Floating an intermodal option
Barge service would provide trucking alternative to connect Oakland, Stockton.
By Chris Dupin
Ports America sees big potential at the Port of Oakland for increased moves of Asian cargo to the U.S. Midwest by rail. A start-up called Eco-Transport, believes barge transport may also be a part of its future.
Alex Yeros is managing director at Eco-Transport and its parent company Broe Group, a firm that hopes to start a short sea inland barge service that would move containers between Oakland and the Port of Stockton, located 75 miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Yeros said the company was hoping to launch the service as soon as September, believing the time may be ripe both environmentally and due to container shipping industry trends. He notes that in recent years some shipping lines have been reducing their involvement in inland transportation, and are encouraging shippers to return containers quickly so they can be reloaded or returned to Asia.
Compared to some ports, the flow of containers in and out of Oakland is more balanced, and that there is high demand for export containers to carry agricultural goods from California.
Last year there were 988,973 TEUs of import containers that moved through the Port of Oakland (796,404 full and 192,569 empty), and 1.2 million TEUs of export containers (910,700 full and 333,860 empty).
He estimates about a quarter of the traffic is moved through the Union Pacific and BNSF Railway intermodal facilities right at the port. Another Broe subsidiary, Omnitrax, operates the BNSF terminal in the Port of Oakland, which is called the Oakland International Gateway.
But because of a lack of space in Oakland, many of the other containers are trucked to the Stockton area to large distribution centers or deconsolidation stations where freight is reloaded into domestic equipment, he said.
There are about 50 million square feet of distribution or deconsolidation facilities in the Stockton area where much is loaded onto trains at two other rail facilities, the BNSF's terminal in Mariposa and UP's terminal in Lathrop, he said.
Today, when those containers move in and out of Oakland, many travel by truck over Interstate 580 to the greater Stockton area where they are transloaded into domestic containers, and the ocean containers are returned empty to Oakland. Meanwhile, Yeros said agricultural exporters dispatch trucks in the opposite direction from the Central Valley to fetch empty containers to carry cotton and other agricultural commodities. This two-way flow of trucks carrying both full and empty containers has helped make I-580 the second most congested freeway in Northen California, according to the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency.
Yeros said establishing a satellite container terminal in the Port of Stockton, and a second one eventually in the Port of West Sacramento, could help eliminate the thousands of container moves each week.
Eco-Transport plans to establish a service that would use a barge to move up to 350 40-foot containers at a time between Oakland and Stockton. The company also plans to coordinate delivery or pickup of containers from warehouses or agricultural exports in the Central Valley.
'We are trying to establish a service within the way the world works today. This would not involve new ships. It is not a roll-on/roll-off service. We are going to load barges the way that ships are loaded and unloaded and ultimately make the delivery to customers with trucks the same way that they operate today,' Yeros said.
In addition to its environmental benefits, he said the service should appeal to exporters because they will be able to get greater access to available equipment 'and we can help them with managing the actual delivery or pickup of the load. Shipping lines can improve the cycle time on their equipment and get a better match in import and exports of their equipment,' he said.
Yeros said truckers might be able to dray several more containers a day to and from the satellite container yard than if they have to drive all the way between Oakland and the Central Valley.
William Lewicki, marketing director for the Port of Stockton, said the barge service could benefit shippers of heavy commodities such as pipe or agricultural goods that cannot fully load containers because of weight limitations on California's highways. By barging containers to and from the port, shippers would be able to load more cargo in each box. This could be an advantage to Port of Stockton tenants such as Ferguson Enterprises, the largest distributor of pipe, valves and fittings in the United States.
Lewicki said his port, along with Sacramento and Eco-Transport, are seeking federal funding for the short-sea shipping initiative under President Obama's economic stimulus plan. Stockton hopes to obtain a couple of mobile cranes, one of which would be devoted to the barge service. The plan, he said, is to set up the operation in the port's western complex, formerly the Navy's 'Rough and Ready' supply depot, where containers could be drayed a quarter mile from berths 19-20 to a container yard.
But even without that crane, he said the port would be able to accommodate startup of the barge service in a matter of weeks. It would, instead, use an existing container crane to offload the barge ' containers would just have to be drayed a mile and a quarter.