Olaf Anderson Construction employees work Thursday on building a $2.5 million fly ash storage facility east of Cavendish Farms. Owned by Kost Materials LLC of Fargo, the facility will be leased to Headwaters Corporation, to store excess fly ash from the Coal Creek Station power plant in Underwood, N.D. John M. Steiner / The Sun
Kost Materials, LLC, an aggregate and ready-mix concrete company based in Fargo, is building a $2.5 million fly ash storage facility just east of Cavendish Farms that will be used to store fly ash from Coal Creek Station.
Jeff Eberhardt, president of Kost Materials, said the storage facility broke ground on Oct. 18 and should be operational by late spring or early summer. The contractor is Olaf Anderson Construction.
The facility will be leased to Headwaters Corporation, a publicly traded company out of Salt Lake City, Utah, that contracts to remove the pulverised fuel ash from the Coal Creek Station power plant in Underwood, N.D.
Great River Energy generates about 22,000 tons of lignite per day at the Coal Creek Station and the fly ash byproduct of the coal combustion can be used to replace up to 30 percent of cement in making concrete, Eberhardt said.
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The concrete production industry is very closely tied to what happens to coal, he said. For that reason it is less attainable with more pressure to buy cement from overseas companies that do not have as strict environmental protection controls, he said.
Spiritwood Station also produces fly ash but it is not of the type that is suitable for concrete production, Eberhardt said. The ash produced at Spiritwood Station is buried with a landfill permit near the Coal Creek facility, he said.
"Coal Creek produces much more ash than Spiritwood," he said.
Coal Creek Station has its own fly ash storage dome but winter accumulations when there is not much concrete demand require additional storage, he said. If fly ash is stored properly it will be used to make concrete in five states, he said, but if exposed to moisture it will harden and must be buried.
Kost Materials has a Fargo fly ash storage facility that is identical to the building going up east of Cavendish Farms, he said. Fly ash is stored in silos, domes and tanks, but Kost Materials uses a flat storage building that Eberhardt said is more economical storage for material that flows almost like water.
"A lot of people store grain the same way," he said.
When completed, the 100-by-300 square-foot building will have 30,000 square feet of storage space to hold 15,000 tons of fly ash when fully loaded, he said.
"Headwaters liked the concept and asked us to build and lease," Eberhardt said. "They will bring the ash and store it in the building, and when construction season starts they just reload and go to various construction sites in North Dakota, Minnesota and South Dakota."
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Kost Materials purchased roughly 26 acres of land owned by the city of Jamestown from Jamestown/Stutsman Development Corp. in the Bloom Business Park in 2013, he said. With the land purchase the total fly ash facility cost will be closer to $3 million, he said.
The original plan was to build a ready-mix operation near Spiritwood. It was to make concrete for the CHS nitrogen fertilizer plant project that was cancelled.
The fly ash facility is a profitable way to maintain a long-term lease with Headwaters Corporation on the property, he said. Eventually there will be another large industrial project that will require a concrete producer nearby.
"The concrete facility is still planned but we have to be smart about it," Eberhardt said. "It is contingent on Spiritwood putting up another large project and if that happens we will start another ready-mix operation there."
Kost Materials will manage the facility for an annual fee. One full-time manager will direct around 30 truck drivers who cycle through the loading and unloading of ash, he said.
Fly ash concrete is cheaper to produce than pure concrete, he said. It is particularly popular with highway departments that find the 30 percent ash concrete takes longer to set and is easier to control, he said.
From an environmental standpoint the use of a byproduct in making cement is less of an ecological footprint than pure cement, which is a large carbon producing process itself, he said. As a recycled byproduct fly ash when used in certain mixtures or concentrations in can qualify for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification with Green or sustainable designs.
