Wednesday, October 14, 2015

New grain terminal for Hamilton

A new 50,000-tonne grain terminal will be added at Pier 26 in Hamilton harbour and be ready to receive Ontario crops by the fall of 2017.

G3, the company that bought the Canadian Wheat Board, is the investor. It has strong connections with Bunge.

“Combined with G3’s existing facilities in Trois-Rivieres and Quebec City, and our strong marketing connections, we believe G3 will present a very competitive new option for Ontario farmers,” said Karl Gerrand, the company’s chief executive officer.

He said it’s part of G3”s plan to become a coast-to-coast Canadian grain business.

G3’s Quebec City grain export terminal came to the company through U.S. grain giant Bunge, which along with Saudi Arabian firm SALIC is a joint-venture owner of G3. G3’s Trois-Rivieres facility, formerly Les Elevateurs des Trois-Rivieres (ETR), had been owned by CWB since 2013.

Grain exports from southern Ontario have been increasing “for some time now,” Gerrand said Tuesday.

“We recognize time is valuable for our farmer partners, which is why this facility has been designed to get trucks in and out as fast as any competing terminal in Ontario.”

Hamilton’s existing terminals handled over two million tonnes of grain, oilseeds and agrifood products in 2014, Hamilton Port Authority CEO Bruce Wood said in G3’s release.

Bunge, which with SALIC closed its deal to buy CWB and rebrand the joint venture as G3 at the end of July, also already operates an edible oil refinery on port real estate at Hamilton, on Pier 11.

Other companies already moving grain and agrifood products through their own facilities at the port include Richardson International, Parrish and Heimbecker, Agrico, Biox Canada, Vopak, Sylvite Agri-Services and Westway Terminals.

Richardson spent more than $5 million in 2012 on expansions at its Hamilton terminal, including a second shipping tower for laker vessels and a third receiving pit for grain trucks. It also built an inland terminal at Shantz Station, between Kitchener and Guelph.

Parrish and Heimbecker, another Winnipeg grain firm, is the owner of Hamilton’s two nine-storey-tall, 28,000-tonne capacity grain storage domes, opened in 2011. And Agrico recently doubled its fertilizer tank storage at Hamilton, to 40,000 tonnes.

The port’s direct access to the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway system means Hamilton is “ideally located for agrifood exporters,” Wood said.

G3’s neighbours at Pier 26 would include Bitumar’s asphalt terminal and the Windsor Salt terminal, owned by German fertilizer firm K+S.