Planning in the port business is like turning around one of the mammoth containerships that sail in and out of Charleston Harbor nearly every day.
It requires time, patience and purpose.
The S.C. State Ports Authority's $105 million acquisition of the former WestRock paper mill along the Cooper River in North Charleston is a textbook example. A decade or more will likely pass before the 280-acre waterfront property will begin its next life as a sizable shipping terminal.
"It's going to take a lot of preparation before that site could ever be utilized," SPA chief executive Barbara Melvin told lawmakers at a hearing in Columbia last week.
The sale of the mill with its 5,000 feet of future berth space along the Cooper River was finalized April 26, according to real estate documents recorded last week with the Charleston County Register of Deeds.
As part of the deal, WestRock Co. included a swath of undeveloped land off Jedburg Road near Summerville.
The former WestRock paper mill site gives the S.C. State Ports Authority 280 acres and 5,000 feet of future berth space next door to its North Charleston Terminal.
The Atlanta-based packaging company and successor to the old Westvaco Corp. announced a year ago it would shut down the 500-worker papermaking plant by late summer after 86 years, citing a "combination of high operating costs and the need for significant capital investment."
WestRock also stated that it was preparing the property for sale.
The SPA was an eager buyer for an obvious reason. The manufacturing site off Virginia Avenue near I-526 will enable it to more than double the size of its North Charleston Terminal right next door.
"It's very exciting for us when we're able to integrate that property into an existing facility," Melvin said.
Just not anytime soon.
The conversion from paper mill to port isn't projected to be needed or completed until the 2030s or possibly the 2040s, Melvin projected.
The acquisition is one piece in a complicated and expensive transportation puzzle that requires several other big-ticket projects to fall into place. All are tied to the emergence of supersized container vessels that the SPA and many other port operators are scrambling to accommodate to stay competitive.
Among the first items on the to-do list is the completion of the SPA's 3-year-old deepwater Leatherman Terminal a few miles away on the former Navy base.
Another is the proposed replacement of the nearby Don Holt Bridge with a higher span that will allow the mega-vessels to safely pass under I-526.
Also, the navigation channel in that section of the Cooper will need to be deepened by several feet.
For those reasons, Melvin said, the WestRock property “is not the next increment of capacity for us."
"We will build out the Leatherman Terminal before we move to that area because to utilize fully the paper mill site, along with any kind of modernization to our North Charleston facility …. we need to be able to handle the biggest ships there," she said.
Melvin and her predecessors at the SPA have stressed that planning how and where the port adds new berths and wharf space is a multigenerational process. it often requires early upfront investments and involves lengthy time horizons that can stretch decades into the future.
“Just permitting, financing, planning … all of that takes a lot of time," she said.
While the WestRock closure was regrettable based on the job losses, it also was a fortuitous once-in-a-lifetime chance for the port to secure and recycle an environmentally challenging site that will provide enough expansion space until at least mid-century, based on current projections.
“This is the future," Melvin told lawmakers, who are expected to provide $55 million in state funds to close the deal. "Port activity really takes 20, 30, 40 years sometimes to plan. And if we had not grabbed this opportunity with the WestRock property, in 20 years, whoever is sitting in this seat should have to answer the question, 'Who was asleep at the switch?' And that would have been me.”
The North Charleston Terminal is now the smallest of the SPA's three box-ship hubs, with five cranes that can move up to 500,000 containers annually.
Once the mill property is added to the mix, it'll be able to handle 10 times as much cargo, making it, by far, the largest.
