A new in-state competitor for Jax's port?

[thelakelander]

Port Manatee Is Poised for New Growth
Container shipping is only phase one in the busy harbor's expansion plans.

PORT MANATEE | The sprawling 1,100-acre Port Manatee, hugging Tampa Bay just a mile south of the Manatee-Hillsborough county line, is a study in efficient motion.

Railcars of fertilizer destined for Australian golf courses and lawns are loaded onto one ship, while another uses a pneumatic tube to disgorge cement dust, to be converted into Florida driveways and roads.

Yards and warehouses are stacked with construction materials, pure aluminum ingots, steel pipes, and even wrecked cars, headed for Central American shops that will piece them back together into drivable vehicles.

Amid all that activity, Port Manatee has thus far stayed out of the container business.

But now that Port Manatee's bank accounts have been beefed up by heavy traffic in general cargo, its managers plan to make up for lost time in the container world.

Soon, the port will be handling 300,000 to 600,000 of these handy steel boxes per year. And that is just Phase One.

Containers, elongated steel boxes that can be stuffed with a wide variety of merchandise, have become the chief enabler of international trade.

With a container, the shipper can unload goods onto a set of wheels called a chassis, and they hit the road pulled by a tractor-trailer. Even better, the carrier can take the 20-foot-long steel box off a ship and stack it onto a railroad freight car, which makes it even easier to whisk it on its way to a distant city.

In the past five years, the world's cargo fleet has almost doubled its capacity to move goods by the container-load.

Two related projects are destined to multiply the port's container business to even higher levels: the supersizing of the Panama Canal and rail giant CSX's plan to create a jumbo-size container terminal in Winter Haven.

Widening the Panama Canal

Port Manatee is the closest deep-water U.S. port to the Panama Canal, a fact that will no doubt become better known in the years to come.

Basically, the two canal lanes that ships now use to cheat their way from the Pacific to the Atlantic are antiques, having first opened in 1914.

Yet, the Panama Canal is so important to world shipping that the trade has invented a word to describe ships that will fit through it. A "Panamax" cargo ship is one with a maximum width of 106 feet and a maximum draft of 41 feet.

The canal is now the site of the world's largest construction project - the creation of a new ultrawide third lane that will allow post-Panamax ships as wide as 180 feet to sneak through its locks from one ocean to the other.

When the new lane opens for business in 2014, ships that can carry 12,000 containers will be able to glide through. This alone will change the nature of global shipping routes.

Say China, which produces 90 percent of the finished goods coming to the United States, dispatches a jumbo ship that has containers headed for Cincinnati and points east.

At present, the ship must dock in a Pacific port such as Los Angeles to disgorge its containers. The Cincinnati-bound containers must then make the long trip overland by rail or truck.

But seven years from now, the same post-Panamax ship will be able to pass from the Pacific to the Atlantic just as quickly as a smaller ship, enabling its eastern U.S. cargo to get closer to its destination by sea than ever before.

The Panama Canal Authority projects that after the supersizing of the canal, as much as 60 percent of the world's shipping trade will pass through its locks, compared with 30 percent at present.

Now, even though Port Manatee is a deep-water port, with the standard 40 feet of depth at mean low tide, that is not enough depth to handle the post-Panamax ships that carry 15,000 containers. Neither can the Port of Tampa.

In fact, there are relatively few ports in the world where they can dock.

They include Everglades, Savannah and Houston in the southern United States, as well as the offshore ports of Freeport, Bahamas, and Kingston, Jamaica.

But the widening of the canal will likely cause a sea change in the way containers are moved, says Rodolfo Sabonge, the Panama Canal marketing executive.

Once the bigger vessels can come through the canal, Sabonge predicts, they will use ports off the shores of the United States but convenient to the states as hubs.

"From there, you will have feeder vessels that will call on other ports," he said.

The rail connection

During a recent visit to Port Manatee, one of the port's two brightly colored locomotives, called switching engines, slowly pushed railroad hopper cars filled with fertilizer toward a ship heading for Australia. The railcars, of course, did not arrive by magic. They were delivered to the port directly by CSX Corp.

Port Manatee already has its own seven-mile railroad line, and it already connects directly with tracks and trains owned by CSX.

Not every port has a good rail connection like that, but that is just a taste of the rail connection to come.

Just 70 miles away by rail, CSX is building a gigantic new hub, the first of its kind in the Southeast, designed to efficiently move containerized shipments and cars toward their final destinations.

The new CSX hub must still be approved by the state as a development of regional impact.

The scale planned for Winter Haven is immense: A 5-million-square-foot complex on 1,200 acres, a $10 billion-a-year boost to the state's economy, and with it 8,000 jobs.

CSX will be the core operator. But some of the carrier's biggest clients will cluster around CSX to expedite their own cargoes.

Hypothetically, a client corporation like Home Depot or Wal-Mart, or even a bunch of Ford dealers, could own a neighboring terminal to receive their loads and speed them on their way to Florida outlets.

At the same time, the CSX yard will be receiving containers from Florida ports and directing them to markets to the north.

Scrubland to container city

At the south end of Port Manatee, where weeds cover most of a 55-acre parcel, hundreds of thousands of 20-foot containers stacked three or four high will soon dot the landscape.

The containerized shipping end of Port Manatee has not happened yet, but it is barreling down a compressed time line in Steve Tyndal's mind. He is Port Manatee's senior director of trade development and special projects.

"Phase One of the CSX center is scheduled to be complete in 2009. The canal is going to be complete in 2014. We will be getting our first container crane by the end of the year," Tyndal said.

At the same time, the port is working feverishly to win state and federal approvals for a five-mile speedway connecting the port directly to Interstate 75, avoiding congestion on U.S. 41, the highway that forms the port's eastern boundary.

"You can kind of see how all these dates are compressing," Tyndal said.

Meanwhile, getting into containers is expensive.

Four million dollars will buy you one good-sized portable harbor crane designed to lift containers onto and off of ships. How about fixed container cranes stationed along the berth? That will cost you even more.

By the end of this year, the port will have its first container crane, part of a $3.9 million public-private partnership between the port authority and Logistec USA Inc., the U.S. arm of a Canadian stevedoring company.

[ Michael Pollick writes for the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota. ]

Last modified: November 01. 2007 12:00AM

http://www.theledger.com/article/20071101/NEWS/711010456/1001/BUSINESS

[Jason]

Man, that is huge news for the west coast.  Jax really has to get on the ball and stay ahead of the the others in meeting the requirements for these new ships.  The logistical connections to the rest of the country are ideal, however, this new rail hub and container port will make port manatee more enticing for shipments from the east.

[thelakelander]

Now, even though Port Manatee is a deep-water port, with the standard 40 feet of depth at mean low tide, that is not enough depth to handle the post-Panamax ships that carry 15,000 containers. Neither can the Port of Tampa.

In fact, there are relatively few ports in the world where they can dock.

They include Everglades, Savannah and Houston in the southern United States, as well as the offshore ports of Freeport, Bahamas, and Kingston, Jamaica.

Anyone know how deep is the St. Johns?  Sounds like we have some dredging to do to take away the advantage that Port Everglades (Fort Lauderdale), Savannah and Houston currently enjoy.

[02roadking]

http://www.jaxport.com/sea/g_harbor.cfm

[Jason]

So once the latest deepening project is complete we'll be the same depth as port manatee but still behind Port Everglades, Savannah, and Houston.

[thelakelander]

Sounds like it.  Savannah and Houston all handle more container traffic then we currently do and they have plans to go after the Asian container shipping segment as well.

The Port Manatee article mentioned a depth of 41 feet is needed for these massive container ships coming in through the Panama Canal.  If so, how long will it take us to deepen our harbor so it will be able to handle them?

[tufsu1]

Port Manatee also needs a better road connection to I-75....there has been a study underway for a few years for a new expressway linking the port directly to the interstate

[Steve]

The Port Manatee article mentioned a depth of 41 feet is needed for these massive container ships coming in through the Panama Canal.  If so, how long will it take us to deepen our harbor so it will be able to handle them?

We are currently at 40 feet up to dames point, and are deepening the channel to 40 up to talleyrand now (will be done next year).  I hear they are talking about going to 45 in the future soon.