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MEXICO: PORT DEVELOPMENT
A case of “mañana” in Mexico?
Shippers and carriers seeking alternatives to congested US ports
are continuing to cast eyes on
Mexico, but beyond groundbreaking at Lázaro Cárdenas for
Hutchison Port Holdings’ expanded container ter minal,
progress has been slow.
The megapuerto project at
Punta Colonet in Baja California,
which was to have been opened
for bidding in the summer, is back
on the “slow burner” as Mexico
shifts its administration.
Although progress is being made on several fronts,
Mexico’s ports are still some way off becoming
marine gates for Asian cargoes moving to the US
southern tier on a scale to rival NAWC range ports
Under the former national
presidentVicente Fox, bidding for
the massive project was to have
been under way by now but several problems have arisen. César
Patricio Reyes Roel, ports direc-
tor at Mexico’s Secretariat of
Communications and Transportation, said bidding will now be held
up for three to four months while
a number of items are sorted out.
One is the constant bickering
between Mexican federal officials
and Baja California state officials
over how to structure the development, which would see a completely new port built 150 miles
south of the US border as well as
a new rail line that would connect it to the US network.
Rival scheme
However, a bigger problem
seems to be a competing project
being headed by Ensenadabased businessman and real estate developer Gabriel Chávez,
who has secured mineral rights
to more than 74,000 acres of
Baja land, including the proposed port site. This is preventing the Mexican government
from publishing the port’s coordinates, which must be included in the bidding process.
Chávez has reportedly gained
five mining concessions in the
Colonet area under a recent
Mexican law that allows mining
on the ocean floor. Although no
mineral reserves have been proven,
Chávez seems to feel there are significant deposits of titanium and
iron within the concessions’
boundaries. These reach out to
12.5 miles offshore.
Of note is the fact that Chávez
is the former president of Vida
Enseñadense, a group of Ensenada
businessmen that originally kicked
off the move to develop a port at
Colonet. Chávez apparently
turned to securing mineral rights
in the area when local communal
landowners refused to join with
him in the port project.
Massive spend
Mexican government officials estimate that the cost of building the
port and rail line will come to
between US$4B and US$5B,
while additional infrastructure
development, including the construction of a new city to house
workers and their families, could
approach US$22B.
However, postponement of the
bidding process has prompted
concern among interested terminal operators because the delay
The Port of Guaymas, located on the Gulf of California, is being proposed as
a new maritime gateway for the US states of Arizona, New Mexico and
Oklahoma
will most likely lead to higher
construction costs.
It transpires that the Mexican
government has dropped its original plan to dedicate all activity at
Colonet to containerships and will
now welcome facilities, such as
bulk terminals, that could support
mining operations. This move is
most likely targeted at meeting
Chávez’s ambitions.
Guaymas gets going
Noticing the delay at Colonet, the
Port of Guaymas, which is located
220 miles south of US on the Gulf
of California, has proposed its facilities as an alternative, especially
for US southwest states.
Guaymas was once a major
bulk cargo handler but lost much
of its business when the US imposed anti-dumping measures on
Mexican cement several years ago.
Since then its cargo volume has
dropped steadily, to well under 2
mtpa from the ≈ 6 mtpa highpoint posted in the mid-1990s.
The Mexican government is
now deepening the port, from 36ft
to 42ft, and is investing US$200M
to modernise the highway linking Guaymas to Nogales,Arizona.
At the same time, the US government is adding two high-speed
truck lanes at Nogales to speed
transit times, while the US General Services Administration
(GSA) is planning a US$70M expansion of the Mariposa commercial port at Nogales, to be completed by 2010.
In addition, Arizona’s City of
Tucson has signed an agreement
to help develop a trade corridor
between Guaymas and its Puerto
Nuevo Inland Transportation
Center that will serve the Arizona
counties of Pima and Santa Cruz.
Looking at longer term potential, engineering students at Arizona State University are undertaking a study of the Mexican
port’s potential for handling Arizona imports and exports under a
grant supervised by the Arizona
Department of Transportation.
If the study is favourable,
Mexican authorities say they are
prepared to take bids from international terminal operators covering modernisation and expansion of Guaymas, including installation of new container cranes.
Preliminary studies indicate
that Guaymas could handle about
300,000 containers/year. This
would meet the needs of Arizona
and the nearby states of New
Mexico and Oklahoma as well as
parts of western Texas.The region
currently imports about 700,000
containers annually and exports
about 400,000. Although shipments passing through Mexico on
their way to and from US points
would have to pass through customs twice, they would be exempt
from Mexican duties under current North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) rules.
Boxes at Cárdenas
While Colonet and Guaymas plan,
the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, on
Mexico’s lower west coast, is already sending containers north in
increasing numbers. In the first five
months of the year the port’s container traffic increased by 7.4% to
57,942 TEU and part of this
growth has come from discretionary intermodal loads.
This past summer the Kansas
City Southern (KCS) through its
subsidiaries, Kansas City Southern
de Mexico, SA de CV (KCSM)
and Kansas City Southern Railway Company (KCSR), opened
a new daily intermodal rail service linking Lázaro Cárdenas to US
markets in the southeast via an
interchange yard at Jackson, Miss.
According to KCS officials, the
operation gives a “competitive
transit time” for Asian-sourced
boxes when compared to increasingly congested US west coast
ports.After being off-loaded from
ships operated by Maersk, CP
Ships and NYK at Lázaro
Cárdenas, boxes can be at their US
Midwest and southeast destinations within a week.The daily unit
trains are also picking up trailers
owned by Schneider National at
San Luis Potosi and Monterrey for
movement across the border.
3-phase expansion
Start-up of the enhanced rail operation followed ground breaking
at Lázaro Cárdenas by Hutchison
Port Holdings (HPH) in March
on a three-phase expansion of its
container terminal.
First phase development, representing a US$200M investment,
and expected to be completed by
the middle of next year, will help
KCS speed up its intermodal service and may cut travel time for
boxes heading to some US southeast destinations from four days to
less than three. It could also save
shippers up to US$150 per TEU
compared to importing through
the more costly California ports.
Should traffic develop as projected, Lázaro Cárdenas will be
handling almost 800,000 TEU/
year by 2012 and a total annual
throughput of 2M TEU/year is
considered possible once berthing
Mi-Jack RTG being used to handle containers between rail and truck at KCS’s
Jackson, Mississippi intermodal yard. (Photo: KCS)
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October 2006
WorldCargo
news
MEXICO: PORT DEVELOPMENT
for the number of moves undertaken on
a single vessel at Ter minal de
Contenedores de Yucatán, (TCY), a concession of Barcelona-based Grup TCB.
In total, 613 moves were generated by
the arrival of Maersk’s HANSA ARENDA,
which called at the port en route from
Houston to Panama. The work was undertaken over a period of 24h, with 25
containers handled hourly. To date TCY
has invested €11.45M in facilities, including two second-hand Panamax quayside
cranes and one mobile harbour crane. ❏
Right: Hutchison Port Holdings is investing
heavily in its container terminal at Lázaro
Cárdenas, Mexico, operated by subsidiary
Lázaro Cárdenas Terminal Portuaria de
Contenedores. The facility’s intermodal rail
connections to the US via Kansas City
Southern have been expanded. (Photo: HPH)
KSC is in the intermodal driving seat
has been built out to accommodate five
large container ships at the same time.
To keep the new transport route secure, four major security programmes will
be used: the Business Anti-Smuggling and
Security Coalition (BASC), the Container
Security Initiative (CSI), the US-Mexico
Smart Border plan and the US Customs
Trade Partnership Against Terror. All four
have been designed to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) best practices to
ensure that the increased security does not
unduly slow the transport of goods.
Shipments will be pre-screened in
Southeast Asia and the shipper will then
send advance notification to Mexican and
American Customs with the corresponding “pre-clearance” information noted for
the cargo. On arrival in Mexico, containers will pass through multiple X-ray and
gamma ray screenings, and any containers with anomalies will be removed for
additional inspection. Container shipments will then be tracked over the land
route using GPS or RFID systems.
Single bond
A key to developing the new Lázaro
Cárdenas-Kansas City rail link was a decision by Mexican Customs to allow shippers to move as many containers as they
like for a single US$55,000 bond as opposed to previous regulations that required a “through bond” of up to
US$100,000 per container.
To help generate return traffic to the
south, a Mexican customs facility is being built at Kansas City on property being leased to Kansas City SmartPort.The
facility will allow sealed containers to
travel overland back to Mexico with virtually no border delay.
Although shippers like what they see
in the new route, US labour leaders do
not. Unionised longshoremen would not
be employed at Lázaro Cárdenas and, in
Mexico, the employees of Kansas City
Southern would not be United Transportation Union workers.
Further, to the extent that Mexican
trucks might become involved in the
operation, it would also mean that US
Teamster Union drivers would not be
employed. The Security and Prosperity
Partnership of North America has said
that the US Department of Commerce
will allow Mexican trucks to be equipped
with electronic FAST technology so that
they can cross the border in express lanes.
This would theoretically allow them to
handling cargo all the way to Canada.
Traffic update
Container traffic at all Mexico’s ports rose
by 25% in the first five months of this
year and passed the 1M TEU mark in
doing so. In all, 1,020,958 TEU were handled against 815,973 TEU in the corresponding 2005 period. Imports came to
520,146 TEU and exports to 500,783
TEU. Ensenada, with a throughput of
49,000 TEU, had the highest growth rate
(132.9%). Traffic at Mazatlán rose 54.4%
to 10,575 TEU. In the first semester,
Mexico’s largest container port today,
Manzanillo, posted growth of 43.58% to
574,101 TEU.
On the Atlantic coast, the pace was
slower. Veracruz, for example, registered
an increase of 7.4% to 258,833 TEU,
while Altamira experienced growth of
9.8% to 136,268 TEU.At Progreso on the
Yucatán peninsula, throughput fell by
1.7% to 30,678 TEU.
Progreso has just posted a record high
October 2006
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