News Story: Biodiesel plant dreams die

BY TRACEY DUGUAY

Biodiesel may be golden in colour, but the community’s hopes of seeing a local manufacturing plant turned black in early spring.

It was a happy time in May 2005 when the news broke that a $3.8 million dollar biodiesel plant was being built in Greater Sudbury. Politicians grinned like schoolchildren as they announced the deal. City officials and businesses rubbed their hands together thinking about how they were going to spend the economic spin off, projected at around $110 million.

Govindh Jayaraman, president of Topia Energy, the company building the plant, was ecstatic to have secured $1.9 million in federal funding to help with the costs.

As months, then years, passed, there were signs of trouble with the ill-fated plant. The plant was supposed to be built by the fall of 2005, yet there were no signs of construction.

In spring of 2006, Jayaraman said the plant had been delayed because he didn’t know he was supposed to complete an environmental assessment (EA).

The EA was one of the conditions he needed to meet in order to get the money from Natural Resources Canada (NRC).

In early March, with less than 30 days until the federal funding expired, the Topia president said he was still committed to the project but worried about “pre-paying” for the plant before it was even built.

“We have to have spent all the money,” he said in an interview at the time. “It is on eligible expenses that have been incurred that the federal government will chip in for, but they must be incurred.”

He claimed he just found out a few months ago about having to have the federal partnership agreement in place by March 31.

At this point, he also admitted he hadn’t even submitted the EA started a year ago, but professed to not being worried about it.

With the land not even been rezoned, no EA in the government pipeline and no partnership agreement in the making, time was quickly running out on the biodiesel plant.

March 31 came and went as did the dream of Greater Sudbury being home to one of the largest biodiesel plants in Canada.