The US Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration has allocated a $10.5 million grant to the Duluth Seaway Port Authority to help fund construction of a 56,000-square-foot warehouse at the Clure Public Marine Terminal and to rehabilitate a section of the terminal’s dock wall. The new warehouse will complement an existing 430,000 square foot warehousing area while the dock wall rehabilitation will fortify 7 acres of laydown space for heavy-lift and project cargoes, including wind energy components. Last year cargo volume at the Great Lakes port exceeded 33.5 million short tons, the third highest throughput since 2015.

Taiwan’s largest land reclamation undertaking in a commercial seaport has been completed after nine years of work with the $3.75 billion project adding over 422 hectares of new land to the Port of Kaohsiung. The additional area will enable the construction of several new deep-water berths for large container vessels and bulk carriers as well as the building of a new logistics center. Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine Corporation has signed a long-term contract to lease the planned container berths while bulk carrier operators are expected to relocate their operations to the new site from Kaohsiung’s old Zhongdao Wharf area to allow…

A 12-year, $392 million project to deepen the Delaware River to allow larger ships to call at the Port of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Port of Wilmington, Delaware is scheduled to be completed shortly by Oak Brook, Illinois-based Great Lakes Dredge & Dock. The project, which began in 2008, has increased the depth of the 103-mile main shipping channel between Philadelphia and the Atlantic Ocean from 40 to 45 feet. In anticipation of completion of the project the Port of Philadelphia acquired a second set of super post-Panamax container cranes last year that have been installed at its Packer Avenue Marine…

Connecticut-headquartered Prostar Capital has indicated it will invest $100 million to modernize and expand a deepwater petroleum terminal located on the Dutch island of St. Eustatius it acquired from San Antonio-based NuStar Energy last year to load Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs). The expansion work, to include storage tank upgrades and improvements to jetties and docks, will allow customers to move crude oil in and out of the United States to world markets using VLCCs, which can haul 2 million barrels of oil in a single load.

Chile’s SAAM Towage has ordered two RAstar 3200W azimuth tugs from Turkish shipyard UZMAR for operation in El Salvador following the awarding of a contract to provide ship assist services for the Energía del Pacífico (EDP) LNG project in that country. Designed by Canada’s Robert Allan Ltd the twin tugs, to be delivered next year, will measure 32 meters in beam, have a bollard pull of 75 tons and reach a maximum speed of 12.5 knots. SAAM Towage currently operates a fleet of more than 155 tugs at over 60 ports in the Americas servicing around 25,000 ships annually.

Trafigura and Phillips 66 have formed Bluewater Texas Terminal LLC as a 50/50 joint venture to develop a terminal for loading Very Large Crude Carriers approximately 21 miles off Corpus Christi, Texas. The new export facility will consist of up to two single point mooring (SPM) buoys connected to shore by subsea pipelines.

The first phase of a new coal terminal being built approximately 5 kilometers northeast of Vanino on Muchke Bay in Russia’s Khabarovsk region has been completed according to the country’s Federal Marine and River Transport Agency Rosmorrechflot. Being developed by VaninoTransUgol LLC, the new facility is to have an initial export capacity of 12 million tons, which will be boosted to 24 million tons during second phase expansion due to be completed by 2022. VaninoTransUgol is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the large Russian coal mining enterprise “Kolmar” which controls most mining, processing and transportation of coal in the Russian Far…