North Carolina International Port

In early 2006 the North Carolina State Ports Authority (NCSPA) conceived its proposal for a North Carolina International Terminal to be created on property that it purchased just north of the town of Southport, NC between the Progress Energy Brunswick Nuclear Power Plant and the Sunny Point Military Ammunitions Port. The NCSPA purchased the property in early 2006 for $30 million from Pfizer. Nine years later the proposal, having met substantial public and political resistance, will not likely move forward in the foreseeable future.

Conceptual designs for the North Carolina International Terminal called for a high-density, automated container terminal capable of serving 12,000-TEU vessels with at least a 50-foot draft (the existing navigation channel serving the Port of Wilmington in the Wilmington Harbor has a dredge depth of 42 (+/-) feet). Development of the North Carolina International Terminal on the existing footprint could result in a terminal that could handle as many as 2-3 million TEUs a year, which is equivalent to the capacity currently handled by container terminals such as Charleston and Savannah. Construction cost projections as of June 2010 were approximately $4.4 billion (escalated).

Development would have required additional transportation infrastructure expenditures to accommodate the movement of cargo to and from the terminal by both road and rail. Currently, both road and rail access to the proposed North Carolina International Terminal site are limited and would have required substantial improvement to accommodate the expected cargo volumes and to alleviate additional traffic on local roadways.

In support of their land purchase and the proposed construction, the NCSPA had stated that there are currently few ports on the U.S. East Coast that can offer the deep draft conditions and large container terminals that will be required in the future. New locks and channels are now under construction in the Panama Canal, with completion now scheduled for 2016, allowing for much larger "post-Panamax" containerships to transit the canal. At that point, many containers that are now transiting the Pacific and unloading at west coast ports and moving via rail to points east will move more economically to east coast ports through the canal. The NCSPA had proposed that the port capitalize on this new container growth and provide new job opportunities for the region and the state.

In competition with the proposed port, the majority of existing east coast ports are now investing in dredging and expansion projects to attract the larger post-Panamax vessels. In February 2011, Alberto Aleman, the CEO of the Panama Canal, addressed the issue of expanding capacity on the east coast "Two deeper, wider ports along the US Eastern seaboard and one in the Gulf coast should be enough to handle the growth in traffic, instead of the approximately 13 port expansions now underway. The East Coast has many ports, and the large container ships are not going to stop at every port." Given a future environment of such excess capacity where the new post-Panamax vessels can find existing east coast ports competing with each other for business, it is likely that the proposed Southport site would have been in a difficult competitive position. North Carolina manufacturers have a number of existing cost-competitive overseas shipping port options to keep them competitive with other east coast manufacturers without a taxpayer-subsidized port in Southport.

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Wikipedia