Westview Terminal

The Westview Terminal wood pellet shipping facility is designed specifically to receive wood pellets transported by rail from production facilities in the interior of British Columbia, to store wood pellets in storage silos, and to load wood pellets into bulk cargo vessels bound for overseas markets. It includes the construction of private rail storage tracks, wood pellet receiving and unloading, building installation of conveyor and ship loader system, and at full build out up to seven silos of pellet storage.

This state-of-the-art terminal will be able to unload eight rail cars per hour, approximately 1,000 tonnes per hour, and will have storage capacity for 60,000 tonnes following the first phase. Once operational, the Westview Terminal will be able to accommodate Panamax class vessels up to 75,000 DWT (deadweight tonnes) with a loading rate of 2,000 tonnes per hour.

The pellets are unloaded from the train cars at a rate of approximately five-and-a-half minutes per car, with the product being dumped from the underside of the car through a grate and into a series of covered conveyors that run beneath the tracks. The conveyor system includes heat sensing equipment that monitors the temperature of the pellets as they move and flooding mechanism that operators can trigger in the event of a concern around heat or fire.

The conveyors run to a central uptake that includes additional monitoring and suction filters that were added to address concerns around dust. Once at the top of the tower, the pellets are moved to one of the four silos.

Inside each of the silos is a deposit spout that runs from the top of the structure right to the bottom. Along the length of the spout are holes that allow pellets to be easily deposited as the silos fill up. The base of the silos includes fans and aerated tubes to control the temperature of the pellets.

When it comes to loading the pellets onto the ship, the same covered conveyor system with filters runs out to what is essentially a large crane with its own suction filter to control dust. The pellets are then pushed through a hanging conical tube that deposits them into the hull of the waiting ship.