Red Shield Ethanol

Forest Biofuels in the Southeastern US: Fueling its future ...

Four years ago, Dan Bird and Dick Arnold stood in an office within a 125-year-old paper mill and looked out the window to an empty plant. The room, once the controller’s office of previous occupant Georgia Pacific, was laid bare: no phones, no computers, no remnants at all of the Atlanta-based paper giant that vacated the Old Town mill to seek higher profits and lower energy costs in warmer climes. And so they have. Today the plant, now Old Town Fuel & Fiber, produces 600 tons of kraft pulp a day to feed a growing global demand. More importantly, the pulp process provides feedstock for a new sustainable fuel derived from wood: biobutanol, a renewable energy substitute for gasoline. The mill, which creates its own power, employs 205, and next month will begin building a biorefinery to make biobutanol for commercial consumption on a site that once housed tissue-making machines. The transformation from a typical paper mill to a value-added, sustainable and diversified manufacturer reflects the business philosophy of the company’s new private equity owner, Lynn Tilton of Patriarch Partners, and holds potential to drive the local economy once again. The bleak times started in 2006 when the market for pulp began to change at the same time paper-making operations were moving off shore. At the time, GP was producing about 600 tons a day of pulp, 200 of which fed its own machines to make napkins, toilet paper and paper towels under brand names such as Vanity Fair and Brawny. The other 400 tons were baled and sold as dry pulp. But rising energy costs prompted the company to consider warmer locations where balmy river water didn’t need as much energy or time as the frigid Penobscot’s to reach temperatures hot enough to generate steam to turn turbines and power the plant. GP shuttered the plant, intending to raze it until Baldacci stepped in with a group of investors, pledging to use the mill as a learning laboratory to make cellulosic ethanol, another wood-based biofuel that had been pioneered at the University of Maine. Operating as Red Shield Environmental, the mill restarted the pulping operation in the spring of 2007, then closed in November to reconfigure two digesters to work sequentially, rather than independently — a key component in the pulping process that creates the organic byproduct used in cellulosic ethanol and biobutanol.

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