The Great Lakes/St. Lawrence Sea­way is expect­ing a strong fin­ish to the ship­ping sea­son as freighters deliv­er crit­i­cal raw mate­ri­als and exports for North America’s indus­tri­al and agri­cul­tur­al sec­tors before the water­way clos­es Decem­ber 31.

Accord­ing to The St. Lawrence Sea­way Man­age­ment Cor­po­ra­tion, total car­go ship­ments reached 30.3 mil­lion met­ric tons for the peri­od from March 21 to Novem­ber 30. In Decem­ber, dozens of ships are still in the nav­i­ga­tion system.
“Giv­en cur­rent tem­per­a­tures and ice con­di­tions, we’re expect­ing a smooth clos­ing of the Sea­way at the end of Decem­ber. In these final weeks, the water­way will be a busy export cor­ri­dor for the U.S. Mid­west, Cana­di­an Prairie and Ontario har­vests, as well as a con­duit for iron ore, road salt and oth­er raw mate­ri­als for man­u­fac­tur­ers and cities to stock­pile for the win­ter,” said Ter­ence Bowles, Pres­i­dent and CEO of The St. Lawrence Sea­way Man­age­ment Corporation.

Grain ship­ments (Cana­di­an and U.S.) via the Sea­way totaled 9.4 mil­lion met­ric tons up to the end of Novem­ber, in line with 2015’s strong num­bers. Sig­nif­i­cant vol­umes are expect­ed in Decem­ber. The Port of Thun­der Bay, which is the largest grain port on the sys­tem, was expect­ing anoth­er 65 ships in Decem­ber and the first two weeks of Jan­u­ary. The major­i­ty of these ships are load­ing Prairie grain for export and some will still be deliv­er­ing grain and coal to ports with­in the Lakes dur­ing the first two weeks of January.

The Port of John­stown, sit­u­at­ed on the St. Lawrence Sea­way, is fore­cast­ing anoth­er record year for grain ship­ments and pro­cess­ing, with ton­nage total­ing more than 780,000 met­ric tons—up 7 per­cent over 2015.
“There’s been a great soy­bean har­vest in East­ern Ontario this year and we have been unload­ing as many as 170 trucks a day to have ship­ments ready to send out by ves­sel to over­seas mar­kets. Due to our effi­cien­cy improve­ments, we’re cap­tur­ing new busi­ness from farm­ers that may have pre­vi­ous­ly trucked their soy­beans all the way to Sorel, Que­bec and are now choos­ing to ship by water out of the Port of John­stown,” said Robert Dal­ley, Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of the Port of John­stown. “We have five more ships com­ing in over the next few weeks, three to export grain and two car­ry­ing inbound road salt to help de-ice win­ter roads.”

The amount of grain com­ing in and out of the Port of Wind­sor has increased by 47 per­cent so far this season.
“We’ve had huge vol­umes of canola and soy­beans com­ing into the ADM ter­mi­nal to be processed into a vari­ety of food and feed inputs, as well as grains and processed grains for export over­seas. Steel imports to the port for local con­struc­tion, pip­ing and tub­ing projects have also almost dou­bled,” said David Cree, Pres­i­dent and CEO of the Wind­sor Port Author­i­ty. “Our total car­go vol­umes have been hit by a decline in stone fol­low­ing the com­ple­tion of the Rt. Hon Herb Gray Park­way; how­ev­er, we antic­i­pate recov­ery in the future as con­struc­tion begins on the Gordie Howe Inter­na­tion­al Bridge.”

The Port of Hamil­ton has also had buoy­ant results in the agri­food sec­tor. By the end of Novem­ber, more than a mil­lion met­ric tons of grain and half a mil­lion met­ric tons of fer­til­iz­er had tran­sit­ed the port, exceed­ing 2015 ton­nages by 20 percent.

“We expect this pos­i­tive trend to con­tin­ue in 2017 as new capac­i­ty comes online at G3’s new grain export ter­mi­nal and Par­rish & Heimbecker’s new flour mill, both of which will be oper­a­tional in the com­ing year,” said Ian Hamil­ton, Pres­i­dent & CEO, Hamil­ton Port Authority.

Ship­ments of over­sized, high-val­ue project car­go through the Sea­way are also up 42 per­cent this sea­son, with wind tur­bines and machin­ery lead­ing the way. Ship­pers are increas­ing­ly rec­og­niz­ing the val­ue of ship­ping this type of car­go through the Sea­way direct­ly into the North Amer­i­can heart­land fol­low­ing con­cert­ed mar­ket­ing efforts over the past few years.

“The Port of Hamilton’s pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence with project car­go par­al­leled that of the Sea­way as a whole, with steady improve­ment over 2015,” said Hamil­ton. “We saw a num­ber of car­goes come through that were close­ly con­nect­ed to south­ern Ontario’s impor­tant man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, such as heavy machin­ery and plant com­po­nents. The Great Lakes/Seaway water­way is a safe, cost-effec­tive way to ship these very large com­po­nents, help­ing to min­i­mize the dis­rup­tion on our busy roads.”

Source: Cham­ber of Marine Com­merce Decem­ber 19, 2016