Huge marine port continues to upgrade to meet growing demands
It is by just about any measure you care to use one of the most impressive marine port developments in the Pacific Northwest: passenger cruise terminals meshing with a world-class intermodal (ship to rail) container terminal. Marine loading facilities to ship LNG cargoes to energy hungry consumers in Japan, South Korea and China. A $42 million marine terminal to ship wood pellets overseas and a $90 million road-rail corridor that will enable this and other bulk materials like coal, and sulphur link up with mining and natural resource operations across northern BC and Alberta.
“We’re now seeing an incredible hybrid port facility here,” says Michael Gurney, Manager, Corporate Communications, for Prince Rupert Port Authority, “made up of terminals in operation, under development and proposed that represent billions of dollar of investment in Prince Rupert and thousands of jobs in the offing.”
Add to this Ridley Terminals Inc. (RTI), one of North America’s most advanced coal unload and loading terminals and you have a highly sophisticated export point for vast reserves of Western Canadian coal and petroleum coke. Despite its street cred here and overseas, however, it’s been a bumpy ride for the west coast terminals. Built in the 1980s at a cost of $250 million to ship coal from newly opened Tumbler Ridge coal mines in northeastern, B.C., the Crown-owned terminal has been placed on the sales block twice, most recently by the federal Tories in December – a puzzling choice given the terminal broke records the year before in revenue, profits and production, signed 11 new contracts and cut its debt by 70 per cent.
Answering China’s call…
What makes the announcement of the sale more mystifying is the increased appetite for Canadian coal in Asia, notably China. With an annual shipping capacity of 12 million tonnes and onsite storage for another 1.2 million tonnes Ridley Terminals has the added advantage over other western ports of being a day and a half closer to the Asian giant. China is virtually bursting at the seams in new manufacturing and an enormous emerging middle class hungry for goods created with the help of Canadian coal.
The prospect of all that increased activity is the main driver behind tremendous engineering and construction activity at Ridley Terminals, in particular two main components that were extremely complex to engineer and build. The first is RTI’s new rail mounted stacker reclaimer – with a vast complex of interconnecting conveyors, transfer points and ancillary equipment including scales, feeders, dust collection and suppression – and the ability to deliver high volumes of coal and petroleum coke. “The stacker reclaimer,” says RTI’s Director of Project Engineering Emil Tomescu, “is a huge piece of equipment to assemble in terms of the precision needed and the alignment.”
The second major piece was the assembly and installation of tandem rotary railcar dumper barrels designed to unload a coal handling rail fleet that in recent years has transitioned from steel rail cars to lighter, aluminum-made railcars. First job, though, was taking apart and disposing the existing dumper barrels, not an easy task by anyone’s standards. “They were monsters,” chuckles RTI’s project manager Matt LaFiandra. “Each barrel was about 330 tonnes. These were removed from the vault in a single piece using a 600 tonne Liebherr crane and then cut up and shipped out as scrap.”
Substantially lighter at 150 tonnes apiece, the newly commissioned dumper barrels were still a handful, says Prince Rupert managing engineer Andy Cook. “To me it’s the logistics of getting those large heavy load components moved to the site as big and heavy as they are and assembled to the level of precision as they need to be.” Add installation of hydraulic and other components to the very precise lowering of the barrel dumper into an existing 60 foot deep concrete vault and you have, says fellow managing engineer Travis Bernhardt, “a massive mechanical, electrical, hydraulic and civil engineering effort.”
Designed by Metso’s Mining and Construction division the dumper barrels sit on large trunnion beams and bearings. But the really important action occurs at the top of the platen inside the barrel where success lining it up to the rail line is measured in very small fractions of an inch. Based on a bridge and drawbridge design, that platen is also special, says LaFiandra, because its adjustable length accommodates the difference in length between steel and aluminum cars.
“The barrel has end rings that are about 33 feet across and when all is said and done, the platen inside has to match up within approximately 1/16th of an inch of the existing rail line. So it’s very precise.”
It’s all about capacity…
The real eye-catching piece of infrastructure stretched across the Ridley Island skyline is RTI’s third, newly commissioned stacker reclaimer. Typically, companies choose between a trench-type stacker reclaimer, ideal for installations with low-volume, high-active storage pile capacities, and a slewing type stacker reclaimer where much larger quantities of material must be available. And while both machines are horizontally pivoted (slewed) about the vertical axis, only the slewing stacker reclaimer utilizes this motion for operating in the pile during stacking and reclaiming.
Because of its high capacity demands, RTI settled on Sandvik’s PD200-2200/60, a slew type bucket wheel stacker/reclaimer that employs a straight-through tripper to handle material entering from one end of the yard and leaving toward the other end. Sandvik calls it a “super-duty machine” that also minimizes the migration of the centre of gravity in operation and eliminates any interference that might occur between the stacking and reclaiming modes. Built in Jiang Su province, China, the machine was shipped to Ridley Terminal in five separate pieces aboard the HHL Macau.
From there it was transferred to barges at Porpoise Harbour on the east side of the Ridley Island and eventually moved to site with the assistance of Mammoet Heavy Lift and Gat Leedm Trucking. At approximately 1,500 metric tonnes, 140 metres long and 30 metres tall, the machine is a “humongous piece of equipment,” says Tomescu, boasting a reclaim rate of 6,000 tonnes per hour, the stackers a rate of 8,000 tonnes per hour.
As owner and prime contractor of this EPCM project, RTI oversees the construction of everything, including the 14 km long road rail utility corridor (i.e. three inbound and two outbound tracks for coal, potash and other bulk materials). RTI buys directly from suppliers, some of whom deliver it to site where RTI sub-contractors install it. “Other times if it’s a complicated machine like a stacker reclaimer or dumper,” says LaFiandra, “they install it, commission it, and hand us the keys once it’s proven out.”
Meantime, installation of a yet another tandem rotary dumper is planned for 2014, this in turn requiring construction of a new concrete vault. During construction, the rest of the PLC controlled plant has to be in continuous operation, says LaFiandra, which will mean digging the 60 foot vault in close proximity to those facilities. He likens it to building a sky scraper in downtown Vancouver or Toronto. “You’ve got buildings all around, you have to build this massive hole and not disturb the stuff around you. So it’s a substantial job.” Like the existing dumper barrels, this one will process a unit train of up to 75 cars an hour.
Asked if there’s anything to the rumour that yet another stacker reclaimer may also be in the offing, LaFiandra was charac
teristically cautious. “There is space to install a fourth stacker reclaimer, but at this point a fourth stacker reclaimer has not been ordered.” That may be enough for now. By 2015, however, RTI and the port authority expect the newly commission stacker-reclaimer and tandem rotary dumper barrels will more than double the terminal’s capacity to 25 Mt/y and three million tonnes of ground storage.
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