By Andrew de Souza

Sign of the times

Aug 3, 2011 | 5:50 PM

Paper Excellence executives, employees, and many dignitaries were on hand to unveil the new sign for the Prince Albert Pulp Mill on Wednesday.

Paper Excellence vice president Ed Roste, who is in charge of the mill, held a press conference to publically acknowledge the mill’s reopening, refurbishment and eventual move to producing dissolving pulp.

He said it was an exciting time that would help both the local economy and the forest industry in the region.

“We’re excited to play a pivotal role to help the forest industry be reestablished in Saskatchewan,” he said.

“We are anticipating that we will have around 250 employees working here by third quarter of 2012 and there will be on the order of 700 jobs created indirectly to harvest to forest, truck the logs to the mill … the commodities that will be trucked into the mill and the product that will be railed out.”

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Premier Brad Wall was on hand to help with the unveiling. He said the province had been working long hours to get some kind of deal for the mill and that Paper Excellence was the company they had wanted to run it all along.

Now that that was underway, he said it could only mean good things.

“It’s good news for the province, it’s great news for PA and area as we see the mill slowly come back to life and jobs be created,” he said. “It’s going to help move our province forward in a sector that’s finding new legs and new strength in forestry.”

Timeline set for reopening

Roste said the plant currently had six contractors working on cleaning up the plant while the company worked on hiring the initial management and planning team.

He said once they were in place, they would begin refurbishing and retrofitting the plant to produce the new product, which was expected to be completed by September 2012, though he noted there could be delays since it was a $30 million project.

“In the new conversion from a paper grade kraft mill to a dissolving pulp mill, there’s some large vessels that we have install,” he said. “And the delivery time can be very long because it has to be made in western Canada and most of the fabricating shops are busy.

“So we’re finding that the scheduling has slipped a few months already based on the availability of shops.”

He said once that was in place they would begin to hire trades people and then finally operators and start production in earnest with a full staff of about 250 people.

adesouza@panow.com