Gypsum industry news

Georgia-Pacific officially opened its new gypsum wallboard plant at Sweetwater in Texas earlier this month. The US$325m project is situated next to the company’s existing plant at the site, Sweetwater West, on the other side of a road. Canada-based Gyptech said in 2021 that it was supplying the equipment for the new high-speed line at the site.

When Georgia-Pacific first announced the new project in 2020, it mentioned that it would be able to keep its logistics costs low, use raw gypsum reserves and the existing workforce. Despite this, the plant has still created over 100 new jobs. The company also said that it anticipated closing its 60Mm²/yr Quanah plant, also in Texas, depending upon market conditions. This came to pass in March 2023. Altogether, both plants at Sweetwater will have a production capacity of around 93Mm²/yr. This implies that the new plant has a production capacity of around 60Mm²/yr, given that the existing plant’s capacity is 30Mm²/yr. Funnily enough this is the same as the Quanah plant.

The new plant at Sweetwater may be a sign that the US wallboard market is picking up again. Georgia-Pacific has invested some serious money and it is targeting Texas, a leading area for construction nationally. However, it does come with a few caveats. Firstly, the new plant at Sweetwater is replacing existing capacity at Quanah. Secondly, it is using some of the advantages of the existing plant such as its trucks and its proximity to its customers. This suggests that the company may be wary of building a new plant in a greenfield location with all the potential risks that might involve.

US wallboard sales have regularly peaked and troughed over the decades, like many other commodity markets, as demand and production capacity race each other. Sales of wallboard peaked around the year 2000 and then again in the mid 2000s before tailing off following the 2007 recession. They have been recovering ever since and started to get close to the levels seen in the first half of the 2000s in 2022 when the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported wallboard sales of 2.6Bnm².

Generally, the last tranche of new wallboard plants in the US were built or approved in the late 2000s before the financial downturn. These new sites included CertainTeed’s Roxboro plant in North Carolina and the Moundsville plant in West Virginia, Gold Bond Building Products’ Mount Holly plant in North Carolina and American Gypsum’s Georgetown plant in South Carolina. From this point though various plants were either closed or mothballed. Some of the latter have been restarted as the market slowly recovered. New plant projects in the 2010s tended to be upgrades or replacements. One example of this was USG’s plan to rebuild a production line at its Jacksonville plant in Florida, which was announced in late 2017 before Knauf took over the company in 2018. Another was National Gypsum’s scheme to reopen its Wilmington plant in North Carolina in 2019. At the same time in the 2010s there were a number of mergers and acquisitions including Lafarge’s sale of its gypsum business in North America in 2013, Knauf’s takeover of USG in 2019 and Saint-Gobain’s acquisition of Continental Building Products in 2020.

When Georgia-Pacific started building the new plant at Sweetwater in 2020 this marked the start of a new phase of US wallboard plant projects. American Gypsum announced plans for an upgrade to its Albuquerque gypsum wallboard plant in 2021, Gold Bond Building Products started building its long-delayed Eloy plant in Arizona in 2022 and it said it was spending US$90m on an upgrade to its Mount Holly gypsum wallboard plant in North Carolina in 2023, and CertainTeed revealed it wanted to build a second production line at its Palatka gypsum wallboard plant in Florida also in 2023.

Congratulations are due to Georgia-Pacific for the achievement at Sweetwater. Optimism for the US market in general may also be in order given the slow but steady stream of projects that have been announced and completed since 2020. The next step, when a company builds a new wallboard plant at a greenfield site in the US, looks set to happen when Gold Bond Building Products completes its Eloy plant.

US: Gold Bond Building Products plans to spend US$90m on an upgrade to its Mount Holly gypsum wallboard plant in North Carolina. The project will include installing a railway line and related infrastructure to aid logistics, according to the Gaston Gazette newspaper. It is expected to create 11 new jobs at the site. Construction on the project is expected to be completed in 2024. The affiliate company of National Gypsum has operated a plant at Mount Holly since 2007.

US: National Gypsum will reopen its Wilmington, North Carollina wallboard plant which was idled in 2009. The company plans to spend US$25m on upgrading the site. The company also plans to build a rail spur into the plant to support despatch by railway. The site will use raw gypsum from the company’s quarry in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada.

"We expect to have the plant operational by the end of the year," said chief executive officer Tom Nelson. The company intends to use the plant to grow its specialty gypsum wallboard board product lines, which include mould and moisture-resistant features. Nelson thanked the Wilmington Business Development, New Hanover County Commission, and Wilmington City Council for assistance with the project so far. Thanks was also given to the North Carolina Railroad Company, the North Carolina Department of Transportation, and Duke Energy for their support.

US: The commissioners of New Hanover country in North Carolina have approved a US$0.35m incentive package for National Gypsum to open its Wilmington wallboard plant. The package will be offered over five years if the wallboard producer meets benchmarks that include investing US$25m in the plant and hiring at least 51 people at the site, according to the Star News newspaper. The city of Wilmington is also considering offering a package of US$0.23m. However, pollution concerns have been aired at public hearings about re-starting the plant.

US: National Gypsum is considering reopening a gypsum wallboard plant in either Tampa, Florida or Wilmington, North Carolina. The wallboard producer plans to make its final decision late in 2018, according to the Greater Wilmington Business Journal. The Tampa plant was shut in 2008 and the Wilmington plant stopped operations in 2009. The company is planning to expand its presence in the south-east of the country.