business backgrounder | industry
revolving nine-tube array, the satellite coolers, which look like the kind of plumbing Paul Bunyan would create to keep the geysers
churning at Yellowstone National Park. Steam rises and hot water cascades from cooling tubes reminiscent of an Old West six-shooter.
The clinker must still be ground into a fine powder. That takes place in giant rotating tubes that whir in their own building.
Steel alloy balls that range in size from softballs to golf balls cascade around inside these tubes, pulverizing the clinker, along
with gypsum, into the final product, cement. The cement is stored in two big domes and eight 120-foot-tall silos.
A road runs under each bank of silos with a loading spout to fill up trailers or rail cars with the cement. The plant also fills
bulk bags designed to be put directly onto barges and sent out by water to customers along the West Coast. The Seattle plant
services two terminals in Spokane and Kennewick
where bulk providers can pick up the product for
2
redi-mix producers.
At the redi-mix plants, cement is mixed with rock,
sand or other aggregate and water to become concrete, the building block of the modern world.
“Attempting to reduce CO emissions without having a
proven, economically viable control would simply drive U.S.
producers out of business. Since no alternative building
material exists, demand will remain even if U.S. production
is eliminated through regulation.”
standing strong
Ash Grove’s family owners aren’t planning to go anywhere. Cement has been made on this property since
the 1920s, and upgrades made in 1992 will keep the
plant productive for many more decades — if increasingly heavy regulation and oversight doesn’t deliver a
fatal blow or death by a thousand cuts.
Fortunately, when regulators and elected officials
actually see the operation, their perspectives change,
said Jacqueline Clark, Ash Grove’s director of communications and public affairs. Once they understand how
cement is made, and learn that this is the only manufacturing plant left in the state, policy issues become clear.
“It’s like the ‘Aha!’ moment,” she said.
Ash Grove recently finished a dialogue with the
City of Seattle over its new Shoreline Management
Plan. Taking city leaders on a tour of the property
helped them understand how important its dock is to
the entire operation. The city approved more than a dozen provisions Ash Grove sought to keep its operation afloat, including
re-categorizing the company from “water-related” to the much more accurate “water-dependent.”
Next up: the Duwamish Superfund cleanup. Fortunately, Ash Grove has built relationships and a solid constituency for this
important ongoing conversation. Nearly all the plant’s raw materials come in by barge through Elliott Bay and up the Duwamish
River, and some of its final product is also shipped out the same way to Alaska and Canada.
Ongoing federal and state discussions about how to clean up sediments in the Duwamish — and who will pay — hang over Ash
Grove and all its neighbors on Seattle’s industrial waterfront.
— Curtis Lesslie, vice president of environmental affairs for Ash Grove
preservation
Even more than most businesses, Ash Grove’s future increasingly depends on decisions made by elected officials in Olympia.
A statewide transportation package is crucial for both the company and the infrastructure of the region. As of press time, a
statewide set of bipartisan public meetings revealed diverse support, and Gov.
Jay Inslee has called for a special session
to put together a package before the end
of the year.
Meanwhile, Inslee is pushing for major
limits on carbon emissions in the state,
— H.R. 7146, the 2008 Carbon Leakage Act, co-sponsored by
adding teeth to a 2008 goal to cut the
“[I]ncreased costs associated with compliance may
unintentionally cause domestic industry to divert new
investments and production to facilities located in countries
without commensurate greenhouse gas regulation.”
then-U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee and Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Penn.
52 association of washington business