Kern County has approved the creation of California’s first inland port in the middle of the Mojave Desert, a 410-acre container hub that will receive cargo by rail from the congested ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Houston-based Pioneer Partners will develop Mojave’s Inner Port on a parcel on the southeast corner of Highways 14 and 58, a few miles north of Mojave Air and Space Port and the desert town of Mojave, according to a report published in Antelope Valley. Hurry.
The new logistics center will have the capacity to handle 1 million containers that will be shipped by rail β on two-mile-long Union Pacific freight trains β 90 miles along the Alameda Corridor to Mojave from the Bay from San Pedro to the Port of Long Beach.
Freight will be transferred to trucks at the new inland port, with empty containers returning by rail to SoCal ports. Developers estimate that Mojave’s Inner Port will handle up to 3,600 trucks per day, operating 24 hours a day.
The Inner Port can also use the Mojave Air and Space Port’s long runway to handle air cargo shipments, according to the newspaper report. The project is expected to start next year and be completed in 2024.
“Being surrounded by the dense urban areas of Long Beach and South Los Angeles, available real estate is limited,” Mario Cordero, executive director of the Port of Long Beach, said in a statement.
“Mojave’s Inland Port is the kind of innovative solution that will reduce congestion and allow dockworkers to do their jobs more efficiently, getting goods to businesses and consumers faster,” Cordero said.
The backlog at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which has seen container ships lined up for miles at sea since the start of the pandemic – causing supply chain delays across the United States – prompted the Golden State earlier this year to sign several temporary contracts “from pop-up container parks across the state.
In March, California partnered with online on-demand warehouse marketplace Chunker to create six pop-up logistics centers on state land, GlobeSt.com reported.
Chunker, which bills itself as βthe Airbnb of short-term, on-demand storage space, leases a total of 150 acres across three armories, two fairgrounds and a former prison site in California that can handle approximately 20,000 containers.
According to state officials, Chunker’s one-year contract to outfit and operate the pop-up container parks requires the company to pay the state 5% of its profits from the temporary logistics centers. The deal includes a second-year option.
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