AUSTRALIA – The CBH Group has said that it has expanded its Chadwick grain receival site near Esperance after completing the US$11.4 million investment across its network.
The company has added 80,000 tonnes of new permanent storage at the facility, expanding its capabilities in handling, marketing and processing grain while reaching its customers with better services.
The upgrade includes 4 new closed circular cells that takes Chadwick’s total storage capacity to 655,000 tonnes, making it one our largest receival sites within the network.
CBH, which is Australia’s largest exporter of grain has also installed throughput enhancements including elevators and in-loading conveyors, with a combined in-loading capacity of 1,000 tonnes per hour as part of the upgrade.
Each of the closed circular cells have capacity to hold 20,000 tonnes of grain.
“The expansion is part of CBH’s ongoing investment in the network that focuses maintenance and capital investment on the core 100 sites that already receive more than 95 per cent of the annual crop.
Chadwick has been identified as one of the core 100 sites as grain production in the Esperance region continues to grow.
Within the past decade, the five-year rolling average of receivals within the Esperance Zone has risen by almost one million tonnes, from 1.62 million tonnes in 2005-2009 to 2.54 million tonnes in 2015-2019.
This translates to a compounded annual growth rate of 4.5%.
In the 2018-19 harvest, 2.4 million tonnes were received at CBH sites within the zone,” said CBH.
The Network Strategy involves construction of more than 650,000 tonnes of permanent storage and more than 900,000 tonnes of emergency storage for the 2018-19 harvest.
The company added more than 1.5 million tonnes of storage capacity to its network.
It received 16.4 million tonnes of grain from across the CBH network during the 2018-19 season, its second biggest harvest on record.
