The next major step in rolling out the welcome mat for cargo-carrying aircraft at Prince George Airport is about to be taken.
Work will begin this fall on building a "fuel farm" capable of handling up to six jumbo-size aircraft a day, Prince George Airport Authority said Thursday, well up from the single Boeing 747 or Airbus Airbus A380 the airport currently has the capacity to service.
Sands Bulk Transport, a local company based at the BCR industrial site where it can unload fuel brought into the city by rail and truck it to the site, will be responsible for the entire cost of the roughly $2 million project, which will provide about 6,000 litres of storage.
"It puts us on a competitive footing with Anchorage, Alaska and it allows us to serve a continuous stream of aircraft as opposed to handling just one aircraft at a time," PGAA chief executive officer John Gibson said.
The facility will be located at the north end of the airport's main runway, where a refueling apron was completed about a year ago as a finishing touch on the $36-million runway extension.
Now the third-longest in Canada, it's capable of landing the the largest aircraft available and the hope is to convince large cargo carriers taking the circumpolar route between Asia and North America to land at the airport to refuel.
Work is already underway on an industrial-grade road to the west of the airport that would connect Highway 16 East to Highway 97 South and act as the spine for an light industrial park that developers hope to spin off from the airport expansion.
Gibson also hopes to make an announcement relatively quickly on one final piece of the puzzle - landing a partner to build an on-site warehouse facility for transfer of goods on and off aircraft.
"We've got the ability right now to handle tech-stop (refueling) traffic," Gibson said. "It's just that the efficiency of delivery of the fuel and the price of the fuel is a bit higher than the carriers want to pay.
"The common fuel system will allow them to put their own fuel into the tanks at whatever price they get and Sands has already worked with another fuel supplier to put in another trans-shipment facility down at the site in the BCR.
"Rail is a cheaper way of getting fuel into town. Right now, it comes in on a B-train, a tandem fuel truck. Once it comes in by rail, it cuts the cost substantially and they've got two competitive rail lines - Burlington-Santa Fe bringing fuel up from Vancouver and Washington, and we've got CN who serves all of the refineries across Canada and eastern U.S."
Sands Bulk Transport owner Wayne Sands, who described his company as a petroleum transporter, said the company had been looking to set up a facility for aviation fuel storage in Prince George for some time.
"It basically tied in with what they (PGAA) wanted to do, it worked out really well for both of us," Sands said.
How long it will take to complete the project is weather-dependent but the plan is to have it ready by February. New fuel trucks will be brought in to complement the ones already at the airport.
Sands used an interesting analogy to describe project's importance given that the airport can currently fuel only one large aircraft per day.
"Put it this way, if you were to drive to Vancouver and there is enough fuel storage at a gas station in Cache Creek to fill up one car, are you going to be the lucky guy that gets it or are you going to try and find somewhere else?"
