Inland barge fleet grew 2% in 2010
The U.S. inland barge fleet expanded 2 percent to about 21,000 barges during 2010 as the numbers of covered hopper barges grew almost 5 percent.
According to the 24th edition of Informa Economic’s Barge Fleet Profile, 873 new barges of all types were added in 2010 and 451 retired.
Among the different barge types, the number of covered barges increased for the first time in 12 years, open barges fell for a second year, while tank barges also increased slightly for the fourth consecutive year.
Informa Senior Vice President Ken Eriksen noted that for more than a dozen years, the size of the covered barge fleet had been shrinking, with the industry “trying to get through some very old fleet that they were carrying” since the late 1970s when investment tax credits caused a boom in barge construction. Covered hopper barges, which are used to haul products such as grain, steel and salt that need to be protected from the weather, tend to have longer lives of 25 to 30 years, than open hopper barges used to carry coal and last 20 to 25 years.
“We’ve been long waiting for that to finally go away and we are about four years away from it finally being gone,” Eriksen said. “We were shrinking that quite a bit, but then in 2009 nobody did anything and people continued to retire equipment and here in 2010 people went out started buying dry covered fleet, partly out of replacement and partly because we started to expand it on the heel of cheap steel, yards making deals and there is demand out there on grain and fertilizer and some other commodities.
Eriksen said traffic in 2010 bounced back from the prior year because with increased exports it is common to see some longer haul moves, and because fertilizer use is up, as some farmers had held off fertilizing their fields and were catching up in 2010. He also said coal exports began to surge in 2010.
Information about barge traffic is available on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Waterborne Commerce Statistics Center.
