Drilling Deep: The mess out at the Southern California ports

Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves

Weston LaBar is the CEO of the Harbor Trucking Association. That’s the trade group that represents the drayage community in the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

On this week’s edition of Drilling Deep, LaBar joins host John Kingston to discuss the group’s recent call for the Federal Maritime Administration to step in and suspend the drayage and demurrage charges that have soared as operations at the port have backed up enormously. LaBar also talks about changes in the harbor operations that led to this situation developing when faced with a surge in import volume.

On the podcast, Kingston also talks about the diesel market, which just got hit with the biggest one-week jump in the basis for fuel surcharges since September of last year.

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John Kingston

John has an almost 50-year career as a journalist, most of them covering commodities and markets. The largest part of his career was spent at Platts, now part of S&P Global Energy. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment. He was awarded the 2020 Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah International Energy Award for Lifetime Achievement for the Advancement of International Energy Journalism.