MAY 2026 came back impressed and indicated they wanted to move forward. That set off one of the most compressed construction timelines in the company’s history. The contract was effectively awarded by the end of April 2016. Ships needed to be loaded by September. In the four months in between, the team cleared forest, ordered custom-built crushers, constructed laydown areas, built causeways out into the water, and erected a receiving dock capable of handling vessels up to 60,000 deadweight tons. The crushing equipment supplier had only four months to build and deliver the circuit. In September of 2016, Shoreline loaded their first ship. “When people come and looked at the site and saw what we had done, they were pretty amazed at what we accomplished in such a short time,” Scott says. The Charleston project called for crushing waste rock down to an inch and a half and loading it aboard ships bound for South Carolina. To make it work, Scott structured an arrangement with Anaconda that allowed him to put up all the capital himself in exchange for paying the mine a per-ton royalty on the rock used – rather than waiting for the publicly traded company to work through their board to raise their share of funding. “I put all the capital in, and at the end of the job, 14 months later, we had shipped out 50 loads of aggregate at 60,000 to 62,000 metric tons each,” Scott says. “We were able to pay back all the capital from that one project. Plus, we paid the mine a couple of million dollars in cash, and they saved significantly on reclamation costs.” It was a proving ground. Scott and his team had entered a business – aggregate crushing and export – that was entirely new to them, and they had executed it at scale. Rather than pocket the returns, Scott reinvested them back into the company’s capabilities, purchasing additional conveyors, a wash plant, and expanded crushing capacity to pursue what would become the company’s core product line: specification-grade aggregate. The transition wasn’t immediate. There was a period of slower demand for basic waste rock, but Scott identified a stronger market for spec rock on the Eastern Seaboard, particularly in Florida. The challenge was earning the right to supply it. Each state’s Department of Transportation maintains their own qualification standards for aggregate, and Shoreline had to pre-qualify their rock and demonstrate it could arrive in spec across multiple jurisdictions. “It took a couple of years to pre-qualify our rock to get into these different jurisdictions and get qualified by the DOTs that regulate the material,” Scott explains. “We had to make sure that we were producing a rock that was in spec and could get it to their ports that way.” The result was a three-product line-up: screenings (a fine sand-like material), a coarse aggregate in the 5/8-inch to 1/2-inch range, and a finer coarse aggregate from 1/2-inch down to 3/8-inch. All of it is washed before shipment to ensure it arrives in spec. In the past three years, Shoreline has shipped upwards of a million tons of rock per year into Florida – through Tampa, Port Redwing, and Port Canaveral – with shipments also going to the Carolinas, Savannah, and Texas. A single shipload has gone as far as Guyana, where a port was being built out for ExxonMobil’s offshore drilling operations. Their primary distribution partner in Florida is Blue
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