Arauco receives Approval for Uruguay Plant

The Uruguayan government gave permission to Celulosa Arauco and the Swedish-Finnish company Stora Enso for the construction of a pulp mill in the area of  Conchillas, Uruguay. The Project is planed to have a capacity of 1.3 million metric tons of pulp a year, but it is not yet defined. The total investment is estimated to fluctuate between U.S. $ 1,5 billion and US $ 2 billion.

Celulosa Arauco y Constitucion SA, the pulp unit of Chile’s Empresas Copec SA, and Stora Enso OYJ received environmental approval from Uruguayan authorities to build a pulp plant in the country, the Santiago-based newspaper El Mercurio reported.

The initiative is part of joint venture between local company and Stora Enso. The Project is planed to have a capacity of 1.3 million metric tons of pulp a year, but it is not yet defined. The total investment for the plant is estimated to fluctuate between U.S. $ 1,5 billion and US $ 2 billion. The initiative also foresees the construction of a port and a biomass generation plant.

In 2009, the Angelini group's forest associated a joint venture equally with Stora and bought the land from the Spanish company Ence, a company that had considered building a plant with similar characteristics as the proposed plant.

This approval is very important to precede the decisions taken by the board of the company in terms of the final investment of the construction of the plant.

The project was commissioned in 2008 by the Uruguayan authorities, but due to the changes that were performed (increased production capacity) the authority launched a new approval process.