In 2023, the Port of Baltimore led the nation for tonnage imports of passenger vehicles; plywood and veneered and laminated wood; kaolin-coated paper and paperboard; self-propelled construction equipment; aluminum; work truck and other commercial vehicles; tractors; gypsum; granulated slag from iron or steel; lead; wood, tongue-and-grooved or otherwise shaped; zinc; animal feed prep; certain types of stainless steel; particle board; tin; nickel; zinc; and aluminum wire, according to my company’s analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.
That has led to a simple question since Tuesday morning, when a container ship leaving the Port of Baltimore struck and destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge, part of the Interstate 695 loop around Baltimore, and now precludes access to the Atlantic Ocean:
Where now?
How will the products and commodities where the Port of Baltimore ranks first in the nation — there are many others — as well the rest enter the United States?
A simple question, yes, but the answer is less so.
Scrambling today are manufacturers and producers, freight forwarders, shipping lines, ports, Customs brokers, terminal operators, importers, warehouse operators, truck and rail lines and retailers, all in service of the ultimate buyers.
It’s just another indicator of how global the economy is, particularly for the world’s largest economy, and how incapable near-shoring is of solving all of the supposed ills of international trade.
While it ranks first for many exports as well, the Port of Baltimore, the nation’s No.-8 ranked seaport by tonnage and ninth by value, skews more heavily than the national average and many seaports toward imports, as reported previously.
Its growth has been far faster than the national average over the last decade, and in 2023 it cracked the top 20 ranking of U.S. airports, seaports and border crossings, at No. 18.
It also topped $80 billion in two-way trade for the first time, one year after topping $70 billion for the first time and two years after topping $60 billion for the first time.
On the export side, still with tonnage, it led the nation in tractors, commercial vehicles, poultry-harvesting machinery, self-propelled construction machinery, and industrial-use vehicles like cranes and derricks.
But by far its leading export by tonnage, with five times the weight of any other, is coal. Baltimore probably ranks second, but U.S. Census Bureau data is intentionally murky on this, at the request of the shipper.
It has created a port called “Norfolk/Mobile/Charleston,” though much of that coal apparently leaves through Norfolk, according to an old U.S. Energy Information Administration report as well as a more recent one from S&P Global. I could not find a current breakdown by port on the EIA website. Our company calls the port called Norfolk-Newport News in the Census data the Port of Virginia, as does the port itself.
Finding the right matches is what has the computers humming today, whether it’s for passenger vehicle imports, about which I wrote yesterday, or coal or any other import or export.
The nearest port that exports coal is, of course, the Port of Virginia, but the Port of Baltimore’s tonnage is four times that listed for the Virginia port — which excludes the fabricated port “Norfolk/Mobile/Charleston.” The Port of New Orleans is the second-largest actual port after Baltimore, but at little more than a third of the tonnage.
The same story will be playing out in the coming days, weeks and — hopefully not — months as the supply chain, which has proven repeatedly to be remarkably resilient, is again put to the test. How to handle that animal feed, the tractors, the poultry harvesting machinery, the coal, the passenger vehicles, the tractors, the tin, nickel and zinc?
