VOORHEESVILLE — Two months after hitting pause on a $40 million expansion of its School Road manufacturing facility, Atlas Copco is once again moving forward with the project. 

The decision to restart the project was referenced in passing during the May 2025 Voorheesville Board of Trustees meeting. 

The decision to hold off on construction, at least according to Kevin O’Connor, Albany County’s economic development chief, had been in response to the Trump administration’s levying of heavy tariffs on goods manufactured outside the United States.

“We have felt some effects from the new administration down in Washington,” O’Connor said during a March 4 meeting of the county’s Industrial Development Agency. “I met with a group of other economic development organizations from around the region, and there appears to be a whole thing of projects by European and Canadian companies in the U.S. [on hold.]”

O’Connor said of the non-American companies’ decision to wait and see, “I assume that’s part of the tariff war, if you will. At that time I had not seen anything to that effect, but we were informed recently that Atlas Copco, which as you know is owned by a German company” — it’s actually a Swedish company — and “their board voted not to approve [the Voorheesville expansion]. They didn’t disapprove it, but they did not approve the project. So the project is on hold for right now.”

“You know, we’ll see what comes [of] this, but these impending trade wars probably don’t bode well for foreign direct investment in the U.S., and particularly in New York and Albany County,” O’Connor said on March 4. 

Atlas Copco did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the project proceeding.

With its proposed expansion, Atlas Copco is looking to fill a void in the decarbonization marketplace. 

The company’s compressors are used in the carbon-capture and sequestration (CSS) processes employed by American industries such as ethanol production, cement manufacturing, and power generation. With CSS, these industries are able to reduce climate-changing greenhouse gasses by capturing the carbon dioxide emissions and permanently storing it underground. 

But the growth of the CCS industry has been hampered by a lack of domestic manufacturing capacity, particularly when it comes to the type of large-scale compressors made by Atlas Copco.”

“In the decarbonization, carbon capture, and carbon sequestration markets, these are brand new. They didn’t exist 10 years ago. They didn’t really exist five years ago except in some pilot plants. Now it’s a full-blown industry across the heartlands where ethanol was made," Randy Dirlam, Atlas Copco’s Voorheesville general manager, told members of the village planning commission in April of last year.

To meet this demand, the company needed to build a facility not allowed by code. 

The village zoning board in June 2024 approved a variance to allow for an addition to the existing building to be built 20 feet higher than the 40 feet allowed by zoning. The facility’s 101,000-square-foot footprint will expand by 65,000 square feet, where zoning allows only for 20,000 square feet.

Dirlam told commission members during the April 2024 meeting that his company’s plans had just been buoyed by the federal government, which had just notified the company a successful application submitted to the Department of Energy for tax credits related to clean energy manufacturing, which were made possible by passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The green credits would allow Atlas Copco to receive back 30 percent of its approximately $40 million investment every year for 10 years. The credits have been a target of the Trump administration; however the bill remains popular on both sides of the aisle, as close to 20 House Republicans asked Speaker Mike Johnson to preserve the IRA’s clean-energy tax credits.

In addition to the federal funds due to the project, Atlas Copco is set to receive a healthy influx of local tax dollars. In July of last year, the Albany County Industrial Development Agency held a public hearing on the company’s request for $4.6 million in tax breaks: a $2.94 million property tax break and $1.63 million in savings from sales and use taxes (on $20.3 million in purchases). A month later, the Advance Albany County Alliance touted a $9 million incentive package that was approved for the project.

Atlas Copco’s county IDA  application said that the company would make annual PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) payments of $211,000 for 10 years, which would be $294,000 less per year than if it made regular tax payments of $505,000 on the new project; and that the annual salaries of the new 55 full-time jobs would range between $50,000 and $115,000.