Short sea shakeup

This was the biggest takeaway from Mercator Media’s second Coastlink Live  ‘Short Sea Feeder Shipping: Navigating through road-freight supply chain challenges’  conference on 30 September.

Richard Newton, commercial director (logistics) at the Port of Tyne, told Port Strategy and GreenPort that coastal shipping is becoming more mainstream. “The biggest challenge has been changing the mindset of shippers and some forwarders to consider alternative supply chain routings. It feels that coastal shipping is now an option for many more shippers,” he said.

Clear benefits

Newton discussed how short sea shipping can cut costs and time, reduce environmental impact and improve efficiency.

He explained the Port of Tyne has undertaken modelling scenarios that demonstrate the benefits of short sea shipping over transport of containers by road.

A road journey from the Port of Felixstowe to Durham, south of the Port of Tyne, based on one 40ft container weighing 20t, involves a 590-mile round trip, 781kg of CO2 emissions and an estimated cost of over GB£1000. A lack of flexibility, truck shortages, delays and additional costs are key considerations, Newton said.

However, the Port of Tyne’s coastal shipping scenario from Felixstowe to Durham via its port involves just 281 nautical miles from the Port of Felixstowe to the Port of Tyne with nine containers onboard one vessel, plus a 40-mile round trip by road from Tyne to Durham. The model has total estimated cost of GB£600 and 142kg of CO2 in total.

Newton concluded that coastal shipping is a viable solution to current supply chain challenges, including driver shortages. He said it is green, cost-effective and flexible, and faster than road transport.

How supply chain issues point to coastal shipping

John Lucy, head of international transport at the Road Haulage Association Ltd, shed light on the supply chain capacity issues, telling delegates that its research showed retiring drivers and Brexit (which saw outsourced drivers leave the UK) were the biggest reasons for the shortage of UK lorry drivers. This was closely followed by tax legislation IR35. The shortage is also being experienced by Europe and the US.

“We’re seeing unprecedented demand from all the regional ports,” said Lucy.  Now, short sea containers are now competing against trailers on price and time, he said. “This provides further room for optimism in the short sea sector.” He added that autonomous shipping suits the needs of Brexit.

He noted the decline in ro-ro traffic between Irish and British ports post-Brexit, the delays in vehicle and equipment manufacturing due to raw material shortages, as well as increase in nearshoring and onshoring as engineering centres relocate, which is expected to bring more business for short sea shipping.

“Port connectivity is going to be absolutely vital now,” said Lucy. This is especially important for freeports, which will be built around multimodal infrastructure, smarter ports and low carbon logistics initiatives, he stressed, adding the industry needs to start considering better connectivity and better turnaround of vehicles at ports to tackle congestion.

This Coastlink Live session was chaired and moderated by Nick Lambert, director of NLA International. Justin Atkin, UK & Ireland representative at the Port of Antwerp, delivered the welcome address. David Cook, group logistics manager at TATA Consumer Products, also spoke at the event.

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