Woodland Pulp weighs plans for LP mill

The corporate owner of the pulp mill in Baileyville has acquired from the Louisiana-Pacific (LP) Corporation the former oriented-strand board (OSB) mill that is next to the pulp mill. The International Grand Investment Corporation (IGIC), a U.S.-based holding company owned by a Chinese engineering and trading company, purchased the former mill and approximately 200 acres of land from LP near the end of August.
According to Scott Beal, a spokesman for Woodland Pulp LLC, the company has not yet determined what it will do with the dormant mill. He says the acreage will be used as a storage area for long logs in order to maintain the mill's inventory at certain times of the year. Also the large crane that was used for unloading log trucks, the OSB mill's boiler and turbine may be able to be restored and placed back into service.
The mill itself would not operate as an OSB plant again, since that's "not our interest," Beal notes, and some of the equipment was removed by LP. He also doubts that paper-making could be a viable option at the former LP mill, since it would require a significant capital investment. Wood pellets are also not an option, since "our interest with fiber is to make pulp, and pellets are a competitive use of fiber." He adds, "Our business is market pulp." However, using the mill to produce wood chips could be a possibility.
"It's still being determined what we would use the mill for," says Beal. "We're early in those evaluations." He does not know when a decision might be made.
Beal says environmental permits are being transferred from LP to the new owner. "We will work as expeditiously as possible" to determine a use for the mill, he adds.
LP had closed the mill in November and December 2004 because of market conditions and raw material costs, laying off 120 workers. The company had acquired the idle OSB mill from Georgia-Pacific in 2002 and restarted it in June 2003.