How ports are working to reduce — or even eliminate — carbon emissions

The transportation sector, which includes planes, trains, trucks and ships, accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Back in 2023, the federal government unveiled a blueprint for eliminating nearly all of those emissions over the next few decades.

Regardless of what happens to this blueprint during the Trump administration, some parts of the transportation sector are trying to decarbonize parts of the supply chain. That includes efforts at U.S. ports to reduce emissions entirely over the course of the next few decades.

At the Port of Hueneme, about 65 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, workers offload a container ship full of bananas.

“We receive bananas from Del Monte, Chiquita, and they come up here, are offloaded, and then distributed out to 13 western U.S. states and some Western Canadian provinces,” said Giles Pettifor, the Port of Hueneme’s Director of Sustainability.

After huge cranes lift refrigerated containers full of bananas off the ship, forklifts put them onto trailer chassis. Then, trucks move those to the other side of the port, where workers will plug the containers in so the bananas can stay cold.

“The next step of the process will be a truck that will connect to that chassis and pull that container off of the port,” Pettifor said. “And that truck will take it out to a processing center, a warehouse, a cold storage facility, for further distribution into the supply chain.”

Pettifor said every step of this process is almost entirely powered by fossil fuels. Over the last few years, the port’s been working on overhauling its entire operation, so that almost everything that happens within its gates can run on electricity.

“That includes shore power for the large vessels, that includes full zero-emission electrification of all the cargo handling equipment, and all of the light duty fleets that operate on port,” Pettifor said.

Pettifor said the port’s already invested upwards of $70 million in this project. And it’s in the process of lining up hundreds of millions of dollars of state, federal and private funding.

Electrifying much bigger ports, like those in Los Angeles and Long Beach, would be a much bigger undertaking, said Alex Scott, a professor of supply chain management at the University of Tennessee.

“They have thousands of thousands of containers sitting around yards, you’ve got a lot of different cranes and terminals, and there’s all this existing infrastructure,” Scott said. “How are you going to change that existing infrastructure? It’s very, very expensive, and hard to do.”

Scott said there are things that bigger ports can focus on to meaningfully reduce emissions. For instance, he said they can upgrade one of the dirtiest links in any supply chain: trucks.

“Those not only emit higher rates of CO2, but they also have the local pollutants at vastly higher rates,” Scott said. “Trucks have made massive advances over the last 10 years, by federal regulation, on all of those metrics.”

For the last few years, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have required that any new trucks that service the port be less than 10 years old.

Another solution is to cut trucks out of the equation as much as possible.

Woan Foong Wong, an economics professor at the University of Oregon, said one way to do that is to move more goods by rail.

“Rail is less polluting,” Wong said. “Because trucks emit eight times more carbon dioxide for the same ton of goods going the same mile, compared to rail.”

Wong recently found that ports can encourage companies to use more rail by making themselves more efficient. That could mean adding a new crane that makes it quicker and cheaper to load containers onto freight trains.

At the Port of Hueneme, Pettifor said making the port’s entire operation more efficient is a big part of its decarbonization plan.

Just a few hundred feet from where workers are unloading bananas, a construction crew is tearing up what used to be a cold storage warehouse.

“For about a year and a half now, we have been working on making the port ready to have more open, working cargo spaces,” Pettifor said. 

This kind of work isn’t as flashy as buying a new fleet of electric cranes or forklifts. But Pettifor says it’s aligned with the same goal of eliminating emissions.

“We have an opportunity to cut holes in the wharf, and put in new charging facilities, or align traffic to take a different route to get around the port, in a matter that is more efficient,” Pettifor said.

The Port’s goal is to eliminate fossil fuels from most of its operations by 2030. But Pettifor said the port doesn’t have the resources to do it on its own, so reaching the goal will depend on getting money from Washington.

If that money is not forthcoming, Pettifor said the port will do its best to make the changes it can with the resources it has.