Delivery of massive cranes heralds big changes at port
Houston terminals preparing for the arrival of larger cargo ships after Panama Canal expansion is finished
They first appeared as a distant speck on the horizon of Galveston Bay.
As they slowly made their way up the Houston Ship Channel to Barbours Cut Terminal, they gained definition: four, 30-storytall, 1,500-ton cranes improbably attached to the deck of a ship — the largest cranes ever to grace the Port of Houston.
The behemoths, which arrived Tuesday afternoon after a 73-day journey from South Korea, are a crucial next step in readying the port for the massive Post Panamax container ships. Their numbers are expected to increase dramatically after the expansion of the Panama Canal is completed next year.
The Port of Houston is spending at least $700 million modernizing its Barbours Cut terminal, and dredging channels to Barbours Cut and the Bayport terminals, to accommodate the expected increase in traffic and size of the ships.
The Panama Canal’s expansion — which began in 2007, is expected to cost at least $5.2 billion, and will triple its capacity — is slated for completion next year.
The four new cranes, which are about twice the size of older cranes, can load and unload ships two times faster. The canal’s expansion is expected to increase the amount of
cargo exported through the Port of Houston five-fold by the year 2035, according to one federal estimate.
Janiece Longoria, chairman of the Port of Houston Authority Commission, said companies shipping goods to the Houston-region have increasingly called for the port to ramp up its ability to handle bigger ships.
“We’re responding to demand,” she said. “With the expansion of the Panama Canal, we’ll see larger ships coming to the Port of Houston.”
The cranes themselves were part of a $50 million contract approved in 2013 by the Port of Houston Authority Commission with a company called Konecranes. They were manufactured in South Korea and are the largest the company has ever built.
While the old cranes could reach across ships that were 13 containers wide, the new cranes will be able to reach across vessels that are 22 containers wide, said Bill Hensel, a Port of Houston authority spokesman.
Longoria said the cranes should be up-and-running in about two months.
Simultaneously, the port authority is also working to widen and deepen the waterways that connect both the Barbours Cut Terminal and another terminal to the 52-mile-long ship channel, moves also designed to handle bigger, heavier ships.
The dredging projects are expected to also be completed this year, Longoria said.
According to Roger Guenther, the executive director of the Port of Houston Authority, more than 25 percent of all imports in the port come through the Panama Canal. That’s more than 250,000 20-foot shipping containers-worth, a common measure of shipping capacity.
About 10 years ago, Guenther said, the port had almost nothing coming from the canal. Looking forward, the 250,000 estimate is likely to go up, although how much is not entirely certain.
One push for increased shipping is demand for consumer goods, including everything from televisions to tables, and food. As the Houston region grows, so does demand for these goods, motivating companies to use bigger ships to carry the most containers to reduce costs, said William Diehl, president of the Greater Houston Port Bureau, a nonprofit group that tracks shipping in and out of the ship channel.
Houston-area petrochemical companies are also creating more plastic resins for export to Asia, which could also benefit from efficiencies created by using larger ships, Diehl said.
Overall, Diehl said, the real need for using bigger ships in the region would likely not be realized for several years. But he said the demand would definitely be there.
“Whether it materializes the first year or the second year, you’re going to need the bigger cranes to deal with the bigger ships that will start coming through,” Diehl said.
Patrick Jankowski, vice president of research for the Greater Houston Partnership, who researches the ship channel, agreed, saying that the opening of the canal would not be a “game changer.”
“People are expecting it to be a miracle worker, or a huge shot in the arm,” he said.
“It’s going to keep us healthy, but it’s not going to make us superhuman.”
He said that demand for imports in the Houston-region would not necessarily increase just because the capacity to deliver goods increased. But he said on one level, boosting the port’s ability to handle bigger ships would help it compete with other ports across the country that are also revamping their capabilities.
He said that if the canal’s expansion were to be completed today, the Port of Houston would not be ready to handle the increased exchange of cargo.
“We would be in danger of even losing what we have,” he said.
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