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New container-on-barge service connects Baton Rouge, New Orleans ports in push to boost exports

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In an effort to ease highway congestion and reduce air pollution, Louisiana port officials have turned to a shuttle service that sends empty cargo containers to Baton Rouge, where they are loaded with plastic resin pellets, an increasingly important commodity, and shipped by barge to New Orleans to be exported.

The aptly named container-on-barge service, which launched last year, is ramping up as U.S. production and sales of resin, the raw material of all plastic products, have continued to grow.

In Louisiana, that increase is driven largely by historically low natural gas prices that are propelling the state's biggest industrial boom in decades.

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In the Baton Rouge area, large-scale resin producers include ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical and Shintech.

Resin exports, however, are big business across the U.S. In the first 10 months of 2016, the port of Houston exported nearly 154,000 TEUs, or 20-foot equivalent units — a measure of cargo capacity for containerized shipping. That accounts for almost 46 percent of the total U.S. volume, according to a recent report by the research firm IHS Markit. New Orleans ranked No. 2, with nearly 46,000 TEUs, just above the combined totals of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California.

In Louisiana, the burgeoning container-on-barge service is operated by Seacor AMH, a Florida-based marine transportation company. The firm collects empty containers in Memphis, Tennessee, and transports them to Baton Rouge for loading before they are sent to New Orleans.

Port of Louisiana historically falls behind Houston and Mobile when it comes to containerized cargo.

Baton Rouge and New Orleans in particular are still both huge bulk cargo ports though. They are installing several new cranes to handle this expanding container on barge cargo. It could mean more container volume for New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

This post was edited on 12/11/17 at 7:04 am