The Port Commission of the Port of Houston Authority has moved to accelerate widening of the Houston Ship Channel, the nation’s busiest waterway. The port’s Authority cooperates with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other representatives of the federal government to speed up the funding and the completion of a deepened and widened of the 52-mile federal waterway.
Specifically, the project is amongst the 11 most important widening and deepening projects that have occurred in the channel, since its conception.
The Houston Ship Channel is experiencing tremendous growth.
Up to now, Houston is the country’s No. 1 export city, and home to the largest petrochemical manufacturing complex in the Americas.
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Energy production and the export of crude oil, and the increasing global demand for chemicals produced in the region, are major drivers of this success. Expansion of the Panama Canal, the growth of vessel sizes, and the region’s population growth have also resulted in record container demand, both for imported consumer goods and exported manufactured products, further driving the need for improvements to the channel.
In order to ensure continued safe, unimpeded traffic of neo-panamax container vessels and other ships, under the terms of this new business rule, only one vessel that imposes “one-way traffic” on all deep-water ships transiting the Houston Ship Channel within Galveston Bay to call facilities within the Port of Houston may call on a Port Authority terminal in a given week, an interim solution intended to ensure unencumbered access to upper channel reaches.
The commission of the port funded $500,000 in favour of traffic efficiency group for the channel. This new group that consists of the U.S. Coast Guard Houston Area Vessel Traffic Service, the Lone Star Harbor Safety Committee, the Houston Pilots, and others, aims to share data and information in order to optimize traffic flow on the channel.
Yet, the traffic flow keeps on increasing, as there are more and more requests for larger vessels to serve the fast-growing demand of containerized consumer imports, resin and agriculture exports, and the needs of the energy industry.
Concluding, Chairman Ric Campo stated
The Houston Ship Channel is open for business for all and will continue to be.