The heaviest shoaling in decades has clogged the shipping channel at the Morehead City state port – reducing the navigable depth for freight vessels by 10 feet and forcing shippers to lighten their loads, at a cost to one port customer of more than $2 million a month.
“I’ve been a pilot for 30 years, and it’s the worst that I’ve ever seen the channel,” said Andrew Midgett Jr., president of the Morehead City Pilots Association. “Ships want to come in at the maximum draft they can, because it saves them money. The deeper the ship, the fewer the calls.”
The natural migration of Shackleford Banks, a barrier island, is slowly dumping what one coastal engineer calls “an avalanche of sand” into the Beaufort Inlet channel. But with money from Congress dwindling, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has fallen behind on regular dredging needed to keep navigation channels open there and elsewhere on the North Carolina cost.
The Corps of Engineers will open bids Jan. 21 on a contract to spend around $4 million for dredging that would start in February. It will be enough to scoop out 375,000 cubic yards of sand from the shallowest part of the channel, but no one can predict how much time it will buy for Morehead City shippers. No more federal dredging funds will be available until October.
Pilots, port customers and state officials say as much as $20 million is needed for more extensive dredging to get ahead of the problem – and to avert more acute shoaling that could cause widespread economic losses for shippers and other businesses that depend on navigable channels.
“We could be in trouble in the next five years if we do not get some solutions,” Transportation Secretary Tony Tata, who oversees the State Ports Authority, said last week at a state Board of Transportation meeting. “That shipping channel has not been maintained, and it’s costing money and jobs.”
The most recent dredging there, last May, removed about 775,000 cubic yards of sand. The shoaling returned during the summer.
“Mother Nature shoaled it right back in, much faster than we anticipated,” said Bob Keistler, navigation projects manager for the Corps of Engineers Wilmington District.
Ships bring lighter loads
Congress has authorized the Corps of Engineers to maintain a channel 600 feet wide and 45 feet deep to get ships from the Atlantic Ocean through Beaufort Inlet to the port. But Morehead City harbor pilots, who guide freighters safely to the docks, have issued a series of escalating draft restrictions since late summer.
The pilots now limit ships to a draft of 35 feet – and that depth is allowed only during daylight and at high tide.
The 500-employee Nucor Steel plant in Hertford County, which makes 1.5 million tons of plate steel each year, schedules a shipload every six weeks of a raw material called direct reduced iron, produced at a Nucor plant in Trinidad. Before the draft restrictions took effect, the keel of a fully loaded Nucor ship rode 38 feet deep in the water.
“One foot of draft represents about 1,500 metric tons of cargo,” said Sam Cooper, Nucor’s raw materials supervisor. “Going from 38 to 35 feet, that’s 4500 metric tons, an additional cost to us of about $100,000.”
Rather than sail with the cargo hold half empty, Nucor mitigates its losses with an option called two-porting. A plant in South Carolina also can make use of direct reduced iron. So the MV Mobile Pearl last week stopped at the Charleston port to offload 18,000 metric tons en route to its destination at Morehead City with an additional 22,600 metric tons, Cooper said. Nucor would have preferred to bring the entire shipment to North Carolina.
Keistler said he hopes the upcoming dredge work will allow harbor pilots to set the channel draft at least as deep as 38 feet.
“You will still have a draft restriction there,” Keistler said.
The shoaling has caused heavier losses for the Morehead City port’s biggest and oldest customer: PotashCorp Aurora, also known as PCS Phosphate. PotashCorp has more than 1,000 employees who mine phosphate ore and make fertilizer and industrial chemicals in Beaufort County.
“The light loading that’s required means that we can’t load to the capacity that we need to,” said PotashCorp spokesman Ray McKeithan. “So that’s a significant cost to us. We see this as a serious issue of safety and commerce. … It’s the worst it’s ever been.”
PotashCorp imports raw sulfur and exports fertilizer through Morehead City, where 18 ships carried more than 1.1 million metric tons of its cargo in 2014. Because expenses are about the same for a ship carrying less cargo, McKeithan said, light loading costs PotashCorp more than $2 million a month.
“It affects the entire region, not just the ports, because we’re such a large employer,” McKeithan said. “And the cost to us is increasing as shoaling increases.”
State shares blame
Last year Tata and Gov. Pat McCrory floated a proposal to make the channel 50 feet deep, to attract bigger ships. Now Tata is calling for public pressure to make the Army Corps of Engineers meet its dredging obligations for a 45-foot depth.
But shippers and pilots say DOT and the State Ports Authority share blame, too. The ports agency is responsible for dredging near the docks. Shoaling there has reduced the water depth by as much as 10 feet in places, limiting PotashCorp’s ability to use its facilities at Radio Island.
“We’d be interested to find out from the ports what their plan is for dredging at our berths,” McKeithan said.
Laura Blair, a Ports Authority spokeswoman, said the state agency waited in the past for opportunities to piggy-back on Corps of Engineers dredging work in the harbor nearby – an opportunity that last occurred in 2011.
“It’s cost-prohibitive for us to go out and contract on our own to bring the dredge in,” Blair said.
Federal funding is based on a formula that ranks the nation’s ports on cargo tonnage and other indicators. If shallow drafts continue to limit the cargo coming in and out of Morehead City, the result will be a lower ranking and even less money for dredging.
“If you don’t dredge it to the authorized depth, they run the risk of losing customers, which cuts back on the tonnage you get,” Keistler said. “That’s a difficult battle.”
PotashCorp will lose another $2 million before the Corps of Engineers starts dredging Beaufort Inlet in February, Tata said.
Midgett, the harbor pilot, said the upcoming work will not keep the channel clear for long.
“Spring and summer will come, and there’s hurricanes and there’s tropical storms,” Midgett said. “And it fills in again.”
Leave a Reply