Denson White, Chief Commercial Officer and Intermodal North America lead for APM Terminals, told TOC Americas that Mobile, Alabama’s rail reach and demographic shifts in the United States reshaping how cargo moves to and from the Americas.
Mobile, Alabama’s container terminal connects to five Class 1 railroads, giving it reach into nearly every part of North America bar a Union Pacific link, Denson White, Intermodal North America lead for APM Terminals, told TOC Americas. Latin American cargo arriving at the port can reach multiple Canadian points in around four days, he said, a service he described as unmatched by most other US ports.
That connectivity, White argued, still runs up against old habits among ocean carriers used to routing cargo through traditional gateways. “The ocean lines are also very set in trying to fill up big ships. And sometimes ports like Mobile, Alabama might have a little bit smaller ships that they are focused… their mentality and what they’re doing is a little bit different,” he said.
Shifting trade lanes
White pointed to a broader change already under way in how goods move between Asia, the US and Latin America. “How do we move things out of Asia markets and move them into Latin markets? And that’s already in progress,” he said, adding that energy exports, including LNG and CNG, from the US into Latin markets are set to keep growing over the next couple of years because of the Gulf’s short rail and ocean distances.
Weight and driver shortages push cargo to rail
On the choice between truck and rail, White said weight limits make the economics clear. “Whenever you can go from 45,000 pounds to 67,000 pounds, that’s a big difference. I mean, you’re adding almost 50% more cargo into a container that you can ship versus over the road,” he said. He linked the shift further to tighter driver supply after commercial driving licences became harder to obtain over the past two years, which he said has pushed up both truck costs and diesel exposure.
Same-day trains to multiple destinations
White said Mobile’s smaller scale allows it to build trains to several destinations on the same day, rather than a full unit train to one city at a time, cutting dwell time compared with larger ports where containers can sit for three to four days.
Moving distribution inland
The bigger change, White said, is where cargo gets unboxed. “Why are we taking the box to these cities that are the hinterland markets and then distribute from there? This is the big change that is already beginning to happen… you’ll continue to see that over the next 20 years,” he said, pointing to population growth in Dallas and Nashville pulling distribution inland, much as Memphis became a logistics hub in the 1980s.
He extended the point to agriculture and forestry, sectors he said were historically built around bulk loading at the port rather than at origin. “The entire infrastructure was built to bring it to the bulk container. So guess where all the agriculture loading was? At the port… now those are beginning to happen because you’re putting in the container at the farm,” he said. He argued the same logic applies across the region, including around Cartagena, where he said the population centre sits inland of the port.
About APM Terminals: in Mobile, Alabama, the terminal connects to five Class 1 railroads, reaching nearly all of North America, and can move Latin American cargo to multiple Canadian points in around four days, White said.