Business briefs

Times-Picayune to be printed in Mobile, Ala.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune reports that the Times-Picayune pressroom will close in late 2015 or early 2016, and the newspaper will be printed in Mobile, Alabama.
ACS Louisiana General Manager Ray Masset says the move will eliminate 100 jobs at his company, which prints and packages the newspaper.
NOLA Media Group, which operates the website and publishes the newspaper, says news and ad sales staffs will remain the same.
Its news staff of 165 includes 95 reporters. Fifty-seven freelancers also contribute to the website and newspaper.
The New Orleans plant was built in 1968 and the one in Mobile in 2002. It prints The Press-Register 144 miles east of New Orleans.
Masset says the newer plant will cut costs, improve efficiency and allow much better reproduction and color.
Ricky Mathews, President of NOLA Media Group, which operates NOLA.com and publishes The Times-Picayune, said the savings will allow greater investment in news and sales. The website and newspaper work out of a downtown high-rise at the foot of Canal Street.
Masset says ACS Louisiana will renovate and expand offices in suburban Metairie, where 29 journalists design, copy edit and lay out the pages of the newspaper and its weekly and monthly sections.
He says people whose jobs are eliminated will be offered severance pay and will be able to apply for positions at other affiliated properties.
Massett says the Howard Avenue property may be donated to a nonprofit institution.

Canadian Pacific CEO says rail deal possible
(AP) The CEO of Canadian Pacific thinks U.S. regulators would approve a well-structured railroad merger, but nothing is planned now that talks with CSX ended.
CEO Hunter Harrison said Tuesday he doesn’t agree with the view that the Surface Transportation Board wouldn’t approve any merger.
Harrison said merging the Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. with CSX Corp. could have improved service by routing traffic around the bottlenecks in Chicago.
And Harrison says giving railroads access to customers on other rail networks would improve competition.
But Harrison says CP officials and CSX found they couldn’t agree on several issues, so talks ended after several meetings.
Officials at Jacksonville, Florida-based CSX have declined to comment on reports on the possible deal.
The other large railroads include Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, BNSF and Canadian National.

Shell Midstream Partners files for $750M IPO
NEW YORK (AP) — Shell Midstream Partners LP filed for an initial public offering that could be worth about $750 million before expenses and discounts.
Shell Midstream was formed by Royal Dutch Shell, and it will focus on acquiring pipelines and other midstream assets.
The master limited partnership filed for an offering of 37.5 million common units, and it expects the offering to price at $19 to $21 per unit. At the midpoint, that would be worth about $750 million.
The underwriters of the IPO will have the option to buy another 5.6 million units. At $21 per unit, that could bring the gross proceeds to as much as $906 million.
Shell Midstream’s assets include stakes in Zydeco Pipeline Co., Mars Oil Pipeline Co., and Bengal Pipeline Co., which all operate in Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi. Mars also works in the Gulf of Mexico. The company also has a small stake in Colonial Pipeline Co., which owns pipelines running from Texas to the Northeast.
If all of the units are sold, Royal Dutch Shell will still own about 69 percent of the partnership. The stock will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “SHLX.” No specific timing for the IPO was announced.

Portion of office building to become a hotel
NEW ORLEANS (AP) Poydras Properties LLC intends to convert seven floors of the 24-story 1250 Poydras building into a Hyatt-branded extended-stay hotel.
New Orleans CityBusiness reported (http://bit.ly/1o3FduT) Select Hotels Group LLC will operate the property, which is in the New Orleans business district near the Superdome.
Conveyance records indicate Poydras Properties executed a commercial lease agreement on Oct. 2 with Waypoint NOLA for a portion of the ground floor of 1250 Poydras and floors 11 through 17 for the hotel conversion project. The area amounts to about 134,000 square feet of space within the building.
Robert Hand, owner of Louisiana Commercial Realty, a broker in the deal, said the renovation budget for the project is $120 million.
Agents for Gulf States Real Estate Services of Covington also were involved in brokering the deal.
The New Orleans permits and licenses website shows Poydras Properties is in the process of applying for renovation permits for the project. A project description shows that the hotel would have a “sky lobby” on the 11th floor and guestrooms and suites on the remaining floors.
Hand said the development has been in the works for months, but there is no set timetable for completion of the work. Designs were done by HC Architecture of Atlanta and locally based Scairono Martinez Architects.
Hand said the project involves an extensive overhaul of the building to accommodate a hotel. He noted that much of the space had been vacant for several years.
The building has walkway access to the nearby Hyatt Regency Hotel and also uses its covered parking area. Hand said the new hotel will piggyback on the existing Hyatt property.
The project essentially combines a 57,000-square-foot block of vacant leasable space on floors 11 through 13 with the four floors above that energy company Eni Petroleum had been leasing. Hand said Eni had been looking for tenants to sublease the space since 2010 when the company left New Orleans for Houston.
Eni was paying about $18 per square foot in rent on roughly 75,000 square feet of space it was not using. The company’s lease wouldn’t have expired until 2018.
Poydras Properties has owned 1250 Poydras since 2001 and also owns the 28-story Entergy Building at 639 Loyola Ave.

Home Federal
declares dividend
SHREVEPORT (AP) — The board of Home Federal Bancorp Inc. of Louisiana has declared a quarterly cash dividend of 7 cents a share on common stock.
The dividend is payable Nov. 3 to shareholders of record Oct. 20.
Home Federal Bancorp is the parent of Home Federal Bank.

Pipeline ditch could cost Adams County $700K
NATCHEZ, Miss. (AP) — Gulf Coast Synthetic Fuel Center — a subsidiary of Rentech, the former owners of the International Paper property — intends to abandon a natural gas pipeline that runs through Tensas and Concordia Parish in Louisiana and into Adams County.
The line ran from a gas field near Lake St. John, where it supplied the natural gas needs of the IP plant. International Paper closed the plant in 2003.
While Gulf Coast Synthetic Fuel Center has announcement the abandonment, Adams County officials say the pipeline is owned by the county.
Officials said the cost of abandoning the pipeline is about $700,000. Of that, between $75,000 and $100,000 would be for legal and regulatory filing fees, while the remainder would be to make up the costs of environmental impact studies.
Board of Supervisors Attorney Scott Slover said getting the pipeline back to an operational state would cost about $350,000.
“The county has some potential industrial clients who are interested in the IP property, and some of those could use the pipeline as an auxiliary (pipeline),” he said. “If the right client comes on, there’s the chance of the pipeline staying on as an auxiliary.”

Gift seeds energy law chair at Tulane
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The Tulane University Law School has received a $2 million gift to help create an endowed faculty chair in energy law.
The gift came from Jim McCulloch, senior vice president and general counsel for Houston-based Forum Energy Technologies, and his wife, Susan.
University officials say the donation kicks off a campaign to raise additional money to create an endowed Center in Energy Law at Tulane.

Site clearance begins for Sasol project
WESTLAKE (AP) — Site clearance for Sasol’s ethane cracker project in Westlake is underway, as workers begin the task of prepping the land for construction.
Mike Hayes, Sasol’s public affairs manager for U.S. megaprojects, said workers from the Westlake-based Civil Construction are in the early stages of spot clearing.
Hayes says preconstruction activities will also include compacting clay to form a solid foundation on which the cracker will be built. He said that site clearance will most likely continue through the end of the year.
Sasol’s proposed $7 billion ethane cracker will produce ethylene, which, in turn, will be used to make products such as synthetic fibers, detergents, paints and fragrances. Construction on the facility is expected to begin next spring.