By Stas Margaronis, AJOT The Port of Vancouver, Washington is continuing its expansion into project cargo fields that include:
  • Moving heavy lift cargo such as the 200 modules destined for an oil sands refinery in Alberta, Canada;
  • Preparing for a minimum of 55 ships that will be bringing in wind turbines bound for wind farms in the Pacific Northwest, Midwest and Southwest destinations in 2012 in advance of an impending end to the federal production tax credit for wind turbines;
  • Expanding the port’s rail capacity from 55,000 cars per year to 160,000 rail cars per year. Thanks to a recent $15 million federal stimulus grant, the port’s improvements on the rail system also will reduce rail congestion by 40%. This is a significant part of the port’s $150 million West Vancouver Freight Access project;
  • Expanding its grain terminal that is operated by United Grain Corporation. It will agricultural export business thanks to Mitusi Corporation of Japan building a $90 million grain elevator to accommodate grain, corn and soybean agricultural exports to Asia;
  • The Port is in negotiation to lease space to BHP Billiton for the company to build a new Potash facility at the Port that will facilitate potash, a key component in fertilizer, exports to Asia.
Alistair Smith, senior director marketing and operations, says that because of the port’s investment in land and equipment, as well as its expertise and natural location, it is an ideal and most cost-effective transfer point for project cargos moving to and from the Pacific Rim and the world. The first oil sands modules were imported in late 2010 and the rest have been arriving from Korea and are being shipped out with the target of completing shipments by the end of November. The port’s ambitious project cargo delivery of 200 oil sands modules has been a major achievement for the port because it demonstrates its logistics expertise in safely moving large project cargo, as well as its available land and prime location as a transfer hub for components shipped in from Korea to Vancouver, Washington. From there, they go up the Columbia River by barge to Pasco, Washington and Lewiston, Idaho before being shipped by truck to their final destination in Alberta, Canada. One barge had the capacity to carry 6-8 modules, so roughly 25 barge moves are needed to ship the entire 200 modules up the Columbia River from Vancouver. Another challenge is the actual unloading of the modules from the ship. At the port, Jones Stevedoring engineered the deployment of two Liebherr mobile harbor cranes to safely pick modules weighing between 80-150 metric tons. The cranes can reach to the far side of the ship to lift heavy cargo - so there’s no need to turn the ship around - and load them onto barge or truck. The port’s Liebherr 500S cranes each have a capacity to lift 140 tons and have computer programs allowing them to facilitate the complicated tandem loading and unloading of up to 210 metric tons. The two cranes were needed because of the complex module shapes that were a maximum of 128 feet long, 24 feet wide and 25-1/2 feet high. In some cases there were twelve point loads and an engineering firm was hired by Jones to design and personally supervise the lifting of each module using two Liebherr cranes in tandem to ensure each transfer of load was correct. Because of the module sizes involved, in some cases only three large modules could be unloaded off ships within an eight hour day, while eight smaller modules were able to be moved in an eight hour day. Smith noted that, “Longshoremen belonging to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (LWU) had to be trained on how to handle the tandem moves by crane and did an excellent job.”

Expertise in Handling and Transporting Wind Energy Components

The purchase of the two Liebherr cranes (the first was purchased in 2005) is fortuitous for the primary project cargo effort the port is engaged in which is to move win