GOLDBORO — Less than one year after declaring its intention to sell its 267-acre plot in the Municipality of the District of Guysborough (MODG’s) Goldboro Industrial Park, liquefied natural gas (LNG) company Pieridae Energy Limited of Calgary announced last week that it has struck a deal with an unnamed party for a “cash consideration” worth $12 million.
The sale, which became final on July 25, is “an important step in concentrating [on] our upstream and midstream businesses,” in Alberta, said the company’s president and CEO Darcy Reding in a news release. “We are excited to conclude the sale... Pieridae will be stronger with a lower risk profile and a clearer investment proposition that benefits our shareholders.”
Pieridae – noting that it did not have the commitment necessary from commercial markets to justify constructing the $10-billion LNG facility it had hoped to develop, when it purchased the Goldboro site from the MODG for $3.2 million in 2015 – put its land, licences and permits on the block last November.
At the time, MODG Warden Vernon Pitts told The Journal that while “council was disappointed that the proposed LNG Project for the Goldboro area did not cross the finish line to development,” it was nonetheless “aware that energy development projects have been swinging away from the LNG and fossil fuel sector. Future world needs have been dictating that these must be addressed by green energy.”
In March 2024, Reding told an investor meeting that, “While we are unable to disclose more specific information at this time, we remain confident in the probability of closing a successful sale transaction [for the Goldboro property] in the first half of 2024.”
The following month, documents made public by the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board (NSUARB) showed that Pieridae had applied to the regulator for permission to transfer its operating permit to a numbered Nova Scotia company whose president, Sam Roche-Perks, is also co-founder director of Simply Blue Group, a green fuels developer based in Ireland.
According to the NSUARB application obtained by The Journal, the “request for consent to transfer permit issued under Gas Plant Facility Regulations (Nova Scotia)” was “pursuant to an Asset Purchase Agreement dated February 16, 2024,” between the buyer, 4574030 Nova Scotia Limited, and Pieridae.
Earlier this month, NSUARB documents showed that 4574030 Nova Scotia Limited had insured the Goldboro property for $5 million with an option to increase that coverage to $20 million “as required,” according to the insurance broker’s letter on file with the regulator.
In late June, at the annual gathering of business and government leaders at Strait of Canso Superport Days in Dundee, Simply Blue’s stakeholder engagement lead, Megan Harris, confirmed that the company planned to build a “renewable energy park” somewhere on the Eastern Shore – but stopped short of identifying the exact location.
“There is an abundance of biomass [in Nova Scotia],” she said at the event. “It’s under-utilized; it is being shipped across the ocean to Europe and beyond. So, we are going to be using some of that and it will benefit the local economy. It’s going to provide stable jobs to the forestry industry in Nova Scotia… We are going to be using [biomass] sustainably harvested from locally managed forests and by-products of existing sawmills.”
The company is also attracted to the province, she said, because it has “excellent potential sites, deepwater marine facilities and government support in a stable country... We hope to start construction in 2026 and begin operations in 2029... We want to develop strategic relationships in the communities that we work in. We want to be out there talking to people, and we want to treat people like people. We also believe that local knowledge is [a] key.”
Neither Simply Blue nor Pieridae – which did not identify the buyer of the Goldboro property in last week’s announcement – returned The Journal’s request for further information or clarification by press time.
