National Gypsum Moves Forward with New Gypsum Wallboard Manufacturing Plants

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). Privately held National Gypsum Company (Charlotte, North Carolina) is moving ahead with construction of a new gypsum wallboard manufacturing plant in Mount Holly, North Carolina. The $125 million project includes a $40 million design-build contract for the 500,000 square-foot building with Bovis Lend Lease, Incorporated (Charlotte, North Carolina), which is on-site managing construction activity. The building is a steel building with a precast concrete exterior and 25,000 square feet of office space. The remaining square footage is for warehousing and process equipment, which is being installed by contractors assigned by the owner. The project is proceeding on schedule with a planned start-up and first production in July of 2007.

First reported by Industrial Info in the site study phase in 2004, the Mount Holly project is the latest in a series of projects from National Gypsum, which has seen a new plant come online about every two years. The company’s previous plant in Apollo Beach (Gibsonton), Florida came online in 2001. An expansion at the Tampa, Florida plant was performed prior to the Apollo Beach site.

The Mount Holly plant will use synthetic gypsum, a byproduct produced from flue gas desulfurization scrubbers at nearby power plants, as a feedstock.

No rest for the weary, National Gypsum is moving forward with its next new plant, this one sited in Eloy, Arizona, where the company will build a $140 million plant utilizing naturally-mined gypsum from its nearby quarry in Winkleman, Arizona. In January 2007, the company finalized the purchasing of the site, essentially an alfalfa field adjacent to Interstate 10 with railroad access to Union Pacific. National Gypsum will construct $6 million worth of rail facilities including a rail spur and loading system at the new site. National Gypsum will drill its own water wells on site for use as process and cooling water. Again, National Gypsum will utilize Bovis Lend Lease as the design-build contractor for the building, estimated to exceed 600,000 square feet. Groundbreaking for the Eloy project is scheduled for May 2007. Steel has been ordered and will be delivered to the site in September 2007. Completion of the Eloy project, which is expected to take 18-24 months to complete and will produce one billion square feet of gypsum wallboard per year, is scheduled for the first quarter of 2007.

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