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Can the Great Circle Route again deliver what it did in yesteryear?

In the beginning there was the Great Circle Route that followed the curvature of the earth from Europe to North America running from UK-North Continent south of Greenland and into the St Lawrence River to the head of inland navigation at Montreal, from where goods were transshipped to a hinterland from New York to Chicago by rail and river craft and later by truck.

West coast Vancouver surpassed Montreal as Canada's largest port in the 1970s. Not that Montreal had ever been the main source of Asian imports, but with the every changing priorities in global shipping, what is true today might not be true tomorrow.

Thus, the idea of a container terminal at Quebec City, 250 kilometres downstream from Montreal, once tried in by CP Ships in 1969, has again been revived, this time brought to life by the advent of mega ships. While Montreal started Canada's role in the maritime container revolution the year before with the country's first quayside gantry crane to serve two 500-TEU cellular containerships, the Manchester Challenge and the Manchester Concorde. But times have changed since, and not to Montreal's advantage.

What hurt was Montreal's lack of deep water and shallow air draught under its bridges, limiting it to ships of 3,500 - 4,000 TEU, while downstream Quebec City could accommodate 8,000-TEUers if only they would come.

Writing in the American Journal of Transportion, of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Leo Ryan, a long-time Montreal-based shipping correspondent, dismisses the Quebec City threat: "Industry observers see little evidence thus far that the Port of Quebec will emerge one day soon as a second container port on the St Lawrence."

But writing in Fort Lauderdale's Maritime Executive, Harry Valentine, an Ottawa-based transport journalist, takes a more positive view, saying: "The willingness of Ports of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto to encourage interlining of ships to and from the Port of Quebec for their European maritime trade, business prospects for Port of Quebec would likely improve, and possibly at the expense of Montreal."

Costing C$400 million (US$309.74 million), the proposed terminal at the Port of Quebec, with nominal annual capacity of 500,000 containers, would be a revised feature of the projected Beaufort 2020 expansion designed as a multi-purpose facility.

Quebec Port Authority president and CEO Mario Girard has announced a plan to build a container terminal at the deep water port aimed at boosting the competitiveness of the St Lawrence gateway with US east coast ports accommodating much bigger ships with capacities 10,000 TEU or more.

Mr Girard affirmed that the Port of Quebec, with its draught of 15 metres at high tide and 11.3 metres at low tide, was strongly positioned to change landscape of commercial shipping.

 “Quebec City,” Mr Girard said, “must leverage its strategic location on the shortest route between Europe and the St Lawrence-Great Lakes region, which is home to over 40 per cent of the US manufacturing industry.”

The Montreal-based Maritime Employer's Association, whose members are representatives of the shipping companies that call at St Lawrence River ports are discouraging Quebec City's port expansion, first by noting the extra surface transport costs and that even harsher winter conditions, it is hardly suitable for 8,000-TEU ships they hope will call.

But Mr Valentine, writing in MarEx, takes a more optimistic view. After dismissing ideas that Quebec would compete with well advanced systems at Halifax, Nova Scotia for Asian boxes coming through Panama as impractical, he focuses on an application of the St Lawrence Seaway which is operational during the container world's global peak season from April to late December.

Apart from the traditional UK-North Continent/Med trade, much of it traditionally transshipped at New York to Chicago, would instead use eastern Canadian ports to avoid congestion in along the US Eastern Seaboard. Some this cargo, it is reasoned would be Far East freight wayported, that is, dropped off at ports from Jeddah to Algeciras by ships bound for UK-North Continent, to be picked up by other ships bound for east coast North America, perhaps direct callers at Quebec City. 

Mr Valentine sees Quebec cargo handling as starkly different than anything that done in Halifax, New York or Boston. His Quebec City idea calls for a re-application of the keep-it-in-on-the-water philosophy that underpins the drainage of Far East cargo from US west coast that was once railed or trucked eastward from LA and Long Beach. Instead this cargo took its time through the Panama Canal to discharage at east coast Savannah and Charleston close to the consumer-rich eastern US, minimising costly overland carriage.

Mr Valentine applies the same principle to the St Lawrence Seaway and Quebec City as a future major transshipment port. After cargo is discharged from the bigger ocean carriers at Quebec, it would be loaded on smaller "seawaymaxes" to serve ports upstream of Montreal including, Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago.

Said Mr Valentine: "Market experience from the northeastern US has revealed the existence of a substantial market involving customers who are willing to wait four additional days for delivery of containers in exchange for savings. There would likely be a substantial market for container shipping between Port of Quebec and several ports along the Seaway."

He then pointed out that a 1,000-TEU ship has regularly sailed between Europe and Port of Cleveland. "At some future time, it could operate between Port of Quebec and Cleveland. Port of Ogdensburg could warrant regular arrivals of a ship of 1,000 TEU with potential for ships of 1,500 TEU, each for ports of Toronto, Detroit and Chicago," he said.

Mr Valentine said the main quay at Quebec City is located on the mouth of the St Charles River tributary of the St Lawrence River. Gentle water conditions there would allow for the operation floating cranes that can transfer containers between a large ocean going ships and seawaymax vessels ships that would ply waters through Seaway and Great Lakes as far away as Chicago and Duluth, whose hinterlands include Minneapolis and Indianapolis with consumer-rich terrain in between.

This vessel-to-vessel transfer operation at Quebec is much the same as the one routinely done in Hong Kong known as the river trade, as much cargo comes down the Pearl River for transshipment from Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour.

"Such transfers of containers at Port of Quebec allows for the operation of river vessels that would encounter difficulty sailing on the sometimes stormy waters on the Gulf of St Lawrence. Tugs pushing coupled tows of barges could easily operate along the St Lawrence River from Quebec to small ports with shallow draft located along the way, as well delivering cargo along navigable tributaries of the St Lawrence River such as the Ottawa River to Canada's capital, the Murray Canal and Severn Waterway in Ontario as well as the Richelieu River into Lake Champlain," said Mr Valentine.

Borrowing a technique used in the lower Mississippi River, that of "extended-length coupled vessels carrying containers between Quebec and Montreal. Costs per container would be a fraction of railway or truck rail costs". These coupled vessels, some designed as ro/ro ships, smoothing out local delivery, would also avail themselves of electric propulsion. Because of the massive hydro-electric dams in northern Quebec, the utility offers the cheapest power rates in the world, allowing for cost-competitive battery-electric vessel operation between Quebec City and Montreal. Given the reduced sailing speed along the Lower St Lawrence River compared to ocean sailing, increasing sailing speed from 10 knots to 20 knots requires eight times the propulsive power. Again, presenting another cost saving.

The presence of Seaway locks upstream of Montreal allows for recharge of batteries while vessels are in the locks. Narrow navigation channels in the Montreal region allows for the installation of electric railway-type power cables to allow for simultaneous propulsion and battery recharge for vessels sailing to ports along the Upper St Lawrence River.

As Mr Valentine sees it the prospect of Europe-Canada/US trade that includes trade to Upper Great Lakes ports warrants sailing a regularly scheduled single vessel of 6,000 to 10,000 TEU, at which point, he said, the Port of Quebec would develop a market niche.

Another factor to consider is the already acknowledged problem of mega ships in the 15,000 - 20,000-TEU ships dumping cargo on ports in massive amounts, which produces of masses of trucks and trains, all straining to collect it - as no shipper wants to be the last to be served.

Does a Quebec-like system, hypothesized by Mr Valentine, go some way to address this problem? If 6,000 - 10,000-TEU ships call at Quebec and transfer cargo into seawaymaxes, which are small enough to ply tributaries of the St Lawrence, could this not relieve the pressure and offer cheaper service?

The weakness of such a scheme, even if it works out in detail, is that it is slow. But for perennial products speed would not matter to those BCOs practicing the "Four Corners" strategy adopted in recent years by major big box retailers who have massive warehouses at the "four corners" of the continent to stock always-in-demand items, which must arrive inexpensively if profitability is to be sustained.

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Can reinventing the St Lawrence Seaway revive the Port of Quebec as a vital transshipment hub for US big box retailers?

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U.S. Trade Specialists