The Long Beach Container Terminal in California receives its dock expansion complete and receives two STS cranes, says Alphaliner. In its effort to improve its berthing and container transfer capacity.
Long Beach Completes $55M Pier G Upgrade
A $55 million project to modernize Container Dock G at the Port of Long Beach was completed in late March. Among other things, the project delivered a 75m extension to pier G236, which is now 450m long.
The three berths in the Pier G area of Long Beach are operated by the International Transportation Service (ITS), a lessee of the port for more than 50 years.
The ITS terminal concession consists of three separate unaligned berths of 375m, 410m and now 450m. The extended ITS wharf can accommodate container ships of fully neo-panamax dimensions, with lengths up to 366.00 m, which means that ITS will be able to serve two vessels of this type simultaneously.
In early 2022, the Macquarie-owned terminal placed orders for five new ultra-large STS cranes with Paceco-Mitsui. Delivery of these is scheduled for the first half of this year and will further increase the capacity of ITS’s large ships.
The Long Beach ITS terminal is used primarily by Ocean Network Express, Maersk, ANL, and Hapag-Lloyd. MSC, which used to be another major customer, relocated its calls at the end of 2022. Today, the terminal mainly handles medium-sized vessels in the 4,000 to 5,000 teu size range.
In addition to these, he receives weekly calls from the ONE operated THEA loop ‘PS7’, which deploys 14,000 teu neo-panamax ships.
ZPMC delivers two more STS to LBCT Long Beach
The LBCT container terminal at the Port of Long Beach, California, has received two megamax-size STS cranes from ZPMC.
The new terminal gantries were delivered fully assembled on board the heavy lift vessel. They have a range of 69.00 m and a light height of 50.00 m.
Following last week’s delivery, the Long Beach Container Terminal now has a fleet of 16 large STS cranes working on a 1,350m quay. So you can handle three large main ships at the same time, or four slightly smaller ships.
The terminal is the most automated maritime facility in the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and features a series of 36 vertically aligned container storage blocks, each served by two rail-mounted automated gantries. Horizontal transport between the dock and the yard is carried out by a fleet of automated guided vehicles.
LBCT opened in 2016. It was created as part of Long Beach’s ‘Middle Harbor Project’, in which two older terminals were closed, demolished and rebuilt into a single new terminal. LBCT was originally owned by OOIL, the parent company of the Hong Kong-based shipping company OOCL. In mid-2017, when the COSCO Group received permission to acquire OOIL, US regulators demanded that the terminal in California be spun off and not come under COSCO control.
Therefore, the LBCT property was “parked” with an interim trust fund until 2019, when the terminal was sold to the consortium led by Macquarie Infrastructure Partners for USD 1.78 billion. At the same time, OOCL committed to using the terminal for a period of 20 years.
Unsurprisingly, COSCO Shipping and its sister company are currently the only LBCT users, sending a total of three weekly services to the terminal, all of which are OCEAN Alliance high-capacity loops. The loops handled in LBTC are ‘PSW2’, ‘PSW6’ and ‘PSW9’.
Source: Alphaliner
