Texada Island Quarry Marine Terminal (Lafarge)

Texada Island (Gillies Bay / Blubber Bay), BC · Private · Lafarge Canada Inc · Strait of Georgia (Salish Sea)

A private bulk/aggregate marine loadout terminal serving Lafarge Canada's Texada Island limestone quarries, the largest limestone production centre in British Columbia, operated by Texada Quarrying (a Lafarge division). Limestone is extracted from quarries at Gillies Bay and the historic Blubber Bay site (active since the early 1900s; the modern quarry has operated since 1952 and was acquired by Lafarge in 1998) and shipped almost entirely by barge across the Strait of Georgia. The barge-loading facility, located at Beale Cove on the island's west side, uses a ship loader designed to handle 2,500-4,000 tonnes per hour of materials ranging from hard-rock aggregates to coal. Average production is about 4 million tonnes of limestone per year (with the wider Texada operation cited at 5-6 Mt/yr), the bulk of it barged to Lafarge's Richmond cement plant on the Fraser River in the Lower Mainland; the operation employs roughly 90 people.