The grain company formerly known as CWB plans to build up a market share in Ontario grain and oilseed handling for export, with a new Lake Ontario terminal at Hamilton.
G3 Canada announced Tuesday it will build a new lake terminal at the Port of Hamilton to ship crops out of southern Ontario en route to export markets.
The 50,000-tonne capacity terminal, already being built at the port’s Pier 26, is expected to be complete for the 2017 harvest, to load vessels and move product to G3’s port handling facilities on the St. Lawrence River for export.
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“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,” G3 CEO Karl Gerrand said in a release.
Winnipeg-based G3’s investment, he said, is part of the company’s plan to cast itself as a “coast-to-coast Canadian grain enterprise.”
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.
Winnipeg-based Richardson in 2012 put up over $5 million in expansions at its Hamilton terminal, including a second shipping tower for laker vessels and a third receiving pit for grain trucks.
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. — AGCanada.com Network
