Maryvale Mill High Pressure Header Elimination and Stripper Heat Exchangers Replacement Project (Revoked)

Maryvale Mill High Pressure Header Elimination and Stripper Heat Exchangers Replacement Project is an Industrial Electricity and Fuel Efficiency project located at the Maryvale paper mill, approximately 8km northwest of Traralgon in the Latrobe Valley region of Victoria. It was registered in October 2015 by Paper Australia Pty Ltd. Because this is a facility-based emissions reduction initiative, the project footprint is confined to the industrial mill site rather than covering a broad hectare area.

Industrial Electricity and Fuel Efficiency projects generate carbon credits by improving energy use, which typically involves modifying, removing, or replacing existing energy-consuming equipment, or changing the way existing equipment is controlled and operated. The methodology's standard requirements involve establishing a historical baseline of fuel and electricity consumption, and subsequently metering the post-upgrade performance to calculate the total emissions avoided. For this specific project, the proponent's activities included installing variable speed drives, upgrading stripper heat exchangers, modifying facility control systems, and optimizing turbines to drastically lower the mill's energy footprint.

The Latrobe Valley region surrounding Traralgon is well known for a mixture of heavy industry (power generation and paper manufacturing), commercial forestry operations to supply the mills, and agriculture, particularly dairy farming and cattle grazing. The area experiences a temperate climate with moderate to high rainfall. The soils in this part of West Gippsland are largely defined by alluvial plains deposited by river systems, predominantly featuring Brown and Yellow Sodosols which present as sandy loam surface soils over dispersive clay subsoils.

An interesting note regarding this project is its revoked status. On the 25th of May 2020, the project was officially revoked under section 30 of the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) Rule. A revocation under this section is often a voluntary withdrawal by the proponent, which can occur if the facility undergoes broader structural changes, if the ongoing measurement and reporting costs outweigh the generated credits, or if the project is no longer viable to maintain within the ACCU scheme.