New shipping line

Container ship connects Halifax to Picton

Anew container shipping line operated by Doornekamp Construction will soon begin trips between Halifax and Picton. The ship will arrive in Picton every other Tuesday, starting in May, and can carry up to 300 40-foot containers. The vessel is 140 metres long and the nominal capacity is 11,000 metric tonnes. For comparison, cargo ships currently using the facility can be up to 300 metres long, with a carrying capacity of up to 30,000 metric tonnes. The shipping operation will continue throughout the time the St. Lawrence Seaway is open, with the route being shortened to Montreal-Halifax between December and March. Ben Doornekamp says there are sound environmental reasons for bringing in containers by ship. “Water is the most environmentally friendly way to transport cargo, as it’s less truck miles and rail miles. Congestion at the Port of Montreal is an issue, whereas if you keep it on the water [Picton] is closer to Toronto, Canada’s biggest market. Picton is a small port, so the efficiency level can be very high.” He added that the Port of Toronto has limited facilities for container ships, and the major congestion bottleneck is at the rail yards.

Containers arriving and those awaiting transshipment will be stored on site, and Doornekamp does not expect them to remain for an extended period. “Some of them get trucked to Belleville, Kingston, Trenton, Toronto. Some will go right on our barges to go to potentially Hamilton or Cleveland on water. And basically the same thing coming back in. Depending on demand, there will be containers coming in on our barges from other destinations on the Great Lakes that will go directly to the ship. There won’t be much storage. The customers don’t want their containers sitting still, so when ships are coming in and out, the link-up between truck and ship will be pretty close. There’s going to be some storage, but it’s going to fluctuate. Sometimes there will be zero, sometimes there will be 200, it just depends.” The container ship is anticipated to make 21 trips between Halifax and Picton each year, and Doornekamp does expect an increase in truck traffic on County Road 49 as containers are picked up or delivered, but says it should be barely noticeable, since a fair percentage of the containers being transshipped will arrive or leave by barge.

He noted that the container shipping service is in compliance with the company’s zoning as a transshipment operation.

Doornekamp says that while some County businesses will make use of the container service, the majority of clients will be regional. “The Belleville-Kingston- Trenton world is very strong in export manufacturing relative to our size, and our logistic efficiency on trucking and rail is at a severe disadvantage, so this is a big advantage for regional. There are some containers moved from the County, and hopefully we can utilize them. Hopefully we can provide an advantage for some of the people to expand, because now the expansion difficulty is related to the lack of logistic and cargo movement options in this region.”

Eventually, Doornekamp anticipates the route will expand to the other Great Lakes. “The St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great lakes is a very underutilized transportation route. There’s an appetite on both sides of the border for more containers. What we’re trying to do is to move more containers, and a good example is we’d go to Hamilton, or possibly Cleveland, depending on customer demand. You can do the math and treat the environment as a big picture; every container that stays on the water longer reduces truck miles and rail miles.”