Sign up for the paNOW newsletter

PA Pulp Mill to open 21 jobs in May

Jan 19, 2012 | 5:40 AM

The Prince Albert Pulp Mill is ahead of schedule and will soon be ready to begin producing power for the province and employing staff says mill general manager Dale Patterson.

“In the last month, we have come together with all our work and the potential exists for us to put green energy in the power grid by May,” he said. “So it’s coming in four or five months early.”

Once the mill’s biomass generators are up and running, Patterson said they’ll be taking on 21 full-time staffers as both operators and skilled trades.

The mill, now owned Paper Excellence announced with SaskPower this week that the facility would begin generating up to 10 MWs of power back to the grid—enough to power about 1000 homes—as the first phase of the mill’s reopening.

In order to get the generators up in running, Patterson said the total cost would be around $10 million—with $5 million already spent and about 65 per cent going to local contractors.

“That allows us to have, obviously, a financial cash flow and will allow us, as we go into next year and construction in the mill, to use that steam to heat the mill,” he said.

The mill will be using the one million tonnes of stockpiled bark and materials from Meadow Lake for biomass generation.

SaskPower president and CEO Robert Watson said the accelerated timeline would mean more work for the crown corporation but they were up to the challenge.

“It’s sooner than what was originally proposed therefore we have to do some special things in order to get them hooked up,” he said. “But we just want to want to make sure that everyone realizes we are going to get them hooked up in the time frame that that they want to be.”

The biggest problem, he said, would be that hooking up such a large project to the grid required a lot of planning and cooperation on an international scale.

“We are hooked up to the North American grid and you can’t add on to it willy-nilly,” he said. “You’ve got to engineer it properly, because if you ever took the grid out of balance then they would start isolating and shutting you down.”

The mill is currently scheduled to be fully operational in by the fall of 2013. Patterson said at the time the plant would be able to generate 30 MWs for the grid, or enough for 3000 homes, but SaskPower said it would take as long as 2016 to be fully able to accept so much power.

adesouza@panow.com