An aerial view of the container terminal at the Port of Mobile. The facility is operated by APM Terminals.Alabama State Port Authority

Mobile’s fast-growing container port is on track for a new round of expansion work.

In other big topics at a Tuesday meeting of the Alabama State Port Authority board, port officials took note of a recent change in ownership in another major port asset.

The container terminal at the Port of Mobile is operated by APM Terminals. Since it was established in 2008, the Port Authority and APM have worked together on a series of expansion programs. Though it is much smaller than the nation’s biggest container terminals on the East and West coasts, it has been one of the nation’s fastest-growing over the last decade.

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Phase 2 of the growth plan, completed in 2017, included the addition of two huge new cranes. Phase 3, which cost about $49.5 million, was approved in 2019 and included a dock extension that allowed the terminal to handle two 1,000-foot-long ships at the same time, as well as more storage yard acreage.

On Tuesday, Port Authority Director and CEO John Driscoll told the board that negotiations with APM on Phase 4 were nearly finished. Phase 4 will cost around $72 million, he said, and will roughly double the capacity of the terminal.

Driscoll stressed that the plan hasn’t been finalized, and no contract has been signed. “This is not a done deal,” he said, “but we’ve agreed on the key terms.”

He said that Phase 4 would consist mainly of additional yard storage and would expand the terminal’s handling capacity to about a million TEUs per year. A TEU, or Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit, represents the capacity of a basic 20-foot shipping container and is the standard measure in the industry.

By comparison, the port handled 277,307 TEUs in 2016. In January, the Port Authority said that in 2021 its volume had topped 500,000 TEUs for the first time.

The port, the state and railroads are working on projects to establish container rail connections from the port to industrial centers in the state. The additional capacity at the container terminal will support that traffic. “That’s just going to add to the new business coming through,” Driscoll said.

During Tuesday’s meeting, Driscoll and other officials noted that MTC Logistics, a company that recently opened a massive refrigerated shipping facility in Mobile, was purchased earlier this month by Lineage Logistics.

The new MTC facility has been seen as a game-changer for the port and the state. Aside from serving as a distribution center for refrigerated and frozen goods coming into the port, it has the capacity to blast-freeze 30 truckloads of cargo every day. State and port officials have said it will enable the Port of Mobile to become a go-to export point for Alabama’s poultry producers.

Port officials recently announced figures showing that the port’s volume of refrigerated cargo was 54.2% higher in February than in January, and 80.9% higher than in February 2021.

Prospects for further growth looked good: As MTC held a grand opening for its facility in October, a company official said plans already were under way to build a second one. Driscoll said Tuesday that because the Lineage Logistics acquisition was so new, it wasn’t yet clear whether that expansion was still moving forward. But he said that as part of the deal, Lineage would have acquired MTC’s option on the property to be used for the expansion.

Driscoll and others had praise for both companies.

Driscoll told the board that Lineage was a much larger company than MTC and that it had recently announced raising $1.7 billion in new equity to fuel its growth. “Bigger isn’t always better, but they’re a really good company,” he said. “It’s kind of with mixed emotions, because MTC Logistics was a great company, a family run business, it’s a good company. But this company is well-run as well, so we’re looking forward” to working with it.

Lineage Logistics describes itself as “the world’s largest temperature-controlled industrial Real Estate Investment Trust and logistics solution provider,” with more than 400 facilities worldwide and more than 2 billion cubic feet of storage capacity.

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