Barge facility, other projects receive state multimodal grant funds

Allegheny County gets total of $5.1 million

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

There was some thought that the Marcellus Shale drilling boom in Western Pennsylvania had reached its peak two years ago and the natural gas industry would go downhill, but that’s not what Jim Lind is seeing.

As president of McKees Rocks Industrial Enterprises, Mr. Lind oversees a facility that transfers frac sand delivered by barge from the Midwest to trucks and rail cars for shipping to drilling sites.

That part of the business has been so strong that the company received a $638,015 state grant to allow it to handle more barges at the same time at the 100-acre site along the Ohio River.

“[Sand shipment] was down in 2015 and 2016, but it has come back,” Mr. Lind said. “We’ve probably grown upwards of 200 percent in the last year or so.”

The money is part of $5.1 million in grants coming to Allegheny County announced last week through the state’s Multimodal Transportation Fund.

The fund was created in 2013 as part of Act 89, a transportation funding bill, to provide for projects that link various transportation methods such as transit, aviation, rail, freight, bicycle and pedestrian.

Mr. Lind said his firm currently can handle four barges at a time. With the grant, the company expects to start work in September on expanded facilities than can handle as many as 20 barges at once and improve the efficiency of the operation.

Oil and gas operators in the Marcellus and Utica basins have continued to increase both the length of their horizontal wells and the amount of sand they pump into them to coax more gas out of the shale. It’s a trend that has analysts predicting annual increases in frac sand