Vast portions of Oxford County are underlain with limestone deposits which are ideal for manufacture of lime and cement. A deposit of unusual purity 100 feet deep stretches from Norwich up to Embro through the centre of the county, with potential extraction volumes of 3.5 billion tonnes. Over 3,000 acres of the deposit area has been licensed by the Ontario government for limestone quarrying. The village of Beachville is atop the deposit and became well known from its earliest days for small kilns burning limestone to produce lime, but manufacturing on a heavy industrial scale now takes place in mills adjacent to quarry properties covering thousands of acres in the county, operated by Lafarge Canada Inc. (1,400 acres) and Carmeuse Lime (Canada) Limited (1,800 acres). The mills which burn the limestone were built in the 1950s with revolving kilns which were the largest pieces of mobile factory equipment in the world, some measuring 10 feet in diameter by 450 feet long. The rate of extraction estimated in the 1980s was an average of 600,000 tonnes per year. It is an energy-intensive industry with very high carbon outputs. Research involving Lafarge in England aims to develop products that will use rather than release some of the carbon.