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Wellsville Intermodal Park Ramps Up with Shale
WELLSVILLE, Ohio -- The village of Wellsville is eager to realize the benefits from a year of growth at the Wellsville Intermodal Facility and the rapid emergence of the oil and gas industry in Columbiana County.
So says Randy Allmon, president of the Wellsville Area Chamber of Commerce.
Last year was “a little better” than 2011, Allmon says, with chamber membership increasing 10% annually the last few years. But with a few local businesses shutting their doors in 2012, he says the village is ready for a surge of the growth based on the industrial park.
“My goal is to get more spinoff from these businesses, especially on Main Street,” Allmon says. “If we can get Main Street going, I think Wellsville will have a bright future.”
There isn’t much property left available for development or occupancy at the intermodal park – about four acres on one side, and another 10 on the floodplain, Drake says. With $5.7 million invested over 10 years, the port authority deemed the intermodal park “complete” last August, with its 60-ton overhead river crane transloading cargo from barge to rail and truck.
Pier 48 Stevedoring LLC operates the river crane and has been moving material since last June, says its owner and president, Larry Heck. Pier 48 has unloaded steel coil from 18 barges filled to their 1,500-ton capacity, and another 24 barges loaded with barite for Cimbar Performance Minerals. By the first week of March, Heck says Pier 48 will have unloaded another 12 barges for Cimbar, which is supplying the barite to Anchor Drilling Fluids USA.
In November, Anchor opened a 12,000-square-foot drilling fluids processing plant at the terminal, where it makes the “mud” used to lubricate the drills of natural gas wells. Each barge has between 1,600 and 1,800 tons of material, and takes about five or six hours to unload, Heck says.
“When they’re running full out, Cimbar’s going to be supplying Anchor with as much as 40 barges a month,” Heck says. “That’s a substantial amount besides all the other business we’re planning on.”
Pier 48 soon will will have three more coil barges transloaded onto trucks bound for steel plants in Youngstown and Warren, including Wheatland Tube, Heck says. Each coil weighs 25 to 30 tons, with as many as 58 coils on each barge. Coils are loaded one at a time onto each truck, which takes five to 10 minutes. In one day, Pier 48 can load some 54 trucks in about 11 hours. Heck is looking to purchase a forklift with a 62,000-pound lift capacity to help move the coils around the site while the crane does other work.
“Because I can put a barge of coil on the ground in four hours, and that allows me to do other things with the crane,” he says.
Pier 48 is looking to moving hydraulic fracturing or “frack” sand and steel pipe through the port as activity in the Marcellus and Utica shale plays continues to increase, Heck says. He says business for Pier 48 will be “just explosive industrywide” as more projects come to fruition at the intermodal park.
In January, the port authority approved a $2.4 million land purchase agreement with Marathon Petroleum Corp. for 3.6 acres to build a truck transfer station that will allow Marathon to bring in and store natural gas liquids from the oil and gas fields to pipeline to their 2.5-million-gallon holding tanks in the terminal. The construction of that storage complex will likely take two to three years, Heck says, and “It looks like a lot of that material for building it will go through our port right here.”
Heck expects work will continue to increase through 2013 with crane operations running two shifts six to seven days a week by mid-year. Pier 48 employs five right now, but Heck says he’d like to have as many as 20 when the port is operating at capacity.
“From the area, I try to gather people from all over,” Heck, says. “From Wellsville itself, East Liverpool, Chester (West Virginia), Salineville. Just to localize it and try to build up employment for this area.”
Pier 48’s neighbor at the intermodal park, Anchor Drilling, also employs local workers. Anchor plant manager Harold Willett says the plant employs three to produce the fracking fluid, or “mud,” and another three truck drivers to deliver the product to nearby drill rigs. Anchor delivers to six rigs in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
“The more rigs they put up there, the more we’ll hire,” Willett says. “Finding people to do this job isn’t that hard, and there’s a lot of people here in town that have helped us out.”
Production at Anchor has already spawned a spinoff business at the intermodal park with QST Trucking leasing a half an acre to provide Anchor with trucking services, says the port authority’s Drake. As businesses such as Anchor move forward, “We can’t overstate how important the Utica play is to the region,” he says.
“Ten years ago, Columbiana County had about 200 millionaires total,” Drake says. “Today, we’ve got about 800 millionaires. I would say that most of those millionaires are property owners or people who are in the oil/shale leasing business.”
While it’s too early to see any verifiable trends in “lending activity, savings or debt reductions from the retail side of our business,” Thad Perry, president and director of the Fairlawn-based CFBank, says the bank has seen new activity “that we haven’t seen for several years [on the commercial end].
“Loan opportunities seem to be moving in a positive direction as businesses are looking at leveraging debt and restructuring to position and strengthen themselves to take advantage of the developing market,” Perry says. “We are certainly prepared to continue to support this market as it moves forward.”
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Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.