Gulf Trade: Top Carriers and Ports
Special Report company Sarens, told the Journal of Commerce that six months of planning went into its December overland move of components for the Shell Polaris CCS project in Alberta, Canada, given the sheer size of the load and the permitting it required.
The project called for the transport and installation of three massive components. Betts said the heaviest load weighed in at 655 tons, including trucks, trailers and equipment, and transporting it required 56 axle lines on two hydraulic platform trailers.
“ This was the biggest thing that moved in Alberta in a lot of years,” Betts said.
Preparing the 66-mile route entailed removing railway arms, securing bridge capacities, and coordinating power line adjustments 45 days in advance.“ This was over and above normal heavy-haul procedures,” Betts said.
The heavy lifting took a total of eight days in October, November and December and included the placement of all three components by crane, with the largest structure towering at nearly 235 feet tall.
Betts said CCS is shaping up to be an active project segment over the next five years, with even larger projects to come.“ There are a whole bunch of them popping up everywhere, so I think it’ s a trend that’ s going to carry on,” he said.
email: autumn @ autumngiusti. com
Authority Director and CEO John Driscoll said during a Feb. 27 groundbreaking event.“ This facility will provide businesses with seamless access to global markets, driving economic growth and strengthening our state’ s supply chain infrastructure.”
Christina Bottomley, vice president of business development and real estate at CSX, said the facility will“ transform how freight is moved across the state— shifting more goods from congested highways onto the sustainable, efficient rail network that CSX operates.”
Last February, the port authority announced it would build a third inland port— the North Alabama ICTF in Decatur, Alabama— that will also be served by CSX. The on-dock Mobile ICTF, operated by APM Terminals, has been in operation since 2016.
At the same time, volumes of intact international containers moving by rail— also called inland point intermodal( IPI)— from US Gulf Coast ports have grown at more than double the rate of shipments coming off the East Coast but from a much lower starting point.
Railroads hauled an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 ocean containers inland from US Gulf Coast ports in 2024, an 18 % jump from 2020 levels, according to a Journal of Commerce analysis of data from the Intermodal Association of North America( IANA). Outbound IPI volumes from the East Coast grew roughly 8 % to between 1 million and 1.5 million boxes, while shipments from the West Coast rose 15 % to between 1.6 million and 2.1 million containers during the same five-year period.
www. joc. com April 7, 2025 | Journal of Commerce 43