Speaker tells how I-69 will speed local economic growth
Capt. Bill Diehl, president of the Greater Houston Port Bureau, said Texarkana will see a greater volume of cargo traffic when Interstate 69 opens, clearing another direct way from Houston northward.
Diehl, who was the featured speaker at the 2018 Economic Outlook Dinner, sponsored by Texas A&M University-Texarkana’s College of Business, Engineering and Technology, also worked at the Panama Canal from 2004-06 and explained how ports work.
“It’s cheaper for a company to ship a container from the Panama Canal to Texarkana through the
Port of Los Angeles than it is through the Port of Houston,” he said.
That’s about to change, he said, as companies further north are now filling empty containers with plastic pellets made from ethane before they return to the port.
“It is expanding the market,” he said. “Companies can get the boxes better, faster, cheaper.”
Diehl predicts that more containers will come from the Port of Houston to Dallas and then be transported via truck or railroad to their final destinations.
The key to whichever route, he said, is predictability.
“Companies have to know it’s going to get there in a certain time frame,” he said. “Ship beats train train beats truck.”
He described the Port of Houston, which is 52 miles long and was built in 1914, the same year as the Panama Canal. They are each basically big lakes with channels the ships go through. Diehl said the Port of Houston added additional channels in the early 2000s to allow for the transition of additional cargo.
The Port is also basically a manufacturing center, he said, detailing the maze of pipelines buried beneath the 274 facilities located there, including Exxon Mobil.
“Exxon Mobil’s facility is four times the size of downtown Houston,” he said.
“They bring in oil. It’s refined, then shipped off to chemical companies,” Diehl said, adding that’s where the maze of pipes comes in. “That cluster of pipes moves the liquids around. In the Port of L.A. or New York, they are like conveyor belts going somewhere. Houston has intermodal transit.”
Two-thirds of the port is involved in the taking and manufacturing of chemicals, he said.
Those chemicals, along with containers holding other goods will soon be coming through Texarkana in greater numbers, Diehl said. ”Better, faster, cheaper is what’s coming this way through this area. More boxes, more traffic, more commerce.”