AGT Food and Ingredients says the facility will give southern Saskatchewan grain shippers better access to containers
A new intermodal terminal will be operating in east Regina in time to handle the 2019 crop.
The terminal will be called Intermobil and operated by Mobil Grain, an AGT Food and Ingredients subsidiary, on the Canadian National Railway line just south of the existing AGT facility.
Work has been underway at the site for some time but the first details were released to farmers at the Grain Expo held during Canadian Western Agribition in Regina last week.
AGT chief executive officer Murad Al-Katib said Regina and southern Saskatchewan shippers haven’t had direct access to containers since 2003. Intermobil is privately owned but will be available for public use to all western Canadian grain shippers.
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Al-Katib declined to reveal the cost of the terminal other than to say tens of millions of dollars.
“This will be one of the largest inland container terminals in the entire country actually,” he said in an interview. “With over 2,500 containers of storage this is truly going to bring all those global steamship lines back to us and get our products out to market.”
Two electric rail-mounted gantry cranes will be installed during the first quarter of 2019 and the facility fully ready to ship grain by harvest time.
Al-Katib said containerized grain shipments are the future as Canada works to develop new markets and fill orders based on customer demands for things like different protein levels.
“This is going to allow us now to introduce shipping programs like trait marketing,” he said. “We are seeing demand now for low glyphosate durum wheat for instance.
“We’re kind of seeing the fair-average quality bulk-handling system failing some millers and higher value processors in the world. We think that containerized grain is going to become a bigger part of the future supply chain.”
Doug MacDonald, CN’s senior vice-president of rail centric supply chain growth, said the railway moved about one million tonnes of grain in containers last year by taking empty containers to farms and eventually to port.
He said there aren’t enough inbound containers stopping right now so empty containers from places like Chicago and Montreal are stopped on their way back to the West Coast.
CN has intermodal terminals in Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Saskatoon.
“Regina was the only major city we weren’t servicing in this way,” he said, leaving pulse shippers to ship in bulk or by truck up to Saskatoon.
Containers will be stopped in Melville and shuttled to Regina’s new facility.
Mobil Grain president Sheldon Affleck said the facility site is about 600 feet wide and a half-mile long and will operate similar to port facilities.
“The gantry spans about 180 feet wide, about eight storeys high, (and) weighs about two locomotives,” he told the farmers. “It’s over top of two rail tracks. It has six lanes of container storage that can be four high and a half-a-mile long and it has two truck lanes for loading directly on to trucks.”
The site also has room for 170 trailer chassis.
“It’s a very efficient way to run a site,” Affleck said. “On the same footprint we’re going to have three to four times as much container storage. The purpose is not to have the containers sitting but containers are not a perfect pipeline.”
He said if there are empty containers anywhere in the CN network, he wants them sitting in Regina where crop commodities will be available to fill them.
He also said there has been some discussion with potash producers about using the terminal for smaller shipments.
Al-Katib said the terminal is separate from AGT’s grain operations and all shippers will be able to book containers with the shipping lines who use CN.
The terminal presents more options to everyone in the sector and will position Regina and southern Saskatchewan as a food hub, he said.
The new Protein Innovation Canada, for example, will be coming on line.
Al-Katib said the market concentration risk for producers is too high.
“We’ve done a great job presenting our products to a small number of markets in large quantities. We need more markets, we need less reliance (on existing markets),” he said. “I think the containerization of grain and upping value, more value-added processing, is going to be a big part of that.”
He added the change in rail transportation dynamics makes more value-added and food production possible.
He said the containers won’t replace bulk handling.
“If we get that right this will provide a couple of million tonnes of surge capacity to southern Saskatchewan in grain, and we all know when we need that surge capacity how valuable that is to the farmgate,” Al-Katib said.
