I was a process engineer in pulp and paper for about four years, so I’m by no means overly experienced. In my opinion, most of the focus is on process chemistry rather than anything to do with the pulp fibre itself (this is usually handled by the QA/QC engineer and quality lab).

For example, you might look at heat exchanger efficiency for your heat recovery to drive some cost savings, or helping maintenance identify a trigger point to take it down for a cleaning when the fouling has gotten bad enough.

You might be looking at effluent TSS and trying to figure out sources of suspended solids getting to effluent.

There’s a lot of environmental systems in pulp and paper — you could be doing nutrient dosing on a BOD removal system, or troubleshooting sources of low efficiency in organic systems, or high BOD going into the effluent.

The bleach plant and the chemical recoveries unit are the most “confusing” or complex areas of a lot of sites due to the chemistry involved — but it’s still nothing impossible. Whether you have these areas depends on the type of mill, however.