idea that they had pitched, and they need time to figure things out while the mill continues to run.
“It’s about having the federal government engaged with the province to allow us that time to continue to study what we have to do to make it viable and produce a solution, to allow us to continue to sell logs and provide the industry with the wood required to build the homes that we’re all saying we need,” Plourde said.
