A new challenge is facing the port of Hampton Roads: the arrival of the port’s largest-ever container ships.
“Mega-alliances” formed by the largest ocean carriers are putting gargantuan ships into service on the busiest trade lanes – vessels big enough to carry 18,000 20-foot containers. That’s three times the capacity of the biggest ships only two decades ago.
Though these giants are plying the Asia-Europe routes, they’ve shoved other smaller, yet-still-massive vessels into other trade lanes.
Hampton Roads and many other ports that already have been struggling to handle cargo surges have begun to feel this cascade effect.
“You have this big crunch through the terminal where you’re trying to force more and more containers through the system,” said Paul Avery, associate editor at World Cargo News, a trade publication based in Britain. “Terminals are struggling to manage this without congestion.”
It’s an issue facing ports worldwide, not just Hampton Roads, where cargo backups have been cited as a factor in the Virginia Port Authority’s multimillion-dollar operating losses this year.
“Virginia’s not unique in the challenge that it has,” Avery said.
Preparing for the larger ships the alliances are bringing “is a critical aspect of any port’s job,” said John Reinhart, a former Maersk Line Ltd. chief executive who took over as the Virginia authority’s CEO in February.
Reinhart has moved aggressively to streamline the port’s operations, knowing that its inefficiencies will be magnified in the era of mega-ships.
Just a few years ago, the norm for Hampton Roads was five ships calling per week on a typical trade lane, each carrying the equivalent of 4,000 20-foot containers and unloading 800 of them over five days, said Tom Capozzi, the Port Authority’s chief commercial officer.
In their place, he said, it now may get two 9,000-unit vessels, each discharging up to 2,000 containers – over two days.
The larger ships began calling on Hampton Roads about two years ago, said Joe Harris, a Port Authority spokesman. About a half-dozen of these vessels visited in the past couple of weeks, and their share of port calls is expected to increase sharply in the coming months and years as mega-alliances expand their reach.
The changes are creating “this huge surge of volume that’s all being condensed,” Capozzi said.
Meanwhile, truckers still want to get in and grab the containers they’ve been hired to haul away as soon as they hit the tarmac, and rail customers still expect their cargo to move within 48 hours, Capozzi said. They don’t understand the magnitude of the change occurring, he added.