Thousands of trucks carrying the majority of Fayetteville’s ethanol supply into the city each year will no longer be coming here. Instead, freight trains will take their place.
That’s because a new transloading facility has opened up in Fayetteville, which will unload the “vast majority” of Fayetteville’s ethanol supply, Fayetteville Cumberland Economic Development Corporation said in a press release announcing the opening on July 17.
By transporting ethanol directly from the Midwest to Fayetteville via rail, the facility will remove the equivalent of 3,000 trucks per year from local roads, FCEDC said. The economic development corporation expects this to lessen the burden on the city’s infrastructure as roadways will see less traffic.
“That right there alone shows the positive impact of that project, relieving that stress off the roadways and just making it safer for everybody,” Rob Patton, FCEDC’s executive director, told CityView, referring to the number of trucks that will no longer drive through Fayetteville.
Ethanol is a biomass fuel, primarily made from corn, which is used in a wide variety of applications — including gasoline, which typically contains up to 10% ethanol. Ethanol plants are concentrated in the Midwest because that’s where corn production is most prevalent, according to the U.S. Dept. of Energy.
Economic impact
According to a January report from the North Carolina Dept. of Transportation (NCDOT), utilizing freight rail is cost-effective and “reduces wear on roadway infrastructure and creates a safer, less congested road network.”
Intermodal facilities and transloading facilities, like the one built for Fayetteville’s ethanol supply, provide important connection points between different methods of transportation; there are currently 83 such facilities in North Carolina, according to the report.
Located off Murchison Road near the I-295 interchange, the new transloading facility connects to the existing CSX freight rail that runs adjacent to the property and extends to Fort Liberty. The transfer point will unload trains that come from ethanol plants in the Midwest directly to the fuel depot next door off Murchison Road, FCEDC said.
The facility is owned by Strategic Transload Services LLC, a chemical transportation company with subsidiaries throughout the Southeast, according to FCEDC.
“The FCEDC staff was extremely helpful with securing the right location for our expansion,” Von Friesen of Strategic Transload Services said in a press release.
Patton said he’s not certain yet if the transloading facility will provide new jobs to the area.
“Possibly, but I’m not 100% sure on that,” he said. “I think that they’ve obviously got guys working over there, but it’s not a huge impact for job creation. It’s more impact for what it’s doing — the investment with the land itself, that was an inert landfill. And then it’s also taking all those trucks off the road to make the roads a little bit safer.”
Environmental and safety impact
Patton emphasized the benefits of utilizing existing infrastructure and the energy efficiency of freight travel compared to using trucks as benefits of the project. He said the property where the transloading facility was built used to be a landfill, but has been idle for a “long time.” According to county land records, the site was owned by Eagle Refuse Company Inc from 1992, which operated a construction and demolition landfill there. The company has been dissolved since 2010, according to state business records, and it sold the land to Strategic Transload Services in 2022 for $25,000.
Because of the debris that had piled up there, there were limited options for potential uses of the property, Patton told CityView.
“it wasn’t like the Ann Street landfill where they’re putting everybody’s trash in,” Patton said. “It was more like stumps and things like that; organic material that had been cleared or taken away or whatever, that we really couldn’t do anything with except for, like, this project. So it’s utilizing otherwise unutilizable piece of land.”
Despite high-profile catastrophic incidents — like the 2023 East Palestine train derailment in Ohio — freight trains carrying hazardous materials, such as ethanol, are considered to be significantly safer in terms of the rate of accidents and spills, according to the U.S. Dept. of Transportation. Patton agrees.
Considered a renewable fuel, ethanol releases significantly fewer greenhouse gasses than fossil fuels, according to the U.S. Dept. of Energy.
“The more you can relieve the stress off the roads, the better off we are, and using that rail line that’s right there just,” Patton said. “It just makes so much sense for efficiencies across the board, like you stated, for the environmental impact of the fuel, the trucks, all that business. It’s just a really cool project that relieves a lot of stress off a congested area.”
Contact Evey Weisblat at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608. To keep CityView Today going and to grow our impact even more, we’re asking our committed readers to consider becoming a member. Click here to join.
