AT bauxite project more than just moving rocks
Point Comfort, Texas - Associated Terminals’ Phillip Wright oversees an operation that began half a world away nearly 50 years ago and will end up in households all across the country.
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An Associated Terminals crew in Point Comfort,
Texas unloads another bauxite shipment from
the Port Allen, Louisiana facility. |
Wright, general manager of Associated Terminals’ Baton Rouge and Manchac operations, is coordinating a project that will send nearly 500,000 tons of bauxite to the Alcoa plant in Point Comfort, Texas. Bauxite, a naturally occurring, non-hazardous red dirt, contains alumina, which is used to make aluminum. The process of digging, trucking, transferring and shipping the bauxite will take about a year.
Moving a 500,000 tons of bauxite from Baton Rouge to Texas takes more than trucks, barges, cranes and muscles. It is a logistical and scheduling challenge that forces Wright to always think at least one week ahead.
“This is the fun, challenging part of the business,” Wright said. “Moving rocks is real simple. We’re in the logistics business.”
Even though moving the rocks may be simple, the journey the bauxite is taking is fascinating. After World War II, the United States realized it had been unprepared for wartime shortages in commodities such as rubber, most of which came from Southeast Asia. Government officials decided to stockpile certain “strategic and critical materials” to decrease dependence on foreign supply sources in case of national emergency.
One of the materials the government stockpiled was bauxite. As repayment of a war debt, Indonesia shipped thousands of tons of the red dirt to the United States Defense National Stockpile Center. Much of that bauxite ended up at the Baton Rouge Depot, which also received bauxite from Suriname in South America.
By the late 1950s, the red mounds of bauxite transformed the naturally flat land on North Sherwood Forest Boulevard into a red Martian landscape. For decades, the bauxite sat undisturbed. Even today, small pine trees and blackberry bushes grow out of the red hills that dot the 130 acres.
When the Cold War ended, Congress directed the Defense National Stockpile Center to sell its excess materials, with the revenues from those sales to be used to support military operations and reduce the deficit. According to DNSC Public Affairs specialist John Reinders, all of the bauxite at the Baton Rouge Depot was declared as excess material.
Alcoa purchased the bauxite and asked Associated Terminals to coordinate moving it from Baton Rouge to Point Comfort, Texas, where Alcoa will extract alumina from the bauxite.
The process begins with Kanarado Corporation’s heavy machinery breaking the bauxite mound’s decades-old crust and scooping the dirt into a truck. Kanarado trucks the bauxite to Associated Terminals’ Port Allen dockside facility.
The bauxite never spends more than a few minutes at Associated Terminals’ facility. As soon as it is unloaded from the truck, an Associated Terminals crew operating two bulldozers and a crane carefully transfers the bauxite into a 1,500-ton capacity barge in the Intracoastal Waterway. Once the barge is full, it is sent to Texas through inland waterways.
When the barges reach Alcoa, another crew unloads them using one of Associated Terminals’ nine high-capacity floating cranes. The barges are cleaned, Alcoa extracts the alumina from the bauxite, and the alumina is loaded into the cleaned barges and sent to a plant in the Midwest to be turned into aluminum.
A second crane has helped Wright double the productivity on the Port Allen side of the operation so Associated Terminals can send out three to four barges per day. Wright figures that, by year’s end, Associated Terminals will have loaded and unloaded more than 300 barges of the bauxite.
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