CMC Rock has a new wash plant running at its West Mountain site in Utah that the company expects will put about 800,000 additional tons of concrete aggregate a year into the Wasatch Front market. The Provo-based producer says it sold the plant’s entire projected output through the end of 2026 within a few months of startup.
The details come from an account published by Rock Products on Oct. 5. It quotes CMC Rock, the equipment maker and the dealer, and nobody else. Treat the figures as company claims.
A 400-ton-per-hour wash plant on a fines-heavy deposit
The plant is a CDE M4500 E5, a modular unit rated at 400 tons per hour and supplied through Utah dealer Goodfellow Corp. CDE is the Northern Ireland wet-processing manufacturer. The job it was bought for is specific: the West Mountain deposit runs heavy in fines, around 15% at times, and CMC Rock needs sand that meets ASTM C33, the standard specification for concrete aggregates.
That combination is the hard part. Too many fines and a sand fails the gradation. Wash too aggressively and saleable product goes out with the waste. The plant uses a dual-pass cyclone arrangement and sand blending to hold the spec while keeping yield up, according to the account. Operations manager Sam Cusick said it has held the tonnages and specifications the company needs. Initial testing, the same account concedes, underestimated how difficult the material would be.
Do the arithmetic on the headline number. At 400 tons an hour, 800,000 tons is 2,000 operating hours, about one shift a day for a year. So the projection assumes neither round-the-clock running nor much downtime. It’s plausible. It’s also a projection.
Water recycling is what makes Utah concrete aggregate pencil
The other number is 90%. A water recycling system on the plant recirculates up to that share of process water, the supplier says. In the Great Basin that isn’t a sustainability flourish. It’s the permit. A wash plant that can’t close its water loop in Utah County mostly doesn’t get built, and a deposit that needs washing stays in the ground.
The account gives no figure for makeup water, plant cost or the commissioning date. CMC Rock, founded in 2006 through the purchase of Z Rock and Tru Crushing, says it controls more than 3,500 acres of aggregate property and runs three concrete batch plants, so some of the new sand has a captive customer.
Why marginal sand deposits are getting capital
Clean, close-in sand and gravel around growing metros has largely been mined, built over or zoned out. What’s left tends to be like West Mountain: workable, but only with more processing. Producers are spending on it because demand is there. U.S. construction aggregates production reached 674 million metric tons in the second quarter, up 5.7% from a year earlier, according to the figures in Rock Products’ October data summary.
Concrete’s other main ingredient is going the opposite way. Cement shipments ran 6.8% under the five-year average in the latest USGS monthly data, and importers are adding terminal capacity rather than kilns. Rock is local in a way cement isn’t. Nobody ships concrete sand in from another time zone, which is why a single 400-ton-per-hour plant can move a regional market.
For Utah ready-mix buyers, the practical read is short. There’s more spec sand coming, and for this year it’s already spoken for.