Remember that company developing a marijuana resort in California? They’re selling the town to an oil company.

LOS ANGELES Could plans to turn an old California ghost town into a marijuana mecca be going up in smoke?

Cannabis technology company American Green, which bought Nipton for $5 million last year, has sold it to another company for $7.7 million, acknowledging it struggled to raise the money needed to remake the old desert mining town into a pot paradise.

Buying and building towns is very cash intensive. Up until now, the cost of attracting capital has been very expensive for our company, Phoenix-based American Green said in a statement issued earlier this month.

That responsibility, the company added, now falls on the new owner, Delta International Oil & Gas, a company thats previously focused on buying properties for exploratory drilling.

However, American Green says the sale includes the provision that it continue with its project to transform the 80-acre town on the edge of the Mojave Desert into a cannabis-themed resort.

After purchasing Nipton last year American Green unveiled ambitious plans that included remodeling its modest Old West-style hotel into a buds and breakfast inn and bottling and selling cannabis-infused beverages drawn from Niptons plentiful desert aquifer. There were also plans to attract cultivators and marijuana-theme boutique owners such as glassblowers.

Still other plans called for the company to bring back Niptons post office and bank and expand its solar farm to serve the entire towns handful of residents, making Nipton green in more ways than one.

How much if any of that has happened couldnt immediately be determined Monday. A clerk who answered the phone at the Nipton Trading Post said he was the only person there but too busy to talk and hung up. A publicist for American Green said she would reach out to Niptons project manager.

Once a booming mining town served by stagecoach and rail lines, Nipton was a ghost town when ...