Silicon smelter once planned for Newport, now under construction in Tennessee

By Zach Hagadone Reader Staff

If it seems like there hasn’t been much news coming out of the proposed silicon smelter in Newport, Wash., it’s because the project made a fairly quiet exit from the small community on the Washington side of the Pend Oreille River in 2021 and, as The Spokesman-Review reported March 19, is currently being built in the tiny town of Tiptonville, Tenn.

Officials in Tiptonville, including Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, welcomed the company behind the smelter — Canadian firm Sinova Global, formerly HiTest Sand and later PacWest Silicon — with a groundbreaking ceremony in the community of 2,400 in October 2022.

“We are pleased to have received all the permits required to commence construction and to partner with TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] who, along with the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, are helping to build a worldclass operation,” stated Sinova CEO Jayson Tymko in a news release at the time.

“To have reached this exciting point in our development is the result of considerable effort by many people for which, on behalf of Sinova, I thank everyone,” he added. “There is more work to be done before we meet here in the future when our operation commences — but I speak for all of us when I say it feels great to be building.”

The $150 million facility will employ 140 workers on a 350-acre industrial park with access to an inland port of the Mississippi River.

That’s what could have come to rural Pend Oreille County, if not for widespread local opposition coupled with slow-moving and complex zoning and permitting issues. Then-PacWest in late 2019 told Washington Gov. Jay Inslee in an update that the project was “on hold,” citing the failure to secure a meeting with the Kalispel Tribe, along with “bad faith actions” by the Pend Oreille Utility District related to costs to supply power to the proposed facility.

Meanwhile, county commissioners had denied a sweeping rezone of the property purchased by the company, and the county Planning Commission hadn’t been able to address the issue amid a long-running and sometimes contentious effort to update the Pend Oreille County Comprehensive Plan, which was recently completed, according to the Spokesman

All that left the company “sitting on the