Moving freight is the name of the game, Stacy Watson told the crowd at the Liberty County Chamber of Commerce’s Progress Through People lunch Thursday.
The Georgia Ports Authority wants to move even more freight in the future, Watson, the ports’ executive director of economic and industrial development said, and it has plans to do so.
Thanks to Brunswick’s facility supplanting Baltimore’s port, the GPA boasts having the No. 1 port for roll-on/roll-off, or RO/RO, and the Savannah port is coming off its second-busiest year ever. In the next 10 years, Watson said, the GPA will spend $4.5 billion to expand its capacity.
The GPA plans to grow from handling 7 million TEUs, or twenty-foot equivalent units, to 12 million in 2035. It is adding five big ship berths, too, the most of any U.S. port. The ports handled 5.7 million TEUs in fiscal year 2025, just shy of the record number for the port of 5.8 million in 2022. For FY25, the ports’ volume was a 58.3% increase since FY16, when it handled 3.6 million.
“It is one of the fastest growing ports in the nation,” Watson said. “There is no better growth curve at any other port.”
The GPA’s yard capacity at Savannah is expected to grow by 80%, allowing for 190,000 containers, and a 50% increase in on-dock rail, which will enable the GPA to have 15 10,000-foot-long trains headed out. Its trucking lanes will go from 53 to 100 and its number of ship berths will double.
With the Garden City Terminal, which Watson called the GPA’s “the jewel in crown,” the ports can handle seven ships at once. The Ocean Terminal, which is right under the Talmadge Bridge, is being converted from RO/RO traffic to containers and will enable another three ships to be berthed.
The Garden City Terminal is the longest contiguous dock in the U.S., Watson said, and at 1,500 acres it is the largest single container terminal in the Western Hemisphere. It is the largest intermodal facility of any port in the United States. It has two miles of continuous berthing space and can handle seven large ships.
“The largest vessels that call on the U.S. call on Savannah,” Watson said.
As an example of how big the Garden City Terminal is, all seven terminals at the New York/New Jersey Terminal, the No. 1 port on the East Coast, can fit inside Garden City’s footprint, Watson said.
The ports average 39 weekly service calls from shipping lines.
Across the river, the GPA has more than 450 acres on Hutchinson Island for what will be known as the Savannah Container Terminal, giving the ports an additional three berths for big ships.
Ocean Terminal’s first phase of expansion is expected to be completed next year, and phase 2 will be done in 2028, expanding the port’s capacity of handling TEUs by more than 2 million a year. The Savannah Container Terminal, when it opens, will boost that total by another 3.5 million TEUs annually.
The Savannah Harbor Expansion Project deepened the port’s river channel from 42 feet to 47 feet, and the seven-year effort finished in 2022, at a cost of nearly $1 billion. The river was dredged an additional five feet to allow ships carrying 14,000 TEUs to dock in Savannah.
But the GPA is looking at welcoming even larger ships to its berths and to do that, it either needs another deepening of the channel or have the Talmadge Bridge raised. At mean high water, the bridge has 185 feet of clearance.
The GPA now accommodates ships carrying as many as 17,000 TEUs and wants to push that figure to as many as 21,000 TEUs.
“We have some work to do with the bridge and the river depth,” Watson said. “We’re working our way to handling the biggest ships in the world.”
The ports, Watson added, have to have additional capacity at the facility to absorb its future opportunities. The ports also boast getting cargo in and out rapidly, either through trucks or on railcars.
Savannah’s facility also has the largest intermodal rail facility in the Western Hemisphere, and the GPA now has its Appalachian Regional Port near Chatsworth open and the Blue Ridge Connector near Gainesville in operation soon. The Savannah port sends out 42 trains per week and it takes 22 hours to get a container from a ship to rail.
“We like rail,” Watson said.
Also now open is a new customs and border protection facility that gives shippers a one-stop shop, Watson said.
“It’s something no other port can offer,” he added.
Trucks coming in and out of the port also have faster turnaround times than anywhere else, Watson boasted. There are over 14,000 trucks a day coming through the gates at Savannah’s port and a truck going from Savannah to Liberty County can make four trips, or turns, a day. Some trucks log up to as many as 10 turns a day.
“In New York or Los Angeles, they are lucky to get two,” Watson said.
The Savannah port can serve 70% of the nation’s population, and with more industries moving to the Southeast, there are more opportunities for the ports, Watson noted.
Cargo coming from China gets to Savannah two days faster than other East Coast ports and the expense is 32% less, Porter said. Ships coming from India, one of the port’s growing markets, also comes to the Savannah port faster than it reaches West Coast ports.
Out of 940 ports across the globe, Savannah is ranked No. 43 and it is No. 2 in the U.S., second only to New York-New Jersey, in connectivity, which includes the number of markets and number of vessels served.
“We are one of the best-connected ports in the United States,” Watson said.