Total Terminals International LLC, a terminal operator and U.S. subsidiary of Seoul, South Korea’s Hanjin Shipping Holdings Co., wants to help customers export more grain to Asia.
The company, which already operates the Hanjin terminal in Long Beach for its parent company, wants to build a facility that would allow it to load grain and other bulk agricultural products into shipping containers.
As demand for U.S. grain has boomed over the past several years due to huge Chinese demand, Long Beach has seen its exports grow from the equivalent of 102,000 20-foot containers of corn, wheat, soybeans and other grain in 2007 to nearly 180,000 containers last year.
TTI is proposing to build the facility on a 10-acre site on Navy Mole – a long, narrow breakwater that separates Pier T from the rest of Long Beach Harbor – while the port is looking for other locations where grain-loading facilities run by other terminal operators might make sense.
Those might include the port’s Middle Harbor terminal, a $1 billion project still under construction where the prospective tenant wants a grain loading facility, said Sean Strawbridge, managing director of trade relations and operations at the Port of Long Beach.
Sending grain overseas in individual cargo containers isn’t the norm. Upwards of 90 percent of exported grain travels in bulk cargo vessels at ports outside Southern California, but neither the Long Beach nor the Los Angeles ports have bulk grain facilities. One in Long Beach closed 20 years ago after new facilities in the Pacific Northwest put it out of business.
However, the twin ports do have the advantage of being the largest port complex in the nation, and the premier destination for imports from Asia – which means ships often steam back across the Pacific with scores of empty containers.
“Rather than send back our precious air, we can increase our exports,” Strawbridge said.
The Long Beach Harbor Commission earlier this month released an initial environmental study of the TTI project. The next step in the process is a scoping meeting – a chance for interested parties to weigh in on what issues should be studied in a full environmental impact report. The meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. Wednesday at Long Beach City Council chambers.
TTI officials did not respond to calls for comment.
Port Transition
Richard Steinke has served as executive director of the Port of Long Beach for 14 years and was set to step down at the end of September. But chances are he’ll be staying in his sixth-floor office at the port administration building a little while longer.
The Long Beach Harbor Commission this summer hired search firm RSR Partners of Greenwich, Conn., to find a port director, but it’s likely a new hire won’t be in place by the end of next month.
Steinke said he’s willing to stay on until his replacement is in place.
“I’m going to work with the board to make sure there’s a smooth transition,” he said. “I think it’s important for us to transition the new executive director and get them to know some of the major customers and politicians, and those types of things.”
Meeting port customers with his replacement, he said, will be especially important.
“In some cultures, the relationship is as important as the business deal,” he said. “We need to let those leaders know we’re passing the baton here.”
While Steinke said he wants to ensure that smooth transition, he also sounds like a man ready to enter into the private sector.
He doesn’t have any plans yet, but said he’ll be staying in Long Beach, and he wants to stay connected to the port and shipping industry.
“It kind of gets in your blood,” Steinke said. “If I can find something on the private side that at last gives me some exposure to the same things I’ve been doing, I’d like to see what those are and try to pursue that.”
Regardless of what he does next, he plans to take some time off before making his next move. He and his wife, Tamy, marked their 30th anniversary earlier this year, but Steinke said they have yet to really celebrate the occasion.
“I owe her a 30th anniversary trip that’s been talked about but not executed,” he said. “I’m only a few months late.”
In an unusually undiplomatic moment, though, he said it’s not his fault: “Every time she thinks she wants to go someplace, she ups that or changes it.”
Paying Up
A settlement announced this week between California Attorney General Kamala Harris and seven terminal operators at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach requires each operator to spend $1 million on projects that will cut diesel emissions.
However, the operators were allowed to decide for themselves how to spend the money, and consequently a variety of projects are getting under way.
APM Terminals Pacific Ltd., which operates at Pier 400 at the Port of Los Angeles, will spend $1 million to convert three diesel-powered gantry cranes to run on electricity, according to the settlement.
SSA Terminals LLC, which operates several port terminals in Long Beach, will replace some of its diesel-powered port tractors with gasoline-powered ones.
Eagle Marine Services Ltd., at the L.A. port said it will spend more than $1 million to retrofit ships from an affiliate company – American President Lines Ltd. – to allow those ships to plug into the local power grid instead of running engines for power while docked.
Four other terminal operators have similar projects lined up.
The settlement also requires the operators to continue to pay for newspaper ads, bus shelter posters and a website warning that port diesel emissions can cause cancer and reproductive harm. Those warnings have been around since 2008 under a separate agreement with the state Attorney General’s Office.
Staff reporter James Rufus Koren can be reached at [email protected] or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 225.
