Eimskip’s calls at the Port of Portland provide unique service for Pine Tree State shippers.
The Port of Portland, Maine and the Icelandic ocean carrier Eimskip have an almost unique relationship for this era of shifting ocean carrier alliances and blank sailings. And it is a relationship advantageous to the port, the carrier and a widening customer base in New England.
Eimskip, which celebrated its 110th anniversary on January 17th, 2024, being a niche ocean carrier — the world’s only pan-Arctic steamship line — has developed an unusually close relationship with diverse port partners. While the Eimskip’s calls include name ports like Portland, Maine; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Reykjavik, Iceland and other well-known European ports, many other ports like Argentia in Newfoundland, Nuuk in Greenland, Thorshavn in the Faroe Islands, or Batsfjord and Kirkenes in the far northern reaches of Norway are calls unique to Eimskip’s liner schedule — a schedule that’s literally one of kind. And in many of the ports, Eimskip is often the only ocean carrier regularly calling and is responsible for the related logistics associated with the ship call — a relationship that is efficient for the carrier and effective for the port.
The Portland Call
However, there is a bit of a back story to Eimskip’s decision to call in the Port of Portland. As Gylfi Sigfusson, CEO of Eimskip USA related in an interview with AJOT, Eimskip got caught up by the geo-politics of the US base closures. “In 2006 the US military left its military base in Iceland and because around 35% of our [Eimskip’s] volume was military related cargo going from Norfolk, Virginia to Iceland for the base in Keflavik, Iceland, that decision hit us hard. At the same time one of our biggest exporter of fish in Iceland, ‘The Icelandic Group’ was sold to a Canadian-based fishing company and instead of routing the cargo through Norfolk, Virginia, they started routing the cargo to the New England area,” Sigfusson said of the cargo shift.
With loss of the military outbound freight and the inbound freight now resting in the hands of a Canadian company, Eimskip was at a crossroads for a US port call. As Sigfusson says of the time, “It had always been our vision that one day we could as a group introduce to the market a weekly service to and from the USA and finally, we took the big step in late November 2018. If we were to maintain our call to Norfolk, we [Eimskip] would have had to have around 4-5 vessels to make a weekly service between Iceland and USA. At the same time, we were calling Everett and Penn Terminal in Pennsylvania. We therefore started to look at moving north trying to limit it to one port call instead of three. We looked at Boston MA, Rhode Island, Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Portland, Maine.
The reason we in the end did choose Portland, Maine was the interest we saw from them. They were willing to invest in the infrastructure; on the State level, the Portland city and the MPA/DOT (Maine Port Authority/Department of Transportation) were all very eager to have finally a shipping line calling the Port of Portland.”
Portland’s Projects Will Improve Perishable Handling
The Port of Portland, now operating under the Maine Port Authority, handles the Eimskip call at their International Marine Terminal (IMT). As Matt Burns, the executive director of the Maine Port Authority (which includes two other deepwater ports: Searsport and Eastport) explained in an interview with the AJOT, that the port has, and in the near future, will benefit from a number of projects.
At the present time, the IMT terminal covers around 20 acres and is equipped with two mobile Liebherr cranes, which can handle 124 tons. Provided with a channel with a 35 foot depth, the facility is capable of serving vessels of around 1,000 TEU (twenty foot equivalent units) to 2,000 TEU. Eimskip’s MV Bakkafoss, with a 1,025 TEU capacity, deployed on the Transatlantic Green Line weekly service schedule, is at this writing the largest cargo vessel to call at the terminal.
Because much of the inbound cargo is perishable, IMT is equipped with around 150 reefer plugs to handle the reefer containers. But that number is changing soon as Burns points out. “We applied for funding in the FY23 PIDP program….one of them was the expanded reefer area in Portland at the IMT.”
The Port of Portland received a $14 million Federal grant in 2023 which will be used to expand the number of available reefer plugs at the IMT to 420. The new plugs will be arranged in a state-of-the-art reefer rack that will be capable of mounting reefers in a stack of five high.
The additional reefer slots will enable Eimskip to handle even greater volumes of perishables at the IMT in the near future. Additionally, a cold storage facility is being built near the IMT which will also enhance the perishable handling capabilities of the Port of Portland.
And another important piece of port infrastructure is now in place. As Burns explained, “the rail siding is complete… [Now] we have the ability to do intermodal at the IMT. We’ve got the ability to load side by side rail cars. And it’s a very nice asset that we would love to use more of…. we’ve been working with consultants in the railroad … to try and find a project to do there, but I think we would ultimately like to do intermodal if we could.”
Undoubtedly the partnership of the port and the ocean carrier has been successful and is setting up for the future, “We just celebrated our 10 years in Portland in April last year and we have been growing steadily over the years and have now reached 50,000 TEU in and out of the port,” Sigfusson said. And with the projects in place, the port and the carrier are positioned for growth in the next decade.
