Insights

Good morning. My name is Adam Tindalschlicht, and I'm sector lead for ports transportation and infrastructure at Ramble based in our Milwaukee, Wisconsin office. We're really excited to have you all here with us this morning. For those that I've not met and worked with in the past, I'm the former director of the Port of Milwaukee, and I also served as an executive at the US Department of Transportation in Washington DC during the Biden administration. Our conversation today will focus on how ports are moving and recognizing risk and building readiness into their infrastructure and operations. As all of you on this call know, maritime gateways are increasingly fee facing climate pressures, extreme weather, and evolving operational challenges while still facing a need to move more goods more efficiently. At Rambo, we believe that resilience is an important part of how we think about infrastructure planning and design, which is why we're excited to host this conversation today with leaders from across the US maritime sector. What you're going to hear is a fantastic panel representing all parts of the maritime and infrastructure ecosystem. Our panelists bring expertise from three different US ports representing the Great Lakes region, the Gulf Coast, and the Pacific Coast, as well as a national organization which focuses on sustainable infrastructure standards. Each panelist will briefly introduce themselves and share how their organization is approaching resilience today. We'll then move into a discussion with all of you to further explore planning, operational strategies, funding frameworks, and lessons learned. Please feel free to use the audience chat and the question feature so we can bring you into this discussion at the end of the webinar. For those who are less familiar with Ramble, we're a global engineering architecture and sustainability consultancy, and our work spans a wide range of infrastructure sectors, including transportation, ports, energy systems, water, and environmental services. Across the US and Canada, we have about two thousand professionals supporting public sector and private sector clients. Many of those projects are helping infrastructure owners and operators plan, design, and deliver systems that are both economically competitive and environmentally sustainable. Ports are a particularly interesting space for us as the maritime industry sits at the intersection of transportation, the energy transition, environmental stewardship, and economic development. Ramble's corporate mission is captured in the phrase, the partner for sustainable change. For us, that means in practice helping clients navigate the transition towards sustainability and resilient infrastructure systems. Climate resilience is an important part of our mission because the infrastructure that's built today will operate for decades into an uncertain climate future. Our teams at Rambo help clients understand climate risk, develop adaptation strategies, and integrate those strategies into real projects. The port sector specifically, Ramble supports clients across the entire project life cycle from early planning through implementation. Now much of our work happens early in that process when ports are evaluating opportunities, risks, and long term investment strategy. This can include feasibility study work, impact assessment, and environmental review processes such as NEPA and CEQUA in California. We also help ports identify and quantify greenhouse gas emissions, develop decarbonization strategies, and conduct climate vulnerability and adaptation plans. By integrating these analyses early, ports are made smarter in their decision making about infrastructure investment while ensuring that their projects remain resilient over the long term. It is now my pleasure to welcome our first expert panelist, Taylor Mitchell. Taylor is the sustainability manager for the Detroit Wayne County Port Authority and I'll leave it to Taylor to introduce more about herself and her work. Good morning, Taylor. Good morning. Thank you so much, Adam. And it's very cool to be considered a expert in maritime, but I appreciate the compliment so much. And thank you to the Rambo team for allowing me to speak today. As Adam said, I am the sustainability manager, Taylor Mitchell's sustainability manager for the Detroit Wayne County Port Authority. And thank you to my executive director, Mark Schrupp, who's really been leading us as a team within the sustainability world. Next slide, please. So as mentioned, the Detroit Wayne County Port Authority, we are a government entity, funded by the city of Detroit, Wayne County, and the state of Michigan founded in nineteen seventy eight. Of course, as the other ports, we promote the movement of cargo on water even though we are not as large as some of our coastal ports with container ships and things of such. We are a much smaller operation specifically. We have our cruise dock. We are a cruise ship champion as the Great Lakes has a new booming industry of cruises coming through. We host those cruise ships, and then we also, of course, promote maritime jobs, economic development, as well as environmental stewardship on the waterways. Next slide. So the Port of Detroit actually is a collection of twenty three private terminals and two public patrolling entities. We deal with a declining eight million tons annually of bulk materials such as coal and cement. As I said, we're not like the coastal ports. We don't have containers and, like, things like that within the Great Lakes necessarily even though a few of our my other port peers are, you know, increasing their containership operations. We mostly deal with the the gritty dirty things. Right? The the the bulk material that gets windy and causes those issues related to those things as well as, you know, steelmaking and heavy equipment. And these are very old sites. These are very heavily industrialized terminal sites that have been around since Henry Ford began his work, dominating the the car industry. Right? And we are also a logistics hub. We have two international bridges, between Canada and Detroit that sees about ten thousand trucks a day going back and forth across the Southwest Detroit region and downriver. And that can cause, as you can imagine, lots of pollution. And we'll talk about that next next slide, please. So over the last three years, the Port Authority has embarked on this ambitious decarbonization and air quality improvement plan to significantly reduce emissions from those poor operations, as I mentioned, specifically the movement of goods. Through the state of Michigan, a planning grant from the state of Michigan, we were able to assess our current greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation of goods or the movement of goods, as I mentioned, which is the ships, the drayage or the trucks and trucks and rail, and the equipment on-site, so the goods and handling equipment, to be able to establish a road map to reach net zero. As you see here from these images, we are dealing with where we we sit in front of the Port of Detroit sits in front of what is known as the most polluted ZIP code in Michigan. This is a generational impact of air quality, pollution, from the industrial operations. Right? And so we also are dealing with, in terms of resilience and and mitigation, dealing with the stormwater management issues as we see an increase in precipitation, which is causing a lot of flooding, and a lot of, backup sewage sewer management, right, from the precipitation that has now been impacted due to, climate change, right, and the the increased temperatures and the drops in temperatures. We were able to, be the the bridge between those private entities, those private terminals, and the community who has long kind of had this butting head. Right? Obviously, we're rep we we understand the reason why there's been a butt of head. Right? We're dealing with people who have increased rates of asthma and respiratory cancers because of these terminal industrial operations regarding, you know, the port. So as a port authority, while we don't have control or authority actually over the private entities, we've been able to, through this research, bridge that gap and hopefully hold all of us accountable on decreasing our decarbonization or decreasing our greenhouse gas emissions and air quality. Next slide, please. So with that said, we found that thirty thousand two hundred and ninety six tons of carbon dioxide equivalents is encompassing that movement of goods, as I mentioned, the shipping, the goods and handling equipment, the drayage, and actually also the administration of the port facility. So we did not include the actual processing of cement or the processing of steel. Right? We just focused on the movement of goods because as the port authority, we felt that that is our boundary. That is what we can impact. And then, of course, what we found is that the trucks are the trucks in the rail are is our biggest percentage of that of that tonnage. And so we have to think of ways of solutions for that. Right? And I'll talk about that next next slide. So with that said, we began to look at opportunities of not just electrification because I know that is kind of the the the popular word, but also just alternative fuels because we're dealing with heavy, huge trucks and huge equipment on-site dealing with bulk bulk materials, wheel loaders, and things of such. So hydrogen, biodiesel, green methanol, researching those alternative fuels options and solutions. Right? Next slide, please, Adam. So with that said, we were able to create this achieved strategic plan between now and two thousand and forty of a net zero goal by two thousand and forty encompassing the trucks, the ships, and the goods and handling equipment using things such as biodiesel, hydrogen, electrification, all of the opportunities of of mitigation, opportunities of decreasing decreasing carbon emissions. And so we're chugging along this two thousand and forty goal. The next slide. And with that, also, we were able to create these two committees that represent both of our major stakeholder, which is the community and the private terminal operators. They both meet quarterly. They both hold the port authority and each other accountable. The port side progress lunch and learn series for our low carbon port committee for our terminal operators have been really an opportunity to allow the space to learn for our terminal operators. We're dealing with guys that have been in the industry for fifty years. They may not understand hydrogen fuel as it is today. So giving that space to to discuss and learn from some of the maritime true experts and get an understanding of the solutions have been a really great space. And then our community advisory board has been really effective of just speaking their mind and telling their truths and and bridging those gaps as well with those that have long time just had a mistrust in government. Right? Next slide. And with that said, and for focusing on decarbonization, we also are focusing on air quality. So we have purposely placed air quality monitors across the Port of Detroit region, tracking their AQIs for this last year. And we also placed one on our cruise dock. Our cruise dock is really the only body that you know, entity that we have control over. And we did find that we are seeing higher AQIs when a cruise is stopped. So now we're discussing with our cruise lines how we can mitigate that and how we can address maybe, you know, some idling vessels and shutting them down and the buses that come. What can we do and what solutions can we make, at our Port Authority office to ensure that our AQI is not having a spike when we're having cruises. And that has really been a great operation. This this platform through Just Air here in the city of Detroit is publicly available. It's a website that our community members can track, so we've been enjoying that. And lastly, as I'm sure many of you have seen, the EPA Clean Ports grant went out. We won, twenty five million dollars, about twenty five million dollars to invest in electric equipment and research hydrogen fuel. This research has been going really well. You know, there's been hiccups, of course, but being able to really directly invest into electrification and into hydrogen fuel, really speeds us ahead on that twenty forty goal. And so we're trucking along with that as well. No pun intended. Next slide. With that said, please stay up to date with us. As I mentioned, we are all in the space of learning. I think, as a sustainability manager, I can be the the tree hugger and the person that has this, you know, beautiful outlook on the environment, but the reality is there are solutions that are causing investment. Right? So we have we work with our city of Detroit, with our state of Michigan, and our county to really find ways to carry and stick those, those those solutions that are needed from our private terminals and, you know, supporting them as much as we can and also expecting them to rise to the occasion. So with that said, thank you so much, Anna. I'll leave it to you. Thank you, Taylor. And for those of you listening to the webinar, again, you can use the question function and the chat function to submit questions or thoughts that you're having that the panel can address after we hear from all of our expert speakers. Next up is Emily Federer, Director of Sustainable Development for the Port of New Orleans. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for having me, Adam, and thanks to Ramble for the for putting in on this presentation today. I think it's a really great way to share our different stories about what we're doing at our different ports, and I'm happy to hear, all the work that Taylor's been doing since she's been at the Port of Detroit. I've been with Port of New Orleans for eleven years, and served in different environmental capacities currently over all of our sustainability programs, influence projects to help them develop sustainably at the port and over our environmental compliance and permitting for Port Nola. Next slide please. So the Port of New Orleans covers a three parish jurisdiction. As many of you may know, Louisiana has parishes rather than counties. So we cover Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes shown here with our goal to maximize maritime commerce for our region. Next slide. Our port owned areas cover the areas that you can see in blue here and we, encompass operations in partnership with the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad. We have cargo and container terminals, a cruise terminal, for ocean going vessels as well as river cruises going up river as far as the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Our Inner Harbor industrial properties, and future Louisiana International Terminal, which is slated to get a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers hopefully later this year. We're just waiting on that. Next slide. Port of New Orleans is considered a diverse landlord port. I believe Port of Detroit is an operating port so they're actually the organization that's handling the materials. Taylor has a lot more control over how the bulk materials are handled via the direct organization that's handling that material. As a landlord port, we lease our properties and maintain the infrastructure that they operate on. So we have a container terminal, where we move about eight hundred TEUs per year. We move bulk and break bulk materials and project cargo. This is a photo of me standing in in front of some massive windmill blades that came in on an ocean going vessel and transported over to barge to go up to the Midwest. We have our New Orleans public belt railroad that helps us with our intermodal exchanges. Industrial real estate, helps us move cargo, and there's some light manufacturing and and smaller niche cargo movements that happen on the on the Inner Harbor navigation canal. And then finally, our cruise industry where we host home port for Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian. We have a few Disney cruises per year. So it's it's an exciting cruise industry where we also have over a million, cruise passengers that come through the Port of New Orleans per year. So Port of New Orleans environmental and sustainability journey really started right before hurricane Katrina. Our board, wanted the port to pursue an ISO fourteen thousand one EMS. However, hurricane Katrina came and, stopped that progress from happening, and the priorities really changed here in New Orleans. Finally, two thousand twelve, they got back to thinking about how the port would handle environmental issues. Previously, our engineering department would cover anything that needed to be handled from an environmental perspective through consultants. Finally got the first environmental manager in twenty thirteen. I joined the port towards the end of twenty fourteen. We also joined Green Marine and became a certified Green Marine port in twenty fifteen and became involved with the environment committee with AAPA. We won our first year grant, for a clean truck replacement incentive program to help replace drayage trucks for our for our owners and operators in New Orleans for the drayage trucks. We had a branded keep it clean campaign and worked with EPA on a pilot trash free waters program. That was also in twenty fifteen. So we did a lot of outreach for the community to help reduce litter around the port, is a huge issue in New Orleans. We also won a Brownfields area wide planning grant from EPA, that helped us catalog our old industrial properties. Port of New Orleans was established by the state of Louisiana in eighteen ninety six and our industrial properties, and the industrial canal was dug and opened in nineteen twenty three. So all those properties around there were established as industrial sites before there were any environmental, regulations so that's been a huge challenge for us. And then we released as a result of the brownfields grant, the port inner harbor revitalization plan in, twenty twenty. And every five years, we also do a five year environmental audit, to help us stay on track with all of our environmental obligations. In twenty twenty one, we acquired the property for the future Louisiana International Terminal, which is the the site that you saw downriver. We're working on building that out right now. And, you know, the last couple years, we we replaced our one hundredth truck with CleanTrip. We've completed five grant programs through the EPA and our state clean diesel program, for CleanTrip, which is really exciting and very meaningful to our, our trucking partners in terms of their own personal air quality, their truck reliability, and then also improving our our near port air quality. These trucks are typically making multiple runs into the port of New Orleans on a daily basis, doing local runs between the canal and the container terminal as well as up to Baton Rouge and back to New Orleans. And then in twenty twenty five, we completed another five year environmental audit and, registered our LIT project with Envision. So it's been a long road. I think we've accomplished a lot and I'm really excited to keep moving moving the needle on many of these projects. Next slide. So this kind of just covers what my sustainable development department includes. Our guiding frameworks and principles from the sustainability perspective, with Green Marine, the AAPA Environment Committee, Envision. And then in twenty twenty four, there's a new program out there called Electric Vehicle Adoption Leadership and we are awarded a silver, award for that for our electric fleet that we have here at the Port of New Orleans administration building and then, the charging stations that are also included with that, and we have charging available to our employees. Some of the grant programs I already talked about, listed here that are handled within sustainable development. Our environmental programs really focus on compliance and moving the needle, further for all of our tenants, our, real estate projects, construction, rail, and just across the port in general. And then from a permitting perspective, we have a permitting manager for the properties that we own. Any projects that happen on the port, we do give permits for construction similar to the way a city would, and then assist our tenants and our construction department with, any regulatory permitting that needs to be completed. Next slide. So Green Marine has really been a huge part of our sustainability journey at the Port of New Orleans. We were the eighth port in the US to gain certification. On the slide here, you can see our results from twenty twenty four. We're actually working on submitting our twenty twenty five results right now. Those are due Friday. So getting those in line, but they really Green Marine really provides a framework, that gives us goals and, different aspects to reach, you know, guidance and, to reach different levels, within Green Marine and it's it's very rigorous. They update the program every year. And then on the right side of the slide here, you can kinda see, the process by which we, go through that certification every year. Annually, we self evaluate, and then every two years, we we get a third party external verifier to verify what we what we're actually saying we do. This year, we are we will be going through that process in April. So, working on that right now. And then we have a really fun annual conference at Green Tech, which, my colleagues on the call here, we were just talking about that is coming up in, in June. So looking forward to that. Next slide. A little bit more about our project, with the Louisiana International Terminal. We started scoping and identifying sites for this project all the way back probably before twenty eighteen. It's been it's been quite a journey, but we we identified five different sites. The reason that we need to build this project is actually right behind me. You can see, our crescent well, I guess when we go on camera after, we have the crescent city connection bridge in New Orleans which limits the the height of ships that can come into the port of New Orleans. Container ships are getting bigger as the economy of scale builds. So we needed to find a site down river where we can continue to have container business on the Mississippi River. We're the only container port in Louisiana and this would be a huge a huge downfall for the economy here if we cannot open a new terminal in Louisiana. We're working with partners with Ports America and TIL to form a joint venture. Both of these operators currently are Green Marine certified in New Orleans and we've been working with them on the Envision program to help us pursue, additional frameworks of moving the needle to build on sustainability as well as resilience. So much of resilience is tied to how we act sustainably. One of the measures we're using here at at LIT is, instead of moving thousands of dump truckloads of sand to build up this property for the project, for for the stability of the container yard. We will be using dredged river sand. We've we've tested that sand for contaminants as well as geotechnical sustainability, suitability. We have a dewatering process of of how to dredge and remove the water from that sand so that's been quite an interesting process to go through. Some other aspects, we're investigating all of the different electric equipment that we can purchase, that we can utilize on the property. All of our current electric or all of our current ship to shore cranes at our current terminal are electric, and we do plan to continue to use those as well as the the RTGs that the port owns, at our current terminal. And then the the other exciting part of this project and my hope is that we will be, able to help the local community with their flooding. We will be installing a new stormwater pump station specifically for drainage from our terminal, but this will also add to the capacity for for pumping stormwater that drains from the community as well, to improve our resilience overall. And then we're also exploring on-site alternative power generation and storage and how that might work within the terminal. And it's really exciting to build a terminal from the ground up and be able to, really put those sustainability and resilience features into the project and and think that through before it's actually on the ground. Most infrastructure that we have today, around New Orleans is very aged, and it's a lot more expensive to go back and retrofit these items rather than thinking thinking about those situations from the beginning and what might be coming in the future. And that is all I have today and thank you so much. There is my contact information. You can find more information about the Port of New Orleans across all the social medias and look forward to the question and answer. Thank you so much, Emily. Again, reminder for those that are joining us, please put any questions using the webinar tech and we will bring those up to our panelists towards the end of today's conversation. Next, we have Giles Petafort, Director of Environment and Sustainability at the Port of Waikumi in California. Good morning, Giles. Hey, good morning. Adam, thank you very much for making this opportunity available. Really excited to talk to you all. Got a great story to tell that's kind of a journey. So kind of buckle up because there's a lot of content to get through in about eight minutes. So we'll just get rolling. So let's jump right into the next slide, we may. We're gonna talk about this sort of from more of a regional big picture perspective because that's really how we see resiliency as, kind of a challenge and a, something that's going affect or is affecting every single person in the country and globally. So just a little bit of background, you can see the green dot right there proximate approximately close to LA and Long Beach down there, right, the two biggest container ports in the country. We're only about forty miles from them as the crow flies or the dolphin swims. So we had to sort of do our own thing. We have our own kind of cargo flavor, and that is really refrigerated containers. We move all of the Chiquita and Del Monte bananas that come into the western US, and we bring a lot of cars. People in California love their cars. About four hundred thousand of them a year come in through our port. So that makes us number one West Coast banana port, number sixteen US container port, and number five, US auto port. So we are a very small little port, but, man, we punch way above our weight because we're all about cargo velocity and moving it off port. And that's really relevant to the conversation because we're gonna talk about interconnectivity. So next slide. Alright. So as all of my colleagues have spoken to earlier, we're looking at inside the gate electrification. We're looking at decarbonization, right, elimination of tailpipe emissions, getting rid of diesel particulate matter, getting rid of diesel soot, GHG emissions. We're very close to our adjacent community. So we have to take on that that responsibility of cleaning up our operations and assessing our kind of long term vision of integrating sustainability emissions reduction into this goal of growing opportunity for a very disadvantaged community as well. So how have we been looking at that? Well, we've been taking each of these different sources independently. We've got shore power being planned for our our deep draft vessels. We have an emissions capture barge that literally, like a catalytic converter filters the exhaust from the vessels themselves. We're electrifying our light duty fleet. We've got forty three million from EPA to electrify cargo handling equipment. Right? We're looking at all this stuff and taking a lot of responsibility for this comprehensive focus inside the gate. So let's go to the next slide. But if we were to just kind of be satisfied with that and rest on our laurels, we would be missing what is reality today. That picture on the left hand side was actually taken at the port. We've had some of the biggest wildfires in state history in our local community. That picture on the right hand side is very emblematic of our local canyons and our local mountain roads. The the climate whipsaw of heat to cold, rain to drought is something that's affecting the entire world. This is our reality, and it is not an existential threat. It is an immediate threat that is facing everybody. So let's go to that next slide if we may. Back in twenty twenty three, it was right before Christmas, it was December twenty first, we had a rainstorm that hit the port. Now this is not that abnormal to have a rainstorm here, but one which drops about three and a half inches of rain on the port in about forty five minutes is really, really unusual. And why this is relevant is because, well, as you can see in the image there, we have critical electrical infrastructure on our port surfaces that when you get that much rain, trying to be managed by a system that is not engineered for that volume of water, you have flooding. And, unfortunately, the peak of that storm event about two AM that morning coincided with a king tide and a high tide. So there was really nowhere for that water to go because there was ocean water throughout our storm drain network as happens at every single high tide. That storm event exceeded the thousand year NOAA prediction for a one hour storm by almost a factor of two. So where does that put us? It basically is off the charts. So what that tells us is there's really no tool. There is no guidance. There is no metric available to ports to understand this risk, And we'll get into that in a second. Let's go to the next slide. So what happened that night is emblematic of a new risk, a new threat, something that all of us as port managers, coastal ecosystem, coastal infrastructure managers have to be cognizant of. And that is kind of this, like, combination pincher movement. Right? Ports are at this unique location right down at the coast. We have increased rain pushing unprecedented volumes of water down our watersheds, bringing surface water flooding, overwhelming our storm drain networks, and we also have sea level rise coming up from underneath. So right in that water sandwich is port infrastructure. And right now, what that means to us has been flooding, power outages, operational paralysis. So this is really critical because if we wanna talk about resiliency, we have to be cognizant that the process begins and ends outside the gate. Right? If we don't have workers at the port, we cannot have cargo moving. If they can't get here because our local roads are flooded, none of the equipment is gonna be operated and none of the critical cargoes are gonna get moved off port. If we're okay inside the gate, but all of our off port partners are flooded, then again, the bottleneck just moves one step out in the supply chain because we have to remember, we are a chain. We are not just our own little islanded thing. We are part of a continuum. That operational discontinuity and those cascading hazards, that is the new normal. So let's go to the next slide. So what did we do about it? Well, we started by basically modeling that risk, understanding flooding. So if you look at that kind of yellow polygon, that's basically the port boundary. And you will notice there's a lot of blue overlaid on that image right there. That is the combination of sea level rise and flood risk. We need to understand this because this is not unique to us. This is just the port. That risk extends throughout our coastal community and affects everything from adjacent housing, adjacent wetlands, and really importantly, like sewage treatment