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Dakotas News

26 Jun 2019

Water Outflow on Seaway Now Above 10,400 CMS

Photo courtesy of Chamber of Marine Commerce

The Chamber of Marine Commerce supports the International Lake Ontario-St. Lawrence River Board’s decision Friday to continue flow rates from the Moses-Saunders dam at 10,400 cubic meters per second (CMS).Maintaining the 10,400 CMS outflow still results in a significant cost to the economy, with an estimated $2.3 million to $3 million in business revenues lost for every day it’s in place due to delays for all ship transits through the Seaway.The Chamber’s ship operators are following…

15 Apr 2015

US Could Eliminate Energy Imports -EIA

Figure 1 (Source: EIA)

EIA's AEO2015 projects that U.S. The Annual Energy Outlook 2015 (AEO2015) released today by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) presents updated projections for U.S. energy markets through 2040 based on six cases (Reference, Low and High Economic Growth, Low and High Oil Price, and High Oil and Gas Resource) that reflect updated scenarios for future crude oil prices. "EIA's AEO2015 shows that the advanced technologies are reshaping the U.S. energy economy," said EIA Administrator Adam Sieminski.

13 Mar 2015

Aleutian Islands Gets Shipping Protection Zone

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) approved protective buffer zones (“Areas to be Avoided”) around Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, approximately 10 years after a shipping disaster occurred off its coasts. In December 2004, the M/V Selendang Ayu foundered off the Aleutians amidst severe weather and was blown to shore, eventually breaking into two pieces and causing more than 300,000 gallons of toxic heavy fuel oil to spill into pristine marine waters and resulted in the deaths of six crew members. Shipping in and around the Aleutian Islands is significant. In 2012, nearly 2,000 individual vessels made more than 4,600 transits through Unimak Pass at the eastern end of the island chain.

06 Oct 2014

U.S. Corn Harvest Competes With Oil Transport

The giant corn harvest about to hit full stride in America's Midwest looks set to overwhelm storage and pile up outdoors, grain industry sources said, raising quality issues and making it hard to keep supplies moving. This year's record corn crop of 14.4 billion bushels alone would fill up 60 percent of the country's grain storage of 24 billion bushels. In total, with a record soybean crop too and hefty harvests of other grains including spring wheat, there will be about 20 billion bushels of new crops looking for storage. That would be on top of the 3.5 billion bushels reported in storage as of Sept. 1 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

24 Sep 2014

Exporting Crude Oil A “No-Brainer”

As I watch the back and forth in Washington – and beyond – on the issue of whether to allow the export of crude oil and LNG, I can only shake my head and wonder why it is even a topic for discussion anymore. I honestly cannot think of a single reason why we shouldn’t. Our European and Asian readers are probably laughing as I discuss the merits of changing a domestic policy that is clearly a remnant from a bygone era. Here at home, though, it’s not really a laughing matter, is it? For more than four decades, the biggest threat to American security was energy – or rather the lack of enough domestic supplies and the use of energy (by others, principally OPEC) as a geopolitical weapon. Those days, at least for North Americans, are long gone. The shale boom is upon us.

01 Jul 2014

U.S. Army Corps to Close Upper Mississippi As Waters Rise

Rising flood waters were expected to make 11 locks and dams impassable on the mid- and upper-Mississippi River and force the closure of the river later on Monday from Bellevue, Iowa, to Saverton, Missouri, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said. The closure would be the most extensive since 2008 on that stretch of the country's busiest waterway, said Ron Fournier, public affairs officer for the Army Corps' Rock Island district. At least 80 barge tows are expected to be affected by the closure. The Mississippi River is the main shipping route to the U.S. Gulf Coast, where about 60 percent of all U.S. corn, soybeans and wheat exports exit the country. Near-record rains caused extensive flooding last week in parts of Minnesota, Iowa and the Dakotas.

16 Nov 2010

Port of Duluth Anticipates Strong Finish to Season

The Port of Duluth-Superior is heading into the final three months of the 2010 shipping season with maritime leaders anticipating a strong finish. Recent tonnage reports indicate a 25 percent overall increase in year-to-date shipments, plus a robust grain trade that has already posted a staggering 89 percent increase over last year’s figures. Through September, over 26.5 million short tons of cargo have moved through the Twin Ports. When the bottom fell out of the economy in 2009 and steel production slowed, shipments of raw materials dropped dramatically, but a critical demand for iron ore and coal on the lower Lakes drove sharp increases early in 2010.