Great Lakes carriers, shippers press for port dredging

Great Lakes carriers, shippers press for port dredging    A group of carrier and shipper executives met in Washington Wednesday to press lawmakers for sufficient funds to dredge the Great Lakes ports.
   “Simply put, decades of inadequate funding for dredging Great Lakes deep-draft ports and waterways are crippling Great Lakes shipping,” said James H.I. Weakley, president of both the Lake Carriers’ Association and Great Lakes Maritime Task Force. “Just about every port on the lakes is losing cargo because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ dredging budget for the lakes is inadequate to meet the needs of commerce.”
   The Great Lakes Maritime Task Force noted that it would cost about $200 million to dredge the Great Lakes ports. This funding could be sourced from the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, which now includes about $1.8 billion.
   “That surplus is the result of not spending revenues raised by a tax on cargo that moves on our nation’s waterways,” Weakley said. “In other words, we aren’t getting what we already paid for.”
   According to the task force, there are 134 deep-draft ports and six connecting channels the Corps must dredge on the Great Lakes.
   The large 1,000-foot-long lake vessels give up about 270 tons of cargo for each inch of reduced draft. Ocean-going vessels in the international trades lose about 115 tons of cargo per inch of lost draft, the task force said.
   “The continuing inability to maximize vessel loadings, particularly the 1,000-foot-long vessel loadings, due to lack of a reliably funded Great Lakes dredging program continues to put in jeopardy our ability to keep pace with coal generated energy demands into the future,” said Fred L. Shusterich, president of Midwest Energy Resources Co. (MERC).
   MERC is considered one of the largest shippers on the Great Lakes. Last year, the company shipped about 20.5 million tons of low sulfur western coal on 412 vessels from its terminal at Superior, Wis. This year MERC plans to move 22 million tons.
   Shusterich said the 1,000-foot-long vessels calling at the company’s terminal lose as much as 18 inches of loaded draft when the St. Mary’s River is the controlling depth on a voyage. This results in about 4,500 tons of coal, or as much as 6.5 percent of the vessel’s carrying capacity per trip, left on MERC’s dock.
   “In order to keep pace with the coal generated energy demands of the Great Lakes basin, Congress must fund a comprehensive plan to restore the Great Lakes system to its project depths as quickly as possible and subsequently adequately maintain these project depths into the future,” Shusterich said.