Pirate Busters - American Shipper

TRANSPORT / PORTS
Floating an intermodal option
Barge service would provide trucking alternative
to connect Oakland, Stockton.
Ports America sees big potential at the
Port of Oakland for increased moves
of Asian cargo to the U.S. Midwest
by rail. A start-up called Eco-Transport,
believes barge transport may also be a part
of its future.
Alex Yeros is managing director at
Eco-Transport and its parent company
Broe Group, a firm that
hopes to start a short sea
inland barge service that
would move containers
between Oakland and
the Port of Stockton,
located 75 miles east of
the Golden Gate Bridge.
Yeros said the company
was hoping to
launch the service as
soon as September,
believing the time may
be ripe both environmentally
and due to
container shipping industry
trends. He notes
that in recent years some
shipping lines have been reducing their
involvement in inland transportation, and
are encouraging shippers to return containers
quickly so they can be reloaded or
returned to Asia.
Compared to some ports, the flow of
containers in and out of Oakland is more
balanced, and that there is high demand
for export containers to carry agricultural
goods from California.
Last year there were 988,973 TEUs of
import containers that moved through
the Port of Oakland (796,404 full and
192,569 empty), and 1.2 million TEUs
of export containers (910,700 full and
333,860 empty).
He estimates about a quarter of the traffic
is moved through the Union Pacific
and BNSF Railway intermodal facilities
right at the port. Another Broe subsidiary,
Omnitrax, operates the BNSF terminal in
the Port of Oakland, which is called the
Oakland International Gateway.
But because of a lack of space in Oakland,
many of the other containers are trucked
to the Stockton area to large distribution
centers or deconsolidation stations where
44 AMERICAN SHIPPER: OCTOBER 2009
BY CHRIS DUPIN
Source: Eco-Transport.
freight is reloaded into domestic equipment,
he said.
There are about 50 million square feet
of distribution or deconsolidation facilities
in the Stockton area where much is loaded
onto trains at two other rail facilities, the
BNSF’s terminal in Mariposa and UP’s
terminal in Lathrop, he said.
Today, when those containers move in
and out of Oakland, many travel by truck
over Interstate 580 to the greater Stockton
area where they are transloaded into domestic
containers, and the ocean containers are
returned empty to Oakland. Meanwhile,
Yeros said agricultural exporters dispatch
trucks in the opposite direction from the
Central Valley to fetch empty containers
to carry cotton and other agricultural
commodities. This two-way f low of trucks
carrying both full and empty containers
has helped make I-580 the second most
congested freeway in Northen California,
according to the Alameda County Congestion
Management Agency.
Yeros said establishing a satellite container
terminal in the Port of Stockton,
and a second one eventually in the Port of
West Sacramento, could help eliminate the
thousands of container moves each week.
Eco-Transport plans to establish a service
that would use a barge to move up to
350 40-foot containers at a time between
Oakland and Stockton. The company also
plans to coordinate delivery or pickup of
containers from warehouses or agricultural
exports in the Central Valley.
“We are trying to establish a service
within the way the world works today.
This would not involve new ships. It is not
a roll-on/roll-off service. We are going to
load barges the way that ships are loaded
and unloaded and ultimately make the
delivery to customers with trucks the same
way that they operate today,” Yeros said.
In addition to its environmental benefits,
he said the service should appeal to
exporters because they will be able to get
greater access to available equipment “and
we can help them with managing the actual
delivery or pickup of the load. Shipping
lines can improve the cycle time on their
equipment and get a better match in import
and exports of their equipment,” he said.
Yeros said truckers might be able to dray
several more containers
a day to and from the
satellite container yard
than if they have to drive
all the way between
Oakland and the Central
Valley.
William Lewicki,
marketing director for
the Port of Stockton,
said the barge service
could benefit shippers
of heavy commodities
such as pipe or agricultural
goods that cannot
fully load containers
because of weight limitations
on California’s
highways. By barging containers to and
from the port, shippers would be able to
load more cargo in each box. This could
be an advantage to Port of Stockton tenants
such as Ferguson Enterprises, the largest
distributor of pipe, valves and fittings in
the United States.
Lewicki said his port, along with Sacramento
and Eco-Transport, are seeking
federal funding for the short-sea shipping
initiative under President Obama’s
economic stimulus plan. Stockton hopes
to obtain a couple of mobile cranes, one
of which would be devoted to the barge
service. The plan, he said, is to set up the
operation in the port’s western complex,
formerly the Navy’s “Rough and Ready”
supply depot, where containers could be
drayed a quarter mile from berths 19-20
to a container yard.
But even without that crane, he said the
port would be able to accommodate startup
of the barge service in a matter of weeks.
It would, instead, use an existing container
crane to offload the barge — containers
0 - 2,500 trucks per day
2,501 - 7,500 trucks per day
7,501+ trucks per day
Marine Highway Route
Traffic congestion will
be eliminated by moving
containers over the Marine
Highway to Eco-Transport’s
Satellite Container Terminal
in the Central Valley.
would just have to be drayed a mile and a
quarter.
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