Equipment to make fuel from wood byproducts as part of a plan to secure future profitability for the Old Town pulp mill is slated to go up for auction later this month.
Auctioneers New Mill Capital and Joseph Finn Co. Inc. have listed assets held by the mill’s pilot biorefinery project as available for purchase at an auction that will start April 14 and close as late as April 16.
Those assets were not included in the $10.5 million bankruptcy sale of the mill’s pulp-making facilities to the Wisconsin paper maker Expera Specialty Solutions. Patriarch Partners, the New York investment firm that bought the mill and its biorefinery, foreclosed on the biorefinery assets before Red Shield’s bankruptcy. Patriarch managed Red Shield.
The foreclosure was challenged by creditors in the case, including Scarborough-based Trico Mechanical Contractors and CCB Inc., whose attorney argued transactions between Patriarch and Red Shield should have been further investigated to determine whether some of the biorefinery assets should have been included in the bankruptcy.
The assets up for auction do not include intellectual property and some equipment funded by a $30 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Approval of the bankruptcy sale Dec. 5 called for the biorefinery assets to be transferred to Expera if Red Shield, Patriarch and the U.S. Department of Energy could not agree on what to do with it within 120 days.