U.S. East Coast seaports have a serious overhang of unused terminal capacity. The Port of Charleston handled about 1.4 million 20-foot equivalent container units last year, just 38 percent of its available capacity of 3.7 million TEUs. At Savannah, the 2.9 million TEUs handled left some 40 percent of its terminal capacity unused. The Port of New York and New Jersey has a maximum capacity of 12 million TEUs, but handled only 5.5 million TEUs last year, according to figures provided to The Journal of Commerce.
At the roughly 4 percent cumulative annual growth over the past decade, the port said it would take 23 years to fill its available capacity. Terminal operators at New York-New Jersey were said to have taken a big financial hit in contract renegotiations with carriers over the past few years, with a terminal executive telling me at last month’s Trans-Pacific Maritime Conference that terminal rates at the East Coast’s largest port are unsustainable, a term usually applied to depressed ocean rates.