A $300 million new cement plant, the first in Arizona in more than 50 years, is celebrating operations today north of Prescott as it prepares to ramp up production when the economy rebounds.
The Drake Cement plant near Paulden began operating earlier this year and has been working the bugs out of its new system, said Brad Belt, senior vice president.
Drake acquired three suppliers in the region and branded them Drake Materials, offering an outlet for its cement.
The plant does not make bagged cement for small home projects, opting to sell its product by the truckload, 27 tons at a time.
Drake's customers add water and rock aggregates to make concrete, concrete block, concrete roof tiles or other construction-project products.
The plant has been in the works since the 1990s and beat out competitor Cemex in opening a new Arizona cement plant. Cemex has proposed a $400 million new plant near Seligman.
Arizona has just two other operating cement plants, the Phoenix Cement Plant in Clarkdale, built in 1959, and the older CalPortland Rillito Plant near Tucson, both of which have expanded over the years, according to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.
"We have been doing a small amount of business for a few customers, primarily for our sister company, Drake Materials, a midsized entity with operations in Phoenix, Mohave County and the Las Vegas area," Belt said.
Drake has offices in Scottsdale and is owned by an American holding company whose primary owners are from Peru, where they own two large cement companies, he added.
The slow economy has meant less demand for cement in the Southwest, but Belt said the new facility is poised to capture a significant market share once building resumes.
Cement plants are most efficient when they run 24 hours a day, all year long, but there isn't enough demand now for that kind of output from Drake, Belt said.
At full capacity, the plant annually can make 660,000 tons of clinker, the term for unground cement in the form of small lumps a few centimeters in diameter.
The plant will need 100 employees to operate at that capacity. Drake now has about 55 employees at the plant and about 10 in Scottsdale.
"The market is very difficult," Belt said. "There is not enough demand for any producer in the state to be running 24 hours a day. In these markets, we run the plant as long as we can until our storage capacity is full, and then shut down and fire up again when it is time to replenish."
The plant has a quarry about a quarter-mile away that supplies it with limestone and silica. It imports coal from southwestern Colorado to fuel the plant. It has a rail connecting it to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway.
Unlike a coal-fired power plant, the cement plant doesn't have coal-ash waste because the ash is incorporated into the cement, Belt said.
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