LONDON: Port Panama City plans to develop a breakbulk forest products terminal on a newly acquired waterfront tract at the U.S. Gulf Coast port on the Florida panhandle. The terminal will include include a 250,000-square-foot warehouse for wood pulp, kraft linerboard and related goods. It will have a railyard with capacity for 48 railcars, a 38-foot-draft berthing area with reinforced bulkhead and 10 acres of open storage.
The expansion is planned on 41 acres the port acquired last week from WestRock Co., which plans to continue to operate its corrugated packaging mill on adjoining property. The port has an option to buy 27 adjacent acres for further expansion. “Over time, this will effectively double our space for handling cargo,” Wayne Stubbs, the port’s executive director, told JOC.com. The port’s approximately 100-acre existing footprint has been partially subdivided among industries that employ a total of more than 700 workers.
Panama City is a diversified port that annually handles more than 2 million tons of cargo — more than 700,000 tons of bulk wood pellets and about 1.2 million tons divided among containers, imported steel, imported copper cathodes for production of electrical wire and exported forest products.
The port’s container service is provided by Linea Peninsular, which operates a cross-Gulf container service to and from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Panama City handled 26,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units of containers last year, according to PIERS, a sister product of JOC.com within IHS. Grubbs said the planned forest products terminal benefits the port and WestRock. The port needed land for expansion and WestRock required deepening of its 32-foot channel in order to justify refurbishment of its pulp and linerboard plant.
Acquiring the WestRock property will enable the port to increase the 150,000 tons to 180,000 tons of breakbulk shipments that now move across the company’s dock, in addition to the approximately 180,000 tons of kraft linerboard the port handles at its own facilities, Stubbs said. Port Panama City paid $13.6 million to acquire the 41 acres, using financing from the Florida Department of Transportation State Infrastructure Bank, and has secured an option to buy 27 more acres for $6 million.
The port already had federal authorization to deepen the WestRock dock to 36 feet, which would match the depth on the port’s main channel. The standard 2-foot undercut means the effective channel depth is 38 feet. Stubbs said state permits for the dredging have been secured, and that after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers provides a re-evaluation of the project, the port hopes to obtain federal funding for the dredging in the fiscal 2018 budget. The total cost is expected to be under $9 million, with half coming from federal funds.
