Guest wrote:It would probably be a lot cheaper to develop infrastructure to facilitate loading at a Lake Michigan port.
I hear your thoughts and respect that. However... As I know it, there is only one true loading port on Lake Michigan for ore, and that is Escanaba. No port for coal.
I'm sure there's been a cost/benefit analysis done on the idea of transporting (by rail or truck) all of the ore and coal that comes out of the Duluth/Superior harbors, let alone the Two Harbors and Silver Bay area.
To transport that via rail to a Lake Michigan loading point has to be expensive. It's one thing to transport the pellets from the Tildon/Empire mines just south of Marquette to Escanaba. But from the Mesabi Range area to Escanaba? And for coal from Wyoming/Montana to Escanaba without the rails to handle that?
How much capacity for loading can Escanaba handle? Can they do coal too? If they could, how would that effect other vessels waiting for ore? What other port can accommodate fully loaded vessels? Sturgeon Bay? Can they handle that kind of rail/truck traffic there for inbound overland shipments? The questions can go on and on.
Surely this would be a private venture (i.e., a publicly held company) that would want to buy the property, convince the Corp of Engineers to dredge. And that company would need some assurance from publicly held companies like Interlake, ASC, and GLF to load their vessels with pellets/coal at their facilities on Lake Michigan before they even decided they would start such work on infrastructure improvements.
The question becomes this: would Interlake, ASC, GLF take on contracts from a company that has to pay a higher transport costs to get product to their dock and find a willing customer in Detroit, Gary, Cleveland, etc that is okay with that? I'm thinking not.
The end result might be better served having our tax dollars used to build a redundant lock rather than seeing the amount of money spent by a company pouring hundreds of millions into developing infrastructure, and subsequently passing that cost on to the end user so they can realize a dividend for their stockholders which eventually drives up the cost of the price of steel/coal we all use.
If it was something that would be viable for some company to invest in, I think it would have been done by now.
[quote="Guest"]It would probably be a lot cheaper to develop infrastructure to facilitate loading at a Lake Michigan port.[/quote]
I hear your thoughts and respect that. However... As I know it, there is only one true loading port on Lake Michigan for ore, and that is Escanaba. No port for coal.
I'm sure there's been a cost/benefit analysis done on the idea of transporting (by rail or truck) all of the ore and coal that comes out of the Duluth/Superior harbors, let alone the Two Harbors and Silver Bay area.
To transport that via rail to a Lake Michigan loading point has to be expensive. It's one thing to transport the pellets from the Tildon/Empire mines just south of Marquette to Escanaba. But from the Mesabi Range area to Escanaba? And for coal from Wyoming/Montana to Escanaba without the rails to handle that?
How much capacity for loading can Escanaba handle? Can they do coal too? If they could, how would that effect other vessels waiting for ore? What other port can accommodate fully loaded vessels? Sturgeon Bay? Can they handle that kind of rail/truck traffic there for inbound overland shipments? The questions can go on and on.
Surely this would be a private venture (i.e., a publicly held company) that would want to buy the property, convince the Corp of Engineers to dredge. And that company would need some assurance from publicly held companies like Interlake, ASC, and GLF to load their vessels with pellets/coal at their facilities on Lake Michigan before they even decided they would start such work on infrastructure improvements.
The question becomes this: would Interlake, ASC, GLF take on contracts from a company that has to pay a higher transport costs to get product to their dock and find a willing customer in Detroit, Gary, Cleveland, etc that is okay with that? I'm thinking not.
The end result might be better served having our tax dollars used to build a redundant lock rather than seeing the amount of money spent by a company pouring hundreds of millions into developing infrastructure, and subsequently passing that cost on to the end user so they can realize a dividend for their stockholders which eventually drives up the cost of the price of steel/coal we all use.
If it was something that would be viable for some company to invest in, I think it would have been done by now.