NATCHEZ — Of the three companies that have put down money in a move to purchase significant tracts of the former International Paper industrial property since Adams County bought it in 2013, none have done so yet.

Two have shelved their projects entirely, while the third is in production but hasn’t completed its purchase a year after it was first announced.

County officials say they’re still optimistic about the future of the property.

The purchase

Adams County spent approximately $9 million when it purchased the IP land from a former industrial prospect — Rentech — for whom county officials had at one time helped facilitate the purchase of the property, which IP had shuttered in 2003.

Rentech had purchased the land with the intention of building a coal-to-liquid alternative fuel facility, but later changed its plans and abandoned the project before putting the property up for sale. Adams County purchased the land and took possession in August 2013.

While local industrial development officials have been marketing the property in parcels, at the time of the county’s purchase Rentech insisted the entire 478-acres had to be bought as a unit. The original asking price was for $8.5 million, but a competing bidder drove it higher.

Even as the sale was closing, Natchez Inc. Executive Director Chandler Russ said he was working with the competing bidder and with five potential industrial clients who were interested in the property.

Since then, three companies — Halcón, Emberclear and Delta-Energy — have signed options to buy significant tracts of the IP site.

But market changes in the energy sector have effectively killed two of those projects, meaning the land once optioned for sale — and the debt associated with it — will remain in the hands of taxpayers for the time being.The companies

The commitments for the land came close together.

In June 2014, Halcón Field Services executed a one-year option for 50 acres on the IP site following a previous optioning of four acres in the Natchez-Adams County Port. The project was to support work in the then-burgeoning Tuscaloosa Marine Shale oil and gas play in Wilkinson, Amite and Pike counties, and represented a $6 million, 25-job investment.

Shale development is more expensive than conventional plays, but when oil was selling at more than $100 a barrel, it was worth it.

The Halcón option was followed by a move in December 2014 to authorize the lease for 30 acres of the IP property to what would eventually be announced as Delta-Energy, a resource recovery company that mines materials — especially carbon solids and hydrocarbon liquids — from scrap tires.

When Delta-Energy’s commitment was formally announced in February 2015, the company said it would spend $3.75 million to purchase a building on the property and the 30 acres.

Near the end of December 2014, the board also executed the first option with Emberclear, a gas-to-liquids company that was seeking 70 acres for a project that represented a possible $500 million to $900 million investment that would result in 200 jobs.

Even then officials cautioned that the deal was a long way from done, but company had 18 months to move on the option it had purchased.

But during that 18 months, the oil market tanked — it was trading at just more than $40 a barrel Friday — forcing energy sector companies to rethink their long-term strategies. For Emberclear and Halcón, that meant letting go of the options they had in Adams County.

“Weakened worldwide oil prices have affected many of our projects, including Emberclear and Halcón,” Russ wrote in an email this week. “They have not renewed their options.  The only bright lining in these projects is that when oil prices return to a level that makes the projects feasible, the projects will return.  We obviously do not know when that will be but believe it is a price above $60.”

In the case of Delta-Energy, the company has completed the first phase of its work, started operating continuously and has hired 32 people.

The company has paid its lease agreement thus far by making approximately $200,000 in improvements in the county-owned fire loop system, “preventing the county from any out-of-pocket expenses,” Russ said.

Under the current agreement, Delta-Energy has two years to exercise its option to purchase or negotiate a lease. The company also has to make a one-time payment of $125,000 April 1.

“We expect that we will receive that payment and then begin a lease agreement with options to purchase and renewals,” Russ said.  “In other words, we are on track and continue to wish for continued growth and success for Delta-Energy.”

A number of clients are eyeing the port industrial property — which includes the IP land and the former Belwood Country Club — and 2016 appears promising, he said.

Board of Supervisors President Mike Lazarus — who served as vice president at the time of the IP purchase — said he believes the purchase was right thing despite the falling through of two of the prospects, and the county has been able to cover the cost of the notes without raising taxes.

This year, the county will pay $315,000 in principle and two interest payments of $238,990 apiece on the IP bond.

“Chandler has a lot of prospects we hear about, and all it is going to take is one big one,” Lazarus said. “I would rather have the property to market than not to have it and not market it. When someone comes in and needs, I want it to be there.”

Supervisors’ Vice President Calvin Butler, who was on the board that purchased the property, said he still believes the purchase was the right move when Rentech put the property up for sale.

“There is something on the table now that may actually go through, and if that works out, it is going to affect the whole site,” he said. “It may take the whole thing off our hands.”

Butler also said an upward change in the oil market can also affect the prospects of the land with the industry already on the ground.

“If the market goes up and Genesis (Energy) does the expansion they want to do in the port, Natchez Railway will need that property to build a loop track to support that,” Butler said.

“I can see that area being good in a couple of years, and I don’t think it will be another type of Rentech situation.”

The county is in the process of negotiating the sale of a small tract of land — three to five acres — to Southwest Electric Power Association, Lazarus said.

The former IP scalehouse has also been leased in the past to a company named Go West, which helped supply oil field operations, but the company allowed the lease to lapse in 2015 after making $160,000 in improvements to the facility. Energy markets were likewise blamed for the failure of Go West to move forward.

Two portions of the property will likely never be on the market.The former wastewater treatment facility and 25 acres associated with it have been reserved for eventual transfer to the St. Catherine Creek Utility Authority in the hope that the plant will one day be used to treat heavy wastewater from new industries.

The plant particularly figures into the needs of Elevance’s planned biorefinery, which engineers have said will generate an amount of wastewater the Natchez Water Works’ existing treatment plant doesn’t have the ability or capacity to handle.

Russ has maintained that having the wastewater plant as an industrial recruiting tool makes the IP purchase worth the expenditure outright.

The second portion is between 90 and 100 acres of floodplain, which county officials have said in the past are needed for maintaining rights-of-way and riverfront access.