SOUTH CAROLINA: The Army Corps of Engineers declared the Port of Charleston’s deepening project to be economically and environmentally feasible on Monday, clearing the way to the project to move ahead pending the securing of needed federal and state funding.
The “chief’s report” increases the likelihood that the South Carolina port will have the deepest harbor on the East Coast by the end of the decade. Larger vessels are increasingly calling the East Coast through the Suez Canal, and even more are expected when the expanded locks of the Panama Canal open mid-2016, allowing the waterway to handle containerships three times the size it can now.
“This is a great day for us,” Jim Newsome, president and CEO of the South Carolina Ports Authority, told the South Carolina International Trade Conference in Charleston.
By dredging its harbor to 52 feet, and entrance channel to 54 feet, Charleston will be able to handle mega-ships with capacities of 14,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units, round the clock, without having to rely on tidal variations. For East Coast ports that will increasingly handle big ships from Asia facing tight windows for transiting the Panama Canal, “it’s not good to have tidal restrictions,” Newsome said Monda.
The port’s archrival, Savannah, however, is ahead, as it will begin deepening its harbor later this month. The $763 million project scheduled for completion in 2018 will deepen its channel from 42 feet to 47 feet. Jacksonville is currently trying to get the funds needed to cajole the port’s TraPac terminal to relocate to Blount Island, saving between $150 to $200 million on a critical dredging project that will deepen its channel from 40 feet to 47 feet and help ensure its future competitiveness in the cutthroat Southeast market.
The market is heating up, thanks to the steadily growing population and West Coast diversions. Savannah traffic jumped 14 percent to nearly 1.7 million TEUs in the first half compared to the same period a year ago, according to PIERS, a sister product of JOC.com within IHS. In the same period, Charleston volume rose 12 percent to almost 918,000 TEUS, while traffic through Jacksonville inched up 2 percent to 443,400 TEUs.
Delivery of the report by Lt. General Thomas Bostick to the Secretary of the Army is significant nationally because it is the first project to be approved under the Corps of Engineers’ new “smart planning” policy designed to expedite the approval process for civil works projects, and significantly reduce planning and approval costs in the process.
