Can the Circle be Unbroken? Revival on the Road to Methanol
Pulpton was dead as a doornail. On that point, there could be no doubt.
The old pulp mill loomed over the road—chained gate, broken windows, vines crawling up the stacks like nature was repossessing the steel. Main Street was worse. Only two lights downtown:a check-cashing place and a nail salon insisting it was “OPEN” in a flicker that felt more plea than promise. The bank, busted. Barbershop, gone. Dollar Store: boarded up and shackled, the padlock furred with rust.
A voice drifted out from under the awning of the shuttered pharmacy, looking straight at all of us out here in Digestville, finger pointed our way.
“Well, I’ll be switched,” he said, looking our way. “What are you all wanderin’ the ruins here for?”
Peewee Belden stepped forward—coat too thin, shoulders narrow, eyes sharp as a hawk that had seen too much and forgotten nothing.
“You want to know how a town dies?” Peewee asked. “I’ll tell you plain. We built these chains in life—link by link. Year after year of no new industry, no new ideas, no belief the forest could do anything but what granddaddy did with it.”
He swept a hand down the empty, rain-slick street. “This ain’t collapse,” he said. “This is a forgettin’. A town forgets its purpose, then folks forget theirs.”
Peewee leaned in, lowering his voice to a warning meant for all of us. “And don’t you get to thinkin’ Pulpton’s the only one in danger. There’s a hundred towns just like this. Maybe even yours.”
He pointed toward a distant glow on the horizon— a pale, rising light beyond the timberline. “You want a different future?” he said. “Then you follow me. I’ll show you Beaver Lake Renewable Energy over near Pineville, Louisiana.
THE ROAD OUT OF PULPTON
And so we followed him— out of the ruins of Pulpton and toward that pale industrial glow, toward a megaproject rising in the pines that just might be the difference
between “forgettin’” and a second act for every timber town in America.
Because what Peewee showed us wasn’t a ghost. It was a blueprint.Beaver Lake Renewable Energy (BLRE), the $2.5 billion wood-to-methanol project now taking shape in central Louisiana, is poised to become the largest facility of its kind in the world. This is where the forest meets the future.
THE SCALE: TIGER STADIUMS AND MANHATTAN CABLES
BLRE sits on the bones of an old mill, but what’s rising now dwarfs anything that stood here before:
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500,000+ tons of green methanol per year
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Concrete enough to fill LSU’s Tiger Stadium to the goalposts
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Cable long enough to stretch from Louisiana to Manhattan
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3.4 million craft hours —
the equivalent of 1,700 years of one person’s labor
And unlike the silent ruins of Pulpton, this project hums with activity.
As Dan LeFevers, VP for Policy and Government Affairs at SunGas Renewables, said: “People talk about elephants in the room. This project? It’s the whole herd.”
THE REGION: LOGGING LEGACY MEETS FUTURE FUELS
Why build here? LeFevers didn’t hesitate: “We needed river access, power, transmission, gas lines, and a wood basket big enough for decades. Those things don’t line up often.”
But there’s a deeper truth— one Peewee knows too well. The South is sitting on a crisis: 50 million tons of wood with nowhere to go. Pulp and paper mills have closed. Thinnings lie on the forest floor, or else they’re burned because there’s simply no market. BLRE isn’t just a facility. It is a forestry relief valve— a way to clear the backlog that chokes landowners, loggers, and mill towns. And the logistics are world-class:
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A barge corridor on the Red River
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Two massive barges every four and a half days
moving fuel to Baton Rouge and global markets -
Industrial infrastructure already in place
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A workforce that knows timber systems better than anywhere else in the country
Where Pulpton drifted into forgettin’, Beaver Lake is building purpose. And yes, Peewee would approve.
THE TECHNOLOGY: FROM LOBLOLLY TO METHANOL
At the center of the project are three SunGas S1000 gasification trains, standardized for reliability and scale. The simplicity is the brilliance:
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Wood arrives.
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It’s chipped.
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Dried.
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Fed into the gasifier.
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Converted into syngas.
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Syngas becomes methanol through Johnson Matthey catalysts.
Crucially: This system needs zero supplemental hydrogen. N No external electrolysis. No exotic partnerships to keep the plant running. Just loblolly pine in, methanol out— a closed-loop, self-contained system immune to the complexity traps that plague other green-fuel projects. Or as Peewee might say if he wandered through the FEED drawings: “Well I’ll be. A mill that learned a new trick.”
THE MARKET: FROM PINEY WOODS TO PANAMA CANAL
The project is owned by C2X, the developer created by AP Moller Maersk and ENEOS. Maersk isn’t dabbling. It’s rewriting the rules of global shipping. This project is the first commercial proof-point for industrial-scale wood-to-methanol production.
It’s not just another plant. It’s the test case that can unlock dozens more across the South. And the “yellow box” LeFevers talked about in a Digest webinar this week? That’s aviation. “The yellow box in 2050 is aviation,” he said. “That means these pine trees today become jet fuel at Heathrow tomorrow.” Methanol today. Alcohol-to-jet tomorrow. Forests to flight.
WHY THIS MATTERS
For every town staring down its own Pulpton-shaped future, Beaver Lake is more than methanol. It’s proof that rural America can innovate at global scale. It’s a new center of gravity for forestry economics. It’s a chance to make ‘manufacturing revival’ intersect with “energy dominance”.
RETURN TO PEEWEE BELDEN
When we passed back through Pulpton after visiting Beaver Lake, Peewee Belden was still under the pharmacy awning, coat wet, eyes bright. He pointed toward the glow on the horizon.
“That nail salon sign down there?” he said. “That’s a flicker. That light out there?” He paused, letting the glow spill across the empty street.
“That’s 500,000 tons of promise. That’s a beacon. That’s what a second act looks like.” He stepped back into the shadows.
“Tell ’em in Digestville,” he said. “Tell every town like this: you ain’t Pulpton yet—not if you follow the light.” And with that, Peewee Belden vanished into the rain, leaving the lesson behind: It’s Purpose, or forgettin’.
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