Cruise Industry Remains Port Saint John’s Most Visible Sign Of Growth
SAINT JOHN – The most visible sign of Port Saint John’s growth and activity level is, of course, the cruise industry, evident Tuesday with the presence of the Adventure of the Seas and its 3,300 passengers walking the streets and checking out shops, cafes and restaurants in the uptown area.
The year-over-year gains are reflected in Port Saint John’s 2018 Annual Report, with another record-setting year in the works. There has been steady growth from 49 ships with a total of 106,501 passengers in 2014 to 69 ships with 159,545 passengers in 2017. In 2019, the port is scheduled to receive 81 ships and 200,000 passengers.
“We have a ship in today, and you may have noticed the cruise business got going earlier this year,” said Port Saint John president and CEO Jim Quinn at the annual general meeting Tuesday morning at the Diamond Jubilee Cruise Terminal.
“We had our first double-ship day [already]. This year will be higher than last year. Of course, Mother Nature has a role to play. Sometimes we get diversions into our port, sometimes diversions away from our port. The long-range forecast for our area is for a long hot summer, so that’s great for building the cruise business.”
While cruise business is a dominant presence from May to October, a scan of the Port’s daily schedule showed that the Adventure of the Seas was just one of nine ships in port Tuesday. Five of them were here to ship petroleum products to domestic and foreign ports and one was a crude-oil tanker.
Quinn says this is a sign that the port’s liquid bulk business is picking up again, after a decline in 2018 largely due to the Irving Oil refinery explosion last October.
After a four-year high of 28,101,794 metric tonnes of liquid bulk exports in 2017, shipments fell to 23,180,122 in 2018. A range of liquid products is shipped from the port each year, including liquefied natural gas, fish oil and molasses. But the refinery is still the main exporter, so reduced activity has a significant impact on liquid bulk numbers.
“There was an incident at the refinery last fall that affected their production and had an immediate impact on the port,” Quinn told reporters after the AGM. “[But] we’re seeing that the production must be back up because the number of ships coming into our port and the volumes going in and out of our port are getting back into the normal ranges.”
Dry bulk shipments also decreased from 1,932,868 metric tonnes in 2017 to 1,459,308 in 2018. Potash exports, the mainstay of dry bulk business in the port, fell from 1,408,244 metric tonnes in 2017 to 1,021,401 metric tonnes in 2018.
But Quinn says shipping more than 1,000,000 metric tonnes is still something to be celebrated and he expects potash shipments to grow again in the future. In the three previous years, shipments topped out at 646,221 metric tonnes.
“Historically, we would not [ship] 1,000,000 tonnes of potash,” said Quinn. “To have more than 1,000,000 [metric] tonnes for the second year in a row bodes well for the future…We know that the amount of potash being produced is up because of new mines and expansions of mines, particularly in Saskatchewan…and it’s just barely keeping up with demand.”
Quinn said the increased demand was coming from places like Brazil and Africa, and Port Saint John is ideally situated to handle shipments to those places for potash coming by rail from across the country.