Between hard rock and a big city
It makes sense for L.A. to import gravel from Vancouver Island
LOS ANGELES — The 835 kilometres of the Los Angeles freeway system. Dodger Stadium. City Hall. All built with concrete filled with rock and sand washed down from Southern California’s mountain ranges.
For evidence of that mineral abundance, look no further than Irwindale, home to more than a dozen pits emptied in the 20th century for those critical building components.
But now, as another building boom rumbles across Los Angeles and a new generation of highrises climbs skyward, the rock and sand are coming from a much more distant source: Canada’s Vancouver Island, 2,300 km away.
That’s a long distance to ship commodities that are still abundant locally, sell for less than $20 a ton and often cost more to transport than to mine.
Yet because of a combination of materials science, cheap ocean shipping and, some argue, not-in-my-backyard attitudes, today’s industrial concrete mixers are often filled with imported rock and sand.
Consider a new apartment building going up in downtown L.A. Last week, two dozen workers poured the concrete that will form the 28th of the building’s 38 stories.
Before that wet concrete was levelled and smoothed, before it was pumped to the top of the building, before it was mixed together at a plant near Vernon, it started out as cement powder, water, sand and gravel.
And those last two ingredients began their journey weeks earlier on the largely undeveloped north side of Vancouver Island, just off the southwest coast of British Columbia.
There, near the logging town of Port McNeil, Polaris Materials and the Indigenous ‘Namgis First Nation own the Orca Quarry, a site where long-melted glaciers 10,000 years ago deposited layers of sand and gravel as thick as 90 metres.
The materials, known in the construction business as aggregate, are scraped from the sides of the quarry pit, washed, sorted into piles and loaded onto conveyor belts that stretch almost two kilometres to a terminal floating on the Broughton Strait.
Then, the rock and sand are dumped into dry-bulk carriers. Each ship can carry about 68,000 tonnes of aggregate.
From Port McNeil, it’s a four-day, 2,330 km voyage down the coast to the Port of Long Beach, where Vancouver based Polaris leases eight acres of waterside real estate.
Conveyor belts stretching from the ship to the terminal can off-load almost 3,000 tonnes of material an hour, taking as long as 40 hours to empty a full ship. The terminal, little more than a parking lot for aggregate, has room for more than 100,000 tonnes of material.
It’s then time for the aggregate to make its way to the construction sites — and, for the first time, to be loaded into trucks and be transported by road.
The fact that Polaris can move its aggregate from a Canadian quarry all the way to Long Beach without being transported by road is one of the reasons it’s feasible to export such heavy, cheap material over such a long distance.
Warren Coalson, a consultant to California mine and quarry operators, estimates it costs $220 (all dollar figures US) to haul a standard 25-U.S.-ton truckload on a 25-mile trip in L.A. traffic. That works out to about 35 cents per ton per mile.
In a big oceangoing vessel, it’s significantly cheaper: roughly half a cent per ton per mile, Polaris spokesperson Nick Van Dyk said.
That leads to some striking math: To ship one ton of rock over 2,330 km of ocean to Long Beach costs about $7.25. To truck it from Long Beach to downtown L.A., about 40 km, adds an additional $8.75. And at $16 combined, that’s less than the $22.75 it might cost to truck a ton of aggregate on the 104 km trip from a quarry in Palmdale to downtown.
“That’s the equation — that’s what makes it work,” Van Dyk said. “The logistics are a big part of it.” And getting bigger. L.A.’s local sand and gravel supplies aren’t as local as they used to be. With most of Irwindale’s quarries now vacant pits, projects might get aggregate from as far away as Palmdale or Victorville. San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area, too, have to tap increasingly distant sources.
A 2012 report from the California state geologist estimates that quarries in Los Angeles County and the Bay Area have permits to produce less than one-third of the aggregate that will be needed over the next 50 years. San Diego, which already imports aggregate from Mexico, is in even worse shape.
It’s not that California doesn’t have enough sand and gravel. But as development has spread, quarries or potential quarry sites that were once in sparsely populated areas are now surrounded by people who don’t want the attendant noise, pollution and truck traffic.
For Polaris, though, the problem has presented an opportunity. And it’s made the company an acquisition target.
Alabama concrete giant Vulcan Materials announced plans to buy Polaris in August for about $200 million, a bid that was quickly topped by a $240 million offer from Texasbased U.S. Concrete. The deal would give U.S. Concrete a way to expand to Southern California without the difficult task of buying or building a quarry of its own.
“It’s hard to build a new quarry anywhere in California,” said Brent Thielman, an analyst at brokerage D.A. Davidson & Co. “It’s the cost of the real estate, the environmental permitting, the regulation. All of that comes with the territory.”
Polaris started shipping aggregate to Long Beach last year, but has been hauling rock and sand to Honolulu and the Bay Area since 2007. The company has said it wants to export to more markets, including San Diego and Ventura County.
It’s not the only company importing sand and gravel into the U.S., but the practice remains relatively rare. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that domestic builders used about one billion tons of aggregate last year, and that only about three million tons were imported — mostly from Canada.
But importing aggregate is more common elsewhere.
Sometimes, it’s the result of a building boom that outstrips local supply. That’s the case in China, which in 2015 imported $2.3 billion worth of sand and gravel, according to United Nations trade statistics.
In other cases, local materials simply aren’t suitable. Qatar and Kuwait were among the top global importers of sand and gravel in 2015, according to United Nations data. There’s plenty of sand in both Persian Gulf nations, but of the wrong sort. Desert sand, formed by wind, is too smooth for making concrete. Coarser sand formed by rivers and glaciers is preferred.
And while logistics is part of the reason Los Angeles builders are buying Vancouver Island gravel, quality is a factor, too. The gravel from the Orca quarry is mostly basalt, a fine-grained volcanic rock that’s harder and denser than the mixture of granite, quartz and schist that are washed out of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Polaris and its local customers say that makes Orca material a preferred choice for making the high-strength concrete used in the floor slabs of new downtown highrises and in elements of the forthcoming Rams and Chargers stadium in Inglewood.
“Lower quality rock, you hit it with a hammer and it chips,” said Polaris’ Van Dyk. “You hit our rock and it rings.”