The California energy company which once touted made-in-Northern Ontario green jet fuel now wants to make wood pellets.
Los Angeles-based Rentech has drastically changed the scope of its project in Northern Ontario as it announced, May 2, it is switching gears by acquiring a shuttered Weyerhaeser fibre board mill in Wawa and and the Atikokan Renewable Fuels mill in Atikokan.
Plans to convert a former Domtar mill in White River into a fuel refinery have been dropped.
To make this happen, Rentech had to acquire a deep-pocketed partner in Georgia-based Fulghum Fibre, a leader in wood chip processing services.
The Atikokan mill, owned by Ed Fukushima and Larry Levchak of Thunder Bay, is undergoing a conversion to make wood pellets to feed the nearby Ontario Power Generation power station.
The Wawa mill will be converted to a wood pellet operation. In addition, Rentech has struck a long-term contract with Canadian National Railway to ship pellets from Wawa to the Port of Quebec, presumably for international customers.
The company is hinting of employment opportunities for First Nations.
Rentech had been signaling for more than a year that jet fuel was no longer in its plans.
In 2011, amid much government fanfare, the province committed 1.1 million cubic metres of wood to Rentech and its local partners to set up a wood-to-aviation fuel refinery in White River to make low-carbon jet fuel. Almost 400 direct and indirect jobs were to be created.
The so-called Olympiad Project was part ofthe province's wood supply competition to put Ontario “wood back to work” in the larger overhaul of the Crown wood tenure system.
Rentech president Hunt Ramsbottom said in 2011 that he expected to have an order book of air carrier clients by the time the plant went into operation in 2015.
But later that same year, Rentech began retrenching on its plans and said it was looking for a deep-pocketed dance partner for the White River plant.
Rentech said it was searching for partners and funding sources in a “financing package that would limit Rentech's investment in the project.”
Last February, Rentech decided to close an R & D plant in Colorado where it planned to find a profitable way to convert biomass into jet fuel.
The company plans to “re-position” itself to take advantage of the a strong business fundamentals of the nitrogen market. Rentech is cutting all its spending on research and development activities from $21 million in 2012 to $10 million in 2013.
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