(The following story by Jeff Berman appeared on the Logistics Management website on November 1.)
PRINCE RUPERT, British Columbia — The much-anticipated launch of the first vessel calling on the Port of Prince Rupert is now official, port officials said yesterday.
The port reported that on Tuesday the Antwerp, a 5,400 TEU (Twenty-foot equivalent units) China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) container vessel, made its way into Prince Rupert Harbor and berthed at the Port’s new Fairview Container Terminal. According to a Port of Prince Rupert statement, the Antwerp is set to depart from the Fairview Container Terminal and will call on Vancouver and Seattle in North America before heading to Hong Kong.
The containers on the Antwerp are comprised of “a variety of merchandise for large eastern retailers, originated in the Chinese ports of Hong Kong, Yantian, Qingdao, Dalian and Xiamen as well as Yokohama, Japan,” according to a Port of Prince Rupert statement.
COSCO first announced in August that it would begin calling on the Fairview terminal, which is operated by Maher Terminals. At the time, COSCO said that it is the first ocean carrier to officially sign up with the Port of Prince Rupert, and it added that this initiative would provide shippers with “a major new gateway to and from the West Coast of North America and Asia,” as well as lessen the congestion experienced by the majority of all United States West Coast ports.
And a COSCO spokesman told Logistics Management that this initiative is a joint effort among Maher, the Port of Prince Rupert, and the Canadian National Railway Company (CN). Under the terms of COSCO’s partnership with CN, the carriers will provide rail service to various North American markets, including Chicago, Memphis, Nashville, Detroit, Toronto, and Montreal, said the spokesman. This railroad partnership was created to give shippers access to CN’s on-dock, high-capacity, double-stack rail network.
Port of Prince Rupert Manager of Corporate Communications Barry Bartlett told LM that this week’s news is the result of a decade’s worth of work, planning, and development as it transformed the Fairview Container Terminal from break-bulk shipments—such as wood and paper—to containers.
“We initially thought of modeling the port after what the Ports of Vancouver, Seattle and Los Angeles/Long Beach do,” said Bartlett. “We hired [a consultant] that said doing what the other West Coast does really wouldn’t fly, because we don’t have any local markets. But he said we have quite a potential niche here when you look at what is happening out west and looking at what our strengths are: no congestion and a shorter distance to the Midwestern region of North America that is underutilized with not a lot of cities in between…where we could get product to faster than other ports could by two days.”
CKYH Alliance: The COSCO vessel currently at the Port of Prince Rupert is part of the CKYH Alliance, which is going to be calling on Prince Rupert for its Pacific Northwest Butterfly South Loop Service. This alliance includes China-based COSCO, Korea-based Hanjin, Japan-based K-Line, and Taiwan-based Yangming. Through this effort, Bartlett said that these shipping lines will see a container ship from a string of nine 5,400 TEU vessels make a weekly call to Prince Rupert.
At the moment, said Bartlett, five Hanjin ships and four COSCO ships will make weekly service to the port, with the other lines to begin calling at the port in the future.
Looking to the future: With the Fairview Container Terminal now open and expected to handle 500,000 TEUs in its first year of operation, the second phase, which is expected to be completed in 2012, is projected to handle 1.5 million TEUs annually. And Bartlett noted that a second terminal is on track to be completed in 2015, which will handle an estimated 2.0 million TEUs.
Along with these notable figures, Bartlett pointed out that Port of Prince Rupert has ample room for growth beyond what is currently planned.