So, while the nitroglycerin production continued to ramp up, I started the beginning phases for chemically pulping paper. I have a general idea of what is involved and how to do it, but as with many processes I've forgotten the exact details. The beginning stage is simple in that we start with wood chips that are steam treated, similar to the mechanical paper process. After that, however, the processes diverge. Further, without any new production lines, we should be able to produce the chemically pulped paper. The only parts that would require new production lines would be for the bleaching process to make the paper lighter, which is unnecessary for use in dynamite.

As a result, I've been concentrating on figuring out the chemical pulping process, and making good progress. The gist of the situation is that I'm trying to selectively break down certain materials in wood while leaving cellulose alone. The two chemicals that I know I need for this are sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide. The sodium sulfide requires some steps to make, but I've been doing it by neutralizing sodium hydroxide with sulfuric acid to make sodium sulfate. Because of how violent that reaction is, I'm limited to using very dilute solutions in larger bulk to produce useable quantities of the sodium sulfate. After that, I reduce it by carbothermic reduction with charcoal to get the sodium sulfide.

There is a better way of producing sodium sulfate via heating sulfuric acid and sodium chloride to make hydrogen chloride gas and sodium sulfate, but until I've got a ballpark estimate of how much I need, I don't want to build a facility to produce it that way, even if the process is relatively straightforward. For now with my lab work, producing it the other way doesn't require any additional construction other than some new beakers every so often, which doesn't require assistance from construction teams.

Over the three months I've been doing research, I've roughly narrowed down what I need for the first stage. I was actually quite a bit off in my initial estimates, but I've gotten to the point of making fairly high quality paper by hand now. The process I've settled on is a batch process where, after I steam the wood chips, I cook them under pressure at about 330 degrees in a large vat of a little over 1 molar sodium hydroxide and about 0.3 molar sodium sulfide mixture. They cook for a few hours. Afterwards, I'm left with a solid wood pulp, and a black gooey substance full of everything else.

The pulp has to be washed a few times, removing the rest of the black goo before it can be filtered to remove any chunks left over and then made into paper. The goo is quite toxic, and a bit too dangerous to just dump into the ocean. I have a few ideas on how to recover leftover sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide from the mix, and we'll likely burn off the rest of it. Normally, that waste heat would be recovered and used to create the heat necessary for some of the stages of the process. However, regulating that is actually somewhat hard, and we have an abundant supply of heat in the form of fluorite crystals which can be fine-tuned to maintain specific temperatures more easily than a burning sludge.

I'm sure there are some trapped useful materials in that sludge other than the initial reactants that we could come back to recover later, but right now I'm more worried about killing off all our fish, so I'd just as well burn it off and make it at least somewhat less toxic. After we launch the next barge in a few weeks, I plan on working on the sodium sulfate production process, the recovery process for the sludge and, time permitting, start working on a design for a paper machine that makes a long, continuous roll of paper.

This will probably be the last time I oversee construction of the barge directly, and moving forward I'll only make the trip to watch the actual barge launch and result. Things went smoothly overall. We were, once again, caught a little off guard by the explosion when the barge was attacked. This time, some kind of very large mouthed fish with bony plates around it's mouth cut the barge in two, which obviously detonated it. It's jaw was immediately torn off, and as it rolled to the side it was clear that the skull had received too much internal damage, and likely the brain had been scrambled.

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The thing that caught us off guard was that the barge wasn't that far from the bay when this happened. It was a little farther than the crab attack, but considering the fish didn't have legs, it was concerning how close it actually was to the shoreline. The blast was borderline deafening given how close it was. Also, many of the demons around commented that they'd gained between 1 and 10 levels. Higher prestige demons like myself or many of the hobgoblins, did not notice such a change. Perhaps, these leviathans have so much experience that even at such a distance many levels are gained. I haven't noted my progress in some time, so I'll list it here.

<LAVA DEMON> Level: 54 HP: 5469/5469 MP: 2482/2482 Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize, Thermal Regulation

I almost wish they hadn't proclaimed this so openly, because Elora had returned to watch once again, and her eyebrow twitched when she heard the comments. I myself plan on trying to take advantage of this moving forward by having us gather at a much closer point to the shore beyond the bay while wearing hearing protection. There may be a small amount of danger presented if a leviathan goes berserk, but it could also invaluably catapult hundreds of individuals many levels ahead of where they currently are.

The next launch should be in about three months as even more nitroglycerin lines are completed. So I'll be returning to work on paper production for a time to match the need for paper to make dynamite.

I ran out of time to work on a paper making machine, but I was able to design a sodium sulfate production line that produces batches of the stuff at about twice my planned consumption rate. It involves a large kiln using acid washed lightstone to resist the sulfuric acid, along with heat fluorite to provide the necessary temperature. Stirring rods mix the solid salt with the sulfuric acid to help react it, and the hydrogen chloride gas is gathered and made into spare hydrochloric acid or vented to atmosphere.

The planned amount of paper to produce daily is 5 tons per day at maximum capacity. By my rough estimates that would end up consuming about 100 acres of forest in a year, or about one-sixth of a square mile. By my estimates, our island supports tropical forest on about 35 square miles of it's area, and temperate forests for about twice that. While I haven't seen their full life cycle, some of the forests we'd planted for wood harvesting in the future seem to indicate that the tropical trees take about 30 years to reach harvestable maturity, meaning this paper mill would require about six square miles of land to grow trees for paper.

Of course, that's only if it's running at full power. We could, just as easily, run it far below that, only processing one batch a day, rather than 12. That would lower the total required land to about a half a square mile. Having the option to run at a much higher volume opens up the opportunity to more easily utilize the wood that we get from clearing forests for construction. Previously, we made most of it into charcoal, and that charcoal would be stored and used for cooking. Now, we've drastically cut the amount used for cooking by utilizing magical ovens using heat fluorite meaning having a new sink for that resource is doubly useful.

I've started doing research on the black sludge to try to recover what I can from it, but I'm still in the early stages. Fractional distillation works to a point until a resin like substance starts to build up on the surface. At that point, I've had to periodically remove that substance for any distillation to continue. I'll have to do more testing to come up with an exact method for recovery, as what material I was able to distill was actually quite rich in sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite still, meaning recycling this material is going to be important for efficiency, let alone the environmental concerns.

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