ADM St. Louis will soon complete a project doubling the capacity of its rail and barge systems. This is biggest investment ADM regional manager Travis Sayers has seen ADM make in St. Louis.
Announced two years ago, this project aims to help the site stay competitive and continue to supply the demand in the grain market.
“For export markets, with the increase in supply of soybean meal from the soybean crush plants getting built in the United States, we needed to make improvements to our facilities to improve our competitiveness,” he says. “At the same time, it’s the perfect time to improve our rail loadout capabilities.”
Sayers explains ADM St. Louis is unique in its geographic market providing rail for domestic destinations along with the Mississippi River access for New Orleans bound exports.
“We are the only facility here in the St. Louis market that has the ability to load shuttle trains that can hit different markets. We’re on the BNSF railroad, and so talking about corn specifically, we hit the Hereford, Texas, market,” he says. “For other facilities in St. Louis, their only outlet is the river. We have multiple outlets to send corn to keep us competitive and potentially pay better values if that’s what the market is indicating.”
Upgrades for Higher Capacity, Faster Speeds
Since January, the barge loading part of this project has been complete.
“It’s been full speed ahead since then,” Sayers says. “April was the biggest month we’ve had so far on the amount of product we put through. Our goal is to just continue to grow that.”
He explains the site has two loading belts filling two barges at the same time. The improvements came from doubling the capacity of one of those belts, from 30,000 bu. an hour to now 60,000 bu. and hour.
On the outbound rail project, where it previously took the on-site team 20 hours to fill a 110-car train, now it’s projected to only take 12 hours.
“We have a ladder track here at our facility in in St. Louis,” Sayers says. “We added a ladder to our track, so we can hold more cars and move cars more efficiently through the facility. We replaced the locomotive with one that was a little more powerful and a little more efficient for us. And then previously, we could only load one car at a time when we were loading trains. Now we can load two cars at the same time.”
The rail project is expected to be fully complete in six weeks.
