Disappointing hopes that Great Lakes ports represent a permanent rescue for shipping from supply chain chaos
 There is a natural tendency to see a current situation as a condition that can be safely extended into the future and from which, future behaviour can be predicted.
Few situations are more susceptible to such mistreatment than the one in which we find ourselves today - more specifically the one describing Great Lakes ports as something of a shipping panacea. In an otherwise sensible piece written for the BBC by Stephen Starr, such a specious hope has been advanced.
What such conclusions - in this is one example of many - fail to consider is that the newly discovered utility of the Great Lakes ports is based on a temporary situation brought about by the Covid crisis. Little thought is given to the likelihood that these ports will return to the "old normal" of little importance they had before ships got too big for the St Lawrence River system and its paltry 10.6-metre navigation channel.
To be fair, Mr Starr outlines the eye-catching good points, noting how the Port of Cleveland increased cargo volume 69 per cent from 2020. "April’s tonnage numbers were double those of the same month in 2021," he notes.
The BBC piece also points out that the Great Lakes are spotted with ports serving two consumer-rich G7 nations with literally millions of shopaholics in the immediate vicinity of the docks of its many ports - Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Toledo, Buffalo and on the Canadian side, Montreal and Toronto.
As Mr Starr notes with unbridled enthusiasm: "Global shipping companies were the first to spot the Great Lakes’ potential. In August, a Dutch shipping company added an additional vessel to its Antwerp-Cleveland route to meet growing demand.
"One ship even sailed all the way from Shanghai to Cleveland last November – a 40-day voyage that bypassed major ports in southern California, Virginia and New Jersey to avoid the backlogs."
It’s not just incoming international cargo companies that are looking to the Great Lakes ports to handle their wares. The Port of Cleveland is working with a Texas-based company trucking cargo from the Gulf of Mexico up to Lake Erie – a 1,000-mile journey – to get its products shipped out to Europe," Mr Starr wrote.
Located more than 2,200 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, the Port of Duluth-Superior was at its peak in the 1950s, when it handled more than 77 million tons of goods such as iron ore and grain, making it the largest freshwater port in the world. By 2017, the amount of cargo it handled had fallen by more than half.
While ports situated on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans dominate America’s shipping industry today, that wasn’t always the case, he says. The Great Lakes ports once served as a crucial North American maritime highway for transporting agricultural and other bulk products such as iron ore, coal and limestone throughout the 1800s and 1900s.
Not just bulk cargo, but consumer goods as well. While he does not mention this, Mr Starr cites the deregulation of the rail and especially the trucking industries in 1980, combined with the offshoring of manufacturing to Asia and elsewhere saw the decline of the Great Lakes ports.
But today, he says, as America’s major coastal ports struggle to meet demand, the Great Lakes has the potential to expand capacity of the country’s shipping industry. The Port of Cleveland, for example, is currently only moving about 10,000 containers a year but could potentially handle about 100,000.
Six hundred and thirty miles northwest of Cleveland, the Port of Duluth-Superior has expanded its facilities to include a customs station that now allows it to handle international cargo. Its first overseas shipment of containers – 200 containers of bagged kidney beans destined for Italy, France, Germany and Hungary – set sail in late May.
And yet it’s not all smooth sailing for the northern ports. Reports of a shortage of icebreaker ships hampered shipping activity last winter, as lakes froze.
The 15 canal locks that allow ships to move between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean are not maintained and kept ice-free by their American and Canadian operators during the winter months.
That means that even if sections of southern Great Lakes such as Lake Erie and Lake Ontario don’t freeze over in winter, access between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic isn't possible.
Another challenge is that the locks can only facilitate vessels that are no wider than 78 feet (23.8 metres), which means that many ships cannot pass through. The Ever Given ship that blocked the Suez Canal for a week last year, for example, is 193 feet (59 metres) wide.
But Mr Starr says industry experts say these problems could be overcome.
"Establishing a feeder or shuttle service of smaller vessels would bridge that gap, say observers, and it’s a move several Canadian ports have recently pursued. In June 2021, the Canadian maritime transport firm, Desgagnes, started a feeder service that ships close to 300 containers between Hamilton, Ontario, and the Port of Montreal.
With labour disputes possibly leading to backlogs in west coast ports, and railway congestion creating bottlenecks, Americans may be facing more supply shortages in the months ahead.
To be fair he touches on seasonality of his Great Lakes solution, which alone makes this concept a deal breaker. Ice is so thick across the St Lawrence at Montreal that they laid track and ran trains across the river to reach Montreal in the 19th century until they built the Victoria Bridge, regarded as the engineering marvel of its time.
But the real problem that simply will not go away is the average size of containerships. One can only get 3,500-TEU ships into Montreal, which is the biggest port in the system. The average size of containerships today is 8,000 - 10,000 TEU. And only sturdy ice-strengthened ships can make it into Montreal in winter. They cannot make it upstream to access the consumer-rich hinterlands of Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago until April.
There is often trouble at the height of summer, which can be as hot in Montreal as it is in Hong Kong, is low water levels, which compel ships to load light coming and going as they did on the Rhine, the Mississippi and the Yangtze this summer.
But the big problem is the transitory nature of the good fortune enjoyed by the Great Lakes this year, brought about by the bureaucratically-driven Covid scare. Once it ends so will the congestion elsewhere that has spawned the Great Lakes' transitory success. As soon as it ends, the new found prosperity of the Great Lakes ports will resume its traditional role in the scheme of things, a role one suspects will be much reduced. |
