Two giant new cranes arrive at Port of Mobile’s container terminal
Two giant container cranes arrive in Mobile on July 17, 2024, after a lengthy voyage from China. The cranes will join four already in place at the container terminal operated by APM TerminalsAlabama Port Authority
Two giant new container cranes arrived Wednesday at the Port of Mobile, where they will add capacity to an APM Terminals container terminal that has been one of the fastest-growing in the nation over the last decade.
The new brace of cranes will join four others at the terminal, which sits well south of downtown Mobile on the west side of the Mobile River, visible from I-10 near the Virginia Street exit. Like two similar high-rise cranes added in 2017, they’ll become part of the Mobile skyline visible from the Bayway and other vantage points.
Two giant container cranes arrive in Mobile on July 17, 2024, after a lengthy voyage from China. The cranes will join four already in place at the container terminal operated by APM TerminalsAlabama Port Authority
Such big-ticket items don’t arrive overnight. Port officials said back in January 2023 that the two newest cranes had been ordered. At that point, Port Authority Director and CEO John Driscoll and others were celebrating yet another record year for container traffic. The standard unit for container traffic is called a TEU, and in 2021 Mobile’s terminal had handled more than half a million of them, breaking that threshold for the first time. In 2022 it had beat that by more than 11%, handling more than 560,000 TEUs.
The cranes are part of a long-running and ongoing expansion plan conducted by the Port Authority and APM Terminals. The set of cranes delivered in 2017 were part of “Phase 2” expansion. Phase 3 included an extension of the docks which allowed the terminal to accommodate two 1,000-foot-long ships at the same time.
Phase 3 expansions cost about $50 million. Phase 4, which was approved in 2022, has been estimated at $72 million worth of work including additional yard storage. Port officials have said that Phase 3 was expected to raise the terminal’s maximum capacity to 650,000 TEUs per year, and that Phase 4 will push it to about 1 million TEUs per year.
The nation’s biggest container terminals are the Port of Los Angeles, which handled an estimated 7.8 million TEUs in 2023, and the Port of Long Beach, Calif., with an estimated 7.3 million.
The effort to expand the terminal dovetails with a massive U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project to deepen and widen the ship channel connecting the port to the Gulf of Mobile. When that is complete, Mobile will be able to accommodate the newest and biggest container ships in the world.