HOUSTON: Port Houston plans to add night gate hours at a second container terminal and provide a “fast lane” for truckers who check in online as the US Gulf’s largest container port prepares for a coming surge in synthetic-resin exports. Meanwhile, officials are anxious for more truckers to use newly extended gate hours at Houston’s Bayport container terminal. Since the terminal’s 7 p.m. local time gate closing was extended to 11 p.m. local time on Oct. 2, average extended-hours volume has been only 300 to 400 trucks a night. “The first month was not what we expected,” Jeff Davis, the port’s chief operating officer, told the annual Harris County International Trade & Transportation Conference. Davis said higher volume is needed to support continued US Customs and Border Protection staffing during the longer hours. “We’re confident that will happen,” he said.
Davis said the port recently won city approval for extended gates at the port’s Barbours Cut terminal, and hopes to implement longer hours as soon as Customs and Border Protection can staff them, which will probably be in about two months. He also said the port is working to develop an online interface between the terminals’ operating system and drayage companies that would provide a fast lane for truckers who send booking numbers and other data in advance instead of stopping to communicate it at the gate or at a near-gate kiosk. This could save two or three minutes per gate transaction at Bayport or Barbours Cut, which average 7,500 truck moves a day, Davis said. He said no schedule has been set for creating the online interface. The two container terminals last year handled 879 ships that averaged 1,450 container moves per call, although a few vessels have loaded and discharged more than 4,000 boxes on a call. Houston routinely handles ships with capacities of 6,000 TEU, but has had some extra loaders this year in the 8,000-TEU range, said Roger Guenther, the port’s executive director.
Houston plans to spend some $1.2 billion during the next decade to rebuild Barbours Cut, which opened in the 1970s, and to complete the build-out of Bayport, which dates to 2007. The work includes larger cranes, new container yards and docks, and new gates. The planned changes are part of a list of operational adjustments and infrastructure improvements that Houston plans as it seeks to meet heightened competition for US resin exports, which are expected to jump by more than 500,000 TEU during the next few years. Houston handled about 45 percent of US resin exports last year, according to PIERS, a sister unit of JOC.com within IHS Markit. Through August of this year, the port’s share dipped to 39 percent as US resin exports fell 10.5 percent year over year, to 406,917 TEU amid disruptions from Hurricane Harvey. Disruption from Harvey’s flooding is expected to be a temporary blip before what analysts forecast will be a sustained boom in US resin exports produced mainly at Gulf Coast plants with access to low-cost natural gas feedstocks.
Although Houston has the advantage of proximity to production sources, it faces intermodal rail competition. Union Pacific and BNSF railroads are promoting their services from the Gulf to the West Coast via bulk-to-container transloading centers in Dallas-Fort Worth. Perry Padden, Americas logistics and distribution manager at ExxonMobil, said a new Texas law allowing heavy-haul corridors at Houston puts the port on “a level playing field” with other ports by allowing containers to be fully loaded with resins. The law allows gross weights of up to 93,000 lbs for six-axle trucks and 100,000 lbs for seven-axle trucks while requiring the heavier trucks to meet stringent safety standards. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the trucks operating on these new heavy-haul corridors will be the safest in the nation,” Padden said. ExxonMobil, which recently completed two polyethylene (PE) reactors at nearby Mont Belvieu, expects to finish another in 2019 at Beaumont, Texas, and is in a joint venture with Saudi Arabia Basic Industries Corp. to build two PE reactors at Corpus Christi, Texas, that are expected to be completed about 2022.
