Bulk shipper tries marine highway for long-distance transport

Lehigh Cement Co. recently began an experiment using a “short-sea” route rather than trucking slag cement to customers in the Northeast.     Lehigh Cement Co. recently began an experiment using a “short-sea” route rather than trucking slag cement to customers in the Northeast. Lehigh’s plant at Port Canaveral makes a binder used in cement production by grinding up slag—a byproduct of the steel industry—shipped from Japan through the Panama Canal. In 2012, it imported 108,000 tons of slag for processing. The final product is mostly distributed to Florida companies that produce ready-mix concrete.
    Company officials realized it would be more efficient to increase production at Port Canaveral to take advantage of extra capacity and ship the slag to other Lehigh locations for distribution outside Florida. They also determined that moving bulk shipments long distance by truck would be too expensive, in part because bulk equipment usually has to be repositioned without a revenue-generating load on the return leg as is often done in the dry-van market. It costs $640, for example, to transport slag to South Florida by truck, according to a report last year by Martin Associates for the Florida East Coast Railway.
   In April, Lehigh, previously referred to as Hanson Slag Cement, dispatched its first transshipment of slag by ocean barge to the company’s facility in Brooklyn, N.Y., for distribution in the New York-New Jersey market, according to the port authority’s spring newsletter. 
   The 12,500 short-ton shipment took more than 36 hours to load, with up to 10 trucks at a time lining up alongside the barge to pump product onboard. 
   A second shipment was delivered in August and the company is actively pursuing new transport options up and down the eastern seaboard, Operations Manager Mark Esolen told American Shipper. Lehigh is on track to begin transporting slag cement to Port Everglades in South Florida in early October and is considering using the sea route to ship product up to Jacksonville, he said.
   Hanson, part of German building materials provider Heidelberg Cement, expects to utilize the “East Coast marine highway” to reach Baltimore and North Carolina in 2015, and eventually use rail to reach Atlanta and other destinations when rail connections to the port are established, a port authority spokesperson said.

This article was published in the October 2014 issue of American Shipper.