Katahdin Paper set to increase pulp production Officials say no new jobs to be added

EAST MILLINOCKET – The July closing of a mill in Port Cartier, Quebec, will increase pulp operations at the Katahdin Paper Co. LLC mill, but no new jobs are likely to come from it, company officials said Tuesday.

Uniforet Inc. closed its bleached chemi-thermo-mechanical market pulp mill in July, eliminating as many as 80 jobs. The closing of that facility, which Katahdin Paper was leasing to make pulp for its Millinocket plant, opened the door for more pulp production in town, said Glenn Saucier, Katahdin Paper’s director of human resources and spokesman.

“All we are going to do is try to feed our pulp requirements [in the Millinocket plant] from the East Millinocket facility, but that does not add new jobs,” Saucier said Tuesday. “For the time being, no, we are not anticipating any additional new jobs.”

East Millinocket’s plant, which has a grinding room capable of producing 350-400 tons a day of ground-wood pulp, will start pumping more pulp through its pipeline to the Millinocket plant as soon as the Uniforet pulp stocks compiled before the shutdown are depleted, Saucier said.

“All we have done is utilize some of the equipment we have had idle,” he said, “so we are just ramping up what we have. We will try to supplement as much as we can with pulp from East Millinocket and whatever we can’t make we will have to buy” from suppliers.

Exactly how much more pulp will be produced in East Millinocket is unknown, Saucier said, but he expected that it would be close to the plant’s maximum output. He estimated that 350 to 400 tons daily were produced at Port Cartier.

Officials at Uniforet Inc. could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Ground-wood pulp is one of the ingredients to the paper the East Millinocket plant makes newspaper inserts from, Saucier said.

A leading North American producer of high value directory and ground-wood papers, Katahdin Paper Co. LLC was purchased out of bankruptcy in April 2003 by Brascan Financial Group and owns two paper mills and three high value uncoated ground-wood paper machines in East Millinocket and Millinocket.

Two directory paper machines operate in the East Millinocket mill and one paper machine is in Millinocket.