American Zinc Recycling's long-idled Mooresboro zinc plant in North Carolina is not expected to reopen in 2017, a company official said Wednesday.
The official, who asked not to be identified, said in an interview that the plant was not expected to reopen until "at least a year from now."
The source referred further questions to Ali Alavi, an American Zinc Refining vice president, who was unavailable for comment. However, an official with consultancy Rutherford County Economic Development Inc. also said that the plant would not resume production before the end of 2017.
"I heard it's going to be early next year," that official said. "They're doing some fine-tuning and testing to bring the plant back in operation at the beginning of next year."
The source said the company was maintaining a "skeleton crew" of maintenance employees at the plant. Formerly known as Horsehead Holding LLC, AZR is the largest zinc producer in the US. It emerged from Chapter 11 federal bankruptcy reorganization in September 2016. Then-Horsehead had filed for bankruptcy on February 2, 2016, in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware in Wilmington.
The Mooresboro plant figured prominently in the bankruptcy proceedings, which saw substantially all of the company's long-term debt wiped out, with about $205 million in secured debt converted to equity.
Mooresboro is a state-of-the-art solvent-extraction/electrowinning facility that cost about $500 million to build, but was shuttered in the days preceding the bankruptcy filing.
The plant had suffered from technical issues almost since its inception and produced only 4,100 mt of zinc in the second quarter of 2015, with output rising to 9,700 mt in the third quarter of 2015. During the bankruptcy proceedings, company officials estimated it would cost about $117 million to bring the plant to its full nameplate capacity of 155,000 mt/year.
In addition to owning Mooresboro owner/operator American Zinc Products LLC, formerly Horsehead Metals Products, AZR also owns The International Metals Reclamation Company LLC, or INMETCO, a recycler of metals-bearing wastes and a processor of nickel-cadmium batteries in North America; and Zochem Inc., a zinc oxide producer located in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. Based in Pittsburgh, the company has about 600 employees.
