Like many East Texas lumber towns, the city of Crockett has for years been losing its battle against the impact of government-subsidized Canadian wood products flooding the U.S. housing market, former City Administrator Ron Duncan says.
Then, Duncan says, Zilkha Biomass Energy came to the city. The company opened its first commercial black pellet plant in October 2010 in a former furniture factory on the outskirts of the town named after Davy Crockett, which is the seat of Houston County and 120 miles north of Houston.
Zilkha hired about 50 people — a nice number, Duncan said, for a town of about 6,900 — and began making pellets around the clock for European electricity producers seeking an enviro-friendly coal substitute. Its goal was to consume from the pine and oak forests surrounding Crockett about 750,000 tons of wood wastes annually, enough by most economic studies to support at least four jobs indirectly for every direct job the company created.
Today, the company is the town’s ninth-largest employer with 23 workers, according to Crockett Economic & Industrial Development Corp. Duncan says that when he left town for another job in May 2013, Zilkha had laid off workers because it had problems shipping its product overseas.
“There was supposed to be a big market for their pellets in Europe,” Duncan recalled Friday. “To the day I left, we had high hopes that whatever the problem was at the receiving port would be cleared up and their production would pick up again.”
From the Bangor Daily News: https://bangordailynews.com/2014/03/08/news/penobscot/texas-city-officials-call-potential-millinocket-pellet-mill-producer-an-asset/?ref=latest