Butte's
INFRASTRUCTURE
The competitive advantage of Butte’s unique location and efficient transportation systems allows businesses to lower transportation costs, lowering production costs and enhancing a company's productivity and profits. Canada, Mexico, and everywhere in between, Butte’s one-of-a-kind location offers crucial connectivity to the world!
TRANSPORATION & LOGISTICS
Butte is the only location of its kind in Montana featuring dynamic transportation and shipping infrastructure connecting companies with the target markets of the Northwest US and Western Canada reducing transportation costs through the use of efficient transportation channels. Interstate 15 runs north-south and Interstate 90 is part of the CANAMEX corridor, these two interstates intersect just 5 miles west of Butte. The BNSF and the Union Pacific railways are the two largest freight rail networks in North America. Both BNSF and UP serve Butte through the Port of Montana located just five minutes outside of the Butte, connecting Southwest Montana to the world. This unique transportation infrastructure with both interstate and Class I rail options is not duplicated anywhere else in Montana and only a handful of places within the Northwest US.
The Port of Montana is a full service transload facility leveraging rail and highway access to directly benefit businesses throughout the region. The Port offers 120,000 sf of indoor storage, 55 acres of outdoor storage, rail care storage capacity, and features five docking areas with two certified scales. With over 30 years of transloading, warehouse, distribution, and logistics experience, the Port is well equipped to meet all of your transportation and transloading needs.
PORT OF MONTANA
POWER & GAS
NorthWestern Energy is a major, regional provider of electricity, natural gas and related services to approximately 709,600 customers in Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska. Their electric system has more than 28,220 miles of transmission and distribution lines and associated facilities serving 297 communities and surrounding rural areas in Montana, eastern South Dakota, and Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
Their natural gas system includes approximately 9,758 miles of transmission and distribution pipelines and storage facilities serving 168 communities and surrounding rural areas in Montana, South Dakota, and central Nebraska.
The Montana energy operations, which are based in Butte, provide regulated electric and natural gas transmission and distribution services to approximately 369,139 electric customers and 196,113 natural gas (and propane in limited areas) customers in the western two-thirds of Montana and Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
NorthWestern Energy is also the energy supplier in Montana, meaning that it provides electric and natural gas supply to customers in the state who do not select a competitive supplier.
WATER
Opening April of 2017, the new $30 million Basin Creek Water Treatment Plant, located just five miles south of Butte, made history as the first ceramic-membrane filter system used to ensure clean water for a U.S. city. It’s high tech, computerized control system and innovative ceramic treatment filter allows up to 7 million gallons of water to flow through the plant’s pipes and processes each day. Only a half of a percent is left as waste, as opposed to most other plants wasting 7 to 10 percent of their water while also requiring large lagoons to capture it. The new facility supplies Butte with some of the cleanest water in the United States.
The water sources serving Butte-Silver Bow are The Big Hole River/South Fork Reservoir, the Moulton Reservoir, and the Basin Creek Reservoir System. Water from each source can be diverted and utilized at any location within the community, however, water from the Basin Creek Reservoir Water primarily serves the southeast side of Butte. These are all surface water sources that, in 2016, supplied 12,099 homes and businesses with 2.87 billion gallons of potable water, with a peak day of 14.86 million gallons.
