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No
container facilities on Newark Bay and Arthur
Kill can handle super-postpanamax traffic
until the raising of the roadway of the
Bayonne Bridge, spanning the Kill van Kull
to connect Staten Island with Bergen Point,
is completed, probably late next year.
Delaware
River ports centered on Philadelphia briefly
and successfully moved to relieve container
congestion, even assuming a full-service
supply and support role throughout New Jersey
and into New York City.
In
doing so, Philadelphia was able to test
and burnish its edge. The city's container
business rose almost 50 per cent between
2009 and 2012, albeit from a low base to
2,209 TEU.
As
in Charleston, and building on its heightened
stature and awareness, post-Sandy, Philadelphia
recently acquired 76 hectares of the former
naval shipyard adjacent to its Packer Marine
Terminal and is developing Southport Marine
Terminal, a state-of-the-art postpanamax
niche container port adjacent to a 15.2
foot draft fairway dredged for cruisers,
battleships and carriers once built or refitted,
then later mothballed at the navy yard.
The
adjacent Packer Avenue terminal features
12.4-metre draft and Greenwich railyard
hosts major clients Hamburg-Sud Line, while
Canadian Pacific's year-round Atlantic Coast
terminal is a facility shared with CSX and
Norfolk Southern.
Also,
the US west coast operations are likely
to accelerate and come to have a remarkably
efficient competitive edge when their existing
landbridge traffic begins to divert to the
new Panama Canal in mid-2015.
This
militates against placing too many eggs
in the east coast basket just yet. The Gulf
Coast's advantages are more complicated
and debatable in that large and overlapping
port hinterlands that impose significant
intermodal costs and are well served from
southeastern container ports.
The
Suez route from the Far East to the Mediterranean
and North Atlantic ports has many advantages,
not all of them transitory. One is that
a lower emissions footprint flowing from
a shorter route, fewer port calls and lower
overall speeds are useful politically.
Such
advantages, hinted at by Massport publicity,
are anticipated from the recent inauguration
of the distance-favourable, niche Hong Kong/Southeast
Asia-Boston service via Suez (arrivals every
Friday), by Cosco and partners Yang Ming,
Hyundai and Hanjin.
At
roughly the same time, the G6 Alliance,
responding to a similar initiative by Cosco-led
CKYH Alliance inaugurated weekly Suez service
from Hong Kong/Kaohsiung to Jacksonville
(Jaxport). This flurry of scheduling activity
convinced Jaxport developers, including
Hanjin, to defer developing a comprehensive
postpanamax terminal at Dames Point in order
to lobby collectively for 15.2-metre plus
dredging to a single, large but flexible
"union terminal".
Set
against this steaming calculus are the high
Suez tolls, its very busy lanes and ongoing
instability and insurgencies in Egypt (especially
Sinai), Somalia and Yemen. Yet another advantage
is the Suez Canal's ample experience in
transiting more than a dozen 15,500-TEUers
at modern Port Said with 16.7-metre drafts
available from "Red to Med". In
the coming age of much bigger and increasing
number of bigger ships, Suez is becoming
harder and harder to beat.
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