L.A. terminal maximizes capacity with on-dock rail, automated stacking, and “auto-strads.”
One answer can be found at the TraPac Terminal in Los Angeles, which is transforming itself into what is arguably the most modern automated container terminal in the United States.
As in several other high-tech terminals in the country—the Virginia International Gateway originally opened by APM Terminals in 2010 and now operated by the Port of Virginia; the Global Container Terminals facility in Bayonne, N.J.; or the Long Beach Container Terminal under construction in Long Beach’s Middle Harbor—TraPac will use rail-mounted automated stacking cranes (ASCs) to store import and export containers and load and discharge trucks.
Unlike the Virginia and Bayonne container terminals that use manned shuttle carriers, or the LBCT terminal which will use automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to shuttle boxes back and forth from the stacking crane blocks to the giant ship-to-shore cranes used to load and discharge vessels, TraPac’s L.A. terminal will use unmanned, automated straddle carriers (autostrads) manufactured by the Kalmar unit of Cargotec. The autostrads will even shuttle containers to and from the terminal’s new on-dock rail yard.
The use of autostrads, robotic vehicles without drivers, for “horizontal transfer” of containers is pioneering technology in the United States, although the handling equipment is used by Patrick Stevedoring’s terminal in Brisbane, Australia.
TraPac also uses a variety of other technologies. Some is familiar to the industry, such as optical character recognition and transponders to identify truckers, containers and chassis as they enter and exit the facility, while others are unique to TraPac, such as the software that will optimize the storage of containers at the terminal.
TraPac is located in the West Basin of the port, berths 136-147, on a site that is shaped like the number “7” that abuts Harry Bridges Boulevard in L.A.’s Wilmington neighborhood.
Founded in 1987, TraPac is a subsidiary of the Japanese shipping company Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and originally had a footprint of just 70 acres, serving MOL’s ships exclusively. In 2014, Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management Inc. acquired a 49 percent stake in TraPac’s operations in Los Angeles and Oakland. (The investment does not include other TraPac assets, such as its terminal operations in Jacksonville, Fla.)
Over the years, the L.A. terminal has gradually added land to its current footprint and business from other liner carriers.
Frank Pisano, president of TraPac, said when the current expansion is complete it will encompass about 220 acres, including 30 to 35 acres for an on-dock rail yard.
The terminal is also located north of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, which has an air draft of 185 feet. It’s not clear if the limited air draft of the bridge will be an impediment to the terminal being visited by the increasingly largest containerships expected to eventually call the Port of Los Angeles, but Pisano said the TraPac terminal has been told by MOL to anticipate ships with 14,000 TEUs of capacity by 2017, which would be much larger than the 5,000- to 9,000-TEU ships that call there today.
The automation will allow the terminal to do more with its existing, unusually shaped footprint. Today, it handles about 882,000 TEUs annually. The first four phases of its expansion will boost that capacity to 1.8 million TEUs, and the terminal is studying a fifth phase which could bring capacity up to 2.3 million TEUs.
The terminal is also getting ready for the bigger container vessels by raising its ship-to-shore cranes by 24 feet and extending their outreach across deck from 19 to 21 rows.
Currently, the terminal is called on by two weekly services.
The first is the G6 Alliance’s SE2 service, which links Los Angeles and Oakland with Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand. According to BlueWater Reporting it uses seven MOL ships ranging in size from 8,100 to 9,100 TEUs. In addition to MOL, the other G6 carriers are APL, Hapag-Lloyd, Hyundai Merchant Marine, NYK, and OOCL.
The second service calling TraPac is the JAS service between Los Angeles, Oakland and the Japanese ports, which uses three MOL ships and two “K” Line vessels ranging in size from 4,380 to 5,100 TEUs, according to BlueWater. In addition to members of the G6 and CKYHE alliance (COSCO, “K” Line, Yang Ming, Hanjin and Evergreen), CMA CGM charters space on the service.
TraPac’s Oakland terminal has also increased in size from an original footprint of 30 acres to 66 acres, which today is considered too small to serve the growing size of containerships, and Pisano said the company is reviewing operations there, adding “it’s either we get all-in, or all-out.”
In Los Angeles, TraPac has definitely gone all in.
It has already spent $100 million to date, and will spend $170 million to $180 million in the four-phase development of one part of the terminal, the long side of the aforementioned “7.”
That’s on top of nearly $510.4 million that was spent by the Port of Los Angeles. The cost to the port was sharply revised upward from $364.5 million in 2013 after the design to the terminal was changed to include the use of automated stacking cranes. The cost overrun upset some Los Angeles City Council members, but some of the upgrades, such as the use of the electric-powered automated stacking cranes, had both environmental benefits as well as maximize use of the property.
Phase one of the terminal encompasses four blocks of automated stacking cranes and accompanying autostrads. It has been in place for more than a year. Eventually, 21 blocks of automated stacking carriers will be added during three additional phases of construction. The blocks are eight containers wide and can be stacked five high.
The second phase of the terminal is expected to open by the end of this year.
Currently, stacking cranes and automated straddle carriers are being used solely to handle inbound containers. About 3,500 containers can be unloaded using the automated portion of the terminal today, then ships shift to the top of the “7” where any remaining imports are discharged and exports loaded using more traditional stevedoring equipment.
Pisano said the intent is to stack import containers three-high to minimize the time that the cranes have to “dig” for containers when trucks arrive. Exports and empty containers can be stacked five-high. However, with capacity constrained at the moment containers are being stacked higher.
When truckers arrive at the terminal they go to a pedestal area and are directed to one of the eight truck lanes at the end of each block. The drivers exit their trucks and the cranes automatically deliver the containers and drop them onto their chassis. When the additional ASC blocks open, the process will work in reverse for exports and empties—drivers will be told to go to one of the blocks and the ASC will remove their containers from the chassis.
Safety at the terminal is improved because there will be no workers along most of the pier or container yard—a couple of workers remove or insert twist locks into containers at the bottom of the ship-to-shore cranes, but there are no longshoremen in the area where the autostrads operate or in the ASC stacks.
While ports and terminals are talking about using reservation systems or programs such as “peel-off” or “free-flow” as a way to speed cargo through terminals, TraPac says that is not likely to be needed at its facility.
Today, some terminals are concentrating all their containers bound for major retailers or other beneficial cargo owners in a single location so they can be quickly peeled off to a convoy of truckers. But at TraPac the software that runs the terminal works to distribute containers bound for a single customer evenly over the entire facility. If 10 trucks arrive within minutes of each other to deliver their containers, the cargo will likely be located in 10 different locations within the terminal and can be found and loaded onto the trucks at different locations around the terminal simultaneously.
TraPac initially was the only one of the eight container terminals in the Port of Los Angeles that did not have on-dock rail. A new on-dock rail adjacent to the terminal will open next April and is expected to handle about 30-40 percent of the facility’s cargo.
The terminal will also be able to greatly reduce costs for intermodal shippers.
That’s essential, said Pisano, since the cost of trucking a container to BNSF’s off-dock rail yard runs about $200.
“The rates keep going up. Fuel goes up, trucking costs go up. So it really made MOL and the people coming here uncompetitive,” he said.
With the new handling technology, it will only take a few minutes for the autostrads to transfer containers between the automated stacking crane blocks and rail yard. The terminal even developed a unique system that allows its straddle carriers to pass containers through a radiation portal before being loaded on the on-dock trains.
The new rail terminal will use automated overhead, cantilever cranes that can span eight tracks that hold up to two full double-stack trains.
Initially, the rail terminal will be used to load and discharge BNSF trains, because MOL has a contract with the railroad, but Union Pacific trains will be added shortly thereafter. Like other terminals in the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, trains are actually moved in and out of the port by Pacific Harbor Line.
One beauty of the terminal’s design, said Robert Owens, vice president automation and information technology, is that the operation of the straddle carriers and automated stacking cranes are “decoupled.”
As the containers are discharged from the ships, they are placed in a buffer area where they can then be loaded by another straddle carrier into one of the automated stacking crane blocks, a train or even stored temporarily in stacks three high.
The automated straddle carriers can drop containers in the buffer area and immediately go do their next job. There is no waiting for an automated guided vehicle to arrive beneath a container crane.
Similarly, the automated stacking cranes work continuously. If there is no truck that needs a container to be discharged or loaded, the cranes can be used to “groom” the stacks, so that the containers most likely to be needed next are at the top of the pile.
“I’ve been very encouraged by the work that’s done at TraPac. The fluidity of the movement of cargo in and out of their facility has been impressive,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles. “Ongoing cooperation between the employer and longshore labor is going to be absolutely crucial to the success of that program.
“It’s going to be an interesting evolution in our industry,” he added. “I think that from the latest stats I’ve looked at, only 5 percent of the world’s ports are automated today. TraPac was the first step toward automation here at the Port of Los Angeles, and Long Beach Container Terminal will be the first step over on their side of the harbor area. So it’s going to be real interesting as we look back at our history in the maritime industry as to how these go.”
Seroka noted the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles were given permission by the Federal Maritime Commission earlier this year to cooperate on a variety of issues.
After the severe congestion the two Southern California ports faced this past fall and winter, they outlined three significant areas on which they plan to work “to get us not only back on our feet, but plan for the future,” Seroka said. These include:
- Improving land use so terminals designed 20 years ago can handle the larger ships arriving today and that are expected in the future. Before the recession, ships of 5,000 to 6,000 TEUs were common, while today the average is 8,000 to 8,500 TEUs, and the port is starting to receive ships of 13,000 to 14,000 TEUs at APM Terminals’ facility in Los Angeles. Developing the infrastructure for an automated terminal capable of handling large cranes and large ships—just the portion from the surface of the terminal and below (piling, utilities, etc.) that is the port’s responsibility, is “floating right now at more than $2 million per acre,” Seroka said.
- The second area is process improvement, such as using labor more effectively, speeding up truck gates and improving rail efficiency. Like the railroads, Seroka said the ports believe intermodal services will be of great importance to beneficial cargo owners and non-vessel-operating common carriers.
- The third area is technology, and Seroka pointed to work that the port is doing with Cargomatic to develop an “Uber-like” program for dispatching drayage trucks, called Quick 180. The company helps drayage operators and shipping companies make “street turns” with empty equipment and the peel-off programs for moving large blocks of containers out of terminals to suburban locations, as well as to the “Inland Empire” region east of Los Angeles.
This article was published in the August 2015 issue of American Shipper.
