Judith Adams, Vice President of Marketing at the Port of Mobile.

Photo by Jessica Vaughn

FOLEY – The South Baldwin Chamber of Commerce hosted a Leadership Series event on Monday, June 25, with guest speaker Judith Adams, Vice President of Marketing at the Port of Mobile. During the event, Adams spoke to the audience about daily activities at the port, statistics, and future plans to accommodate growth.

“We dominate primarily about five miles of waterfront,” said Adams. “On the western side we have five national railroads and three short line railroads. The Port Authority is the largest Port Authority owned railroads in the nation, we can handle upwards to 160,000 to 165,000 revenue cars annually … We are a rail-heavy port, and it’s one of the reasons why we’re the tenth largest U.S. sea port in the nation.”

The channel at the port is straight and deep, which contributes to their growth and brings a diversified base of cargo. There is a 40-foot draft in the upper harbor, which can handle Panamax ships. The lower harbor is 45-feet which can handle Post-Panamax ships.

“Between 2016 and 2017, we started coming out of the recession and we started seeing some pretty rapid growth,” said Adams. “In 2017, we saw 20 percent growth in containerized tray, 16 percent growth in steel, aluminum tripled in volume, and then we were still seeing in the general cargo areas nine percent growth in our forest products trade.”

From the vessel and cargo activities of the Alabama State Port Authority public terminals alone, the Mobile Port generates approximately $134,000 across the state, at $22.4 billion in economic value. Adams states that they do not compete with the private terminals in the port, and in fact are complimented by them.

“They’re critically important to industries that manufacture in the state, and also have direct impact on our municipal and county governments because it’s mostly the petroleum industry,” said Adams.

Around 30 to 36 percent of the port’s total cargo volume is petroleum for making asphalt, which is manufactured in Alabama. According it to Adams, nearly every road in the state is made with product that comes through the Port of Mobile.

A large project that has been ongoing at the port is the container intermodal investment, which opened in 2008 and helped the port take off.

“They needed a cost-efficient portal to get products to global markets, and even though this was during the recession people were still trading,” Adams said. “Last year we finished phase two, which was a 20-acre segment.” Phase three will feature a dock extension.

The Port of Mobile is ranked the fastest growth container port in North America. Aside from container growth, another rapidly growing industry in Alabama is the automobile industry, and with every major car dealership operating a factory in the state, the Port of Mobile sees a lot of automotive trade go through their docks.

“We started hearing from shippers that said they needed to start looking at the Port of Mobile for automotive,” said Adams. “So we went out, did a concession RFQ and in the Americas we landed the largest finished automobile terminal operator. Two companies in fact, that serve every automobile company in the world, and they said they want to pay for this. That’s good because we’re a revenue-based agency.”

By the end of 2019, Adams states the port will have a state-of-the-art automotive linguistics facility which will help grow the Southeast’s automotive market. Between the container intermodal and the automobile international on the linguistics side, this is where a large portion of the port’s revenue is going in terms of capital infrastructure to support the Alabama industry.

While the port can handle Panamax ships today, they hope to continue growing in order to handle even more traffic and growing ships in the future.

“Our biggest problem is the channel, it’s very restrictive,” Adams said. “So what are we going to do about it? A little over two years ago, we declared to the federal government that we want you to study this, but there’s a law out there that says 3-3-3.”

This translates to three years, three inches thick, three million dollars, which Adams states was possible, but not to do it right.

“This is the largest estuarine east of the Mississippi, outside the everglades,” Adams said. “The sensitivity of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and what lies on the Alabama shoreline is immeasurable. Seafood, recreational fishing, recreation and tourism, hatcheries, the ecosystem is unbelievably complex. To study that in three years, no, couldn’t be done.”

The port asked for a waiver, and asked for $7.8 million as opposed to $3 million in order to complete the study correctly. Two and a half years in, Adams states the port should be going to 50-feet, and should include a passing lane for shippers, along with improvements that will allow them to serve Super Post-Panamax ships.

The port wanted to protect the eco-system along with their plans, and have taken numerous environmental considerations into the thought-process. They have completed various assessments already, such as oyster modeling, submerged aquatic vegetation, and wetlands assessment and mapping.

“You cannot throw a rock in the bay and not hit a shipwreck or something of significance,” Adams said. “So we had to make sure that whatever we were doing did not disrupt the rich cultural heritage of our 317-year-old community.”

Once complete, the project will not only bring in extra revenue to the port and the state, but once expanded larger ships will be able to choose the Mobile Port as their import and export destination. The project will have no effect on the Bankhead or Wallace Tunnels, both which Adams would like to keep as they help with traffic flow in the community.

To learn more about the project, visit www.Sam.usace.army.mil, which will bring you to the Mobile District website. Once there, you can find the GRR, the General Reevaluation Report for the port, which will show all the information pertaining to the project.

“We want our community to engage,” said Adams. “If anything, I ask that you contact the Corps and say if you love the project. If you don’t like the project, if you have a concern, then we’re inviting the entire region to echo those concerns over to the Corps, they will study it and they will put it in.”

To learn more about the South Baldwin Chamber of Commerce’s events and opportunities, visit their website at www.SouthBaldwinChamber.com.