Additional Resources

California Ports Think Big

By Steve Wilhelm

Puget Sound ports face challenges similar to L.A. and Long Beach

Drive on freeways 710 or 110 on a late afternoon, heading north from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, and you're likely to be flanked by a bellowing wall of trucks hauling ocean containers 20 miles north to rail yards near downtown Los Angeles.

Battered veterans of years on the highway, some of them visibly spewing black diesel exhaust as they thunder north, these 16,000 short-haul trucks are the primary contact most Angelenos have with the ports.
 
Many citizens don't like what they see -- deadly smog. The California Air Resources Board recently found that 1,200 Southern Californians die every year from diesel airborne particulates generated by freight-moving equipment. People living near the ports now call the area a "diesel death zone."

It's a conundrum confronting the entire West Coast, including Seattle and Tacoma. Cargo is surging, but communities, and the law, won't tolerate more pollution.

The problem is worse at L.A.-Long Beach, the largest port complex in the U.S. Imports here are expected to more than double to 36 million 20-foot containers by 2020. But the region already violates federal clean air standards. That means officials must build a system that handles twice as much cargo, but with fewer emissions. How they do it will provide lessons to ports around the world.

There appear to be few alternatives. The cargo is being attracted by the huge Southern California market and driven by the vast growth of manufacturing in China. With aerospace and other manufacturing in decline, jobs from cargo are considered vital to the economy.

But residents are mobilizing to oppose growth they fear will degrade conditions even more. On May 4, the Southern Coast Air Quality Management District called upon the state and federal governments to declare a state of emergency to address the problems

"All these projects are going to depend on us being able to meet clean air goals," said Robert Kanter, director of planning and environmental affairs for the Port of Long Beach.

The air-quality constraints are tight. The two Southern California ports several months ago committed to returning the ports to 2001 levels of several key emissions, even while the ports grow in volume. Called the San Pedro Bay Ports Clean Air Action Plan, the agreement is a massive mustering of political will in response to unavoidable realities.

Without a plan to reduce emissions, the ports' expansion plans were being denied by the courts.

The Port of Los Angeles hasn't had a capital project approved in five years, said Christopher Patton, environmental affairs officer for the Port of Los Angeles.

"For a port growing at double-digit rates of growth, that acts as a constraint," Patton said.

Approvals stopped after San Pedro neighborhood and environmental groups filed suit in 2001 against the Port of Los Angeles over development of what's called the "China Shipping Terminal" on the western edge of the port near residential areas. This forced the port to complete a full Environmental Impact Report (EIR), after the California Court of Appeals in 2002 issued an injunction against continued construction.

The eventual settlement included $50 million in mitigation and specific emissions-reducing technologies and protocols for the terminals. Some yard vehicles switched to alternative fuels. Some ships now turn off their engines and use shore power at dock, a technique called "cold ironing."

"The settlement was a huge victory," said Melissa Lin Perrella, staff attorney at the Los Angeles-area office of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Accomplishing the San Pedro Bay Ports Clean Air Action Plan's goals will require immense outlays of cash, enormous political will, and the commercialization of futuristic technologies that will replace traditional diesel power with electricity, or ultra-clean diesel, throughout the vast Southern California ocean freight-moving system.

And with the region facing many fiscal constraints, and expecting little financial help from the federal government, leaders plan to raise money from the shippers, and ultimately, consumers.

The ports of Seattle, Tacoma and Vancouver, British Columbia, are in the middle of a similar process. On May 16 they announced the Pacific Northwest Clean Air Strategy, a collaborative effort to reduce emissions compared to a 2005 baseline.

But Southern California's plan is more radical, and with more teeth, because that region's air problems are worse and the growth is expected to be much larger. Southern California's huge consumer market gives the ports more leverage with shippers.

On April 12, the Southern California ports announced a plan to replace or upgrade all those 16,000 short-haul trucks that rumble to and from the ports. The five-year program is expected to reduce emissions by 80 percent, at an estimated cost of $1.8 billion. The plan is controversial, in part because it will take control of those trucks away from the many individual owner-operators who are able to buy a used truck for a few thousand dollars to transfer containers, and will instead shift the work to several larger companies that can be overseen by the ports.

A key difference between the California and the Pacific Northwest plans has to do with efforts to reduce emissions from large container ships while underway into ports, and while tied up at terminals. While the Northwest plan is limited in the near term to shifting ships to using shore power or low-sulfur fuels at dockside, the San Pedro plan also will push ship owners to convert to low-sulfur fuel 24 miles offshore and burn that fuel all the way to port.

The sulfur content of ships' bunker fuel is significant, because the Southern California air inventory shows that 45 percent of the sulfur oxide emitted in Southern California comes from the San Pedro Bay port complex, and 90 percent of that comes from ships.

Requiring ships to change fuels has been a difficult issue, because nearly all oceangoing container ships are owned by foreign companies, and under international law cannot be bound to operate under U.S. rules.
 
The California Air Resources Board moved toward reducing the emissions in December 2006, when it filed a rule requiring ocean carriers to use low-sulfur fuels in their auxiliary engines, which generate electricity, starting 24 miles off the coast.

That rule was promptly challenged in federal District Court by the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, an organization of ocean carriers and shore terminals, on the grounds that a regional government (the state) couldn't regulate an international activity such as ocean transportation.

T.L. Garrett, PMSA vice president in Long Beach, said his organization isn't opposed to the emissions reductions, but to the way the state chose to implement the new rule.

"We're not taking the position that this is a technical issue, but a jurisdictional issue," he said. w

Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Perrella counters that the region is being forced to take action to compensate for the lack of federal or international action.

"It would be great if our federal government did more to regulate in this area, the problem is, they're not," she said.

Southern California ports are exercising one power they do have, by utilizing new lease agreements to require ocean carriers to switch to low-sulfur fuels for the last 24 miles into ports, said Kanter, of the Long Beach port. And if those carriers won't agree, the port can just refuse to sign the leases, a course of action that's possible because other ocean carriers are anxious to gain access to Southern California's ports.

"The only leverage we have is leasing," Kanter said. "Each time a lease expires we're informing the new guys, 'Guess what, you're going to have some new additional requirements if you want to continue to do business at the Port of Long Beach.'"