The dynamics of Canada’s economy played out in trade through Port Metro Vancouver in 2015 with the weakening of shipments in commodities such as coal and metal concentrates overshadowed by record exports of wheat and pulse crops, as well as record container traffic.

Port Metro Vancouver handled 138 million tonnes of cargo in 2015, the agency reported Thursday, which was off 2014 results by just one per cent, with a big drop in shipments of mining commodities, particularly thermal coal from the U.S. to China.

Shipments of thermal coal, which is used in generating electricity, were down 21 per cent to 9.1 million tonnes in 2015. Shipments of steelmaking coal were also down eight per cent.

Wheat exports, on the other hand, were up 20 per cent to 10.7 million tonnes, and specialty crops, including pulses such as peas and lentils, were also up 20 per cent to 3.5 million tonnes.

“Overall, we ended the year about level in terms of total tonnage, but record volumes in grain, record volumes in potash and record volumes in containers offsetting that decline,” said port CEO Robin Silvester.

The decline in volumes for coal and mining commodities, he added, were not a surprise.

Declines were also seen in metal imports, mostly steel and fabricated components, as a result of lower investments in the energy sector, Silvester said.

Foreign forest product exports including logs, lumber, wood chips and wood pulp saw a slight decrease to 10.9 million metric tonnes.

Oil is another commodity that saw a sharp drop in 2015, with seaborne shipments to U.S. ports down one third to just under two million tonnes compared with 2014.

Declining oil prices made sales to overseas markets less attractive, the port said, and changes to allocation rules on Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline resulted in lower volumes available for export by ship.

The terminals that export agricultural commodities and potash have made big investments in recent years to increase their capacity, and Silvester said improvements in the supply chain for their products is showing gains.

One of the surprises, Silvester said, was a 15-per-cent increase in exports of Canadian pulse crops — peas, beans and lentils — to India, the port’s fifth biggest trading partner.

“India has had a couple of pretty tough years in terms of domestic agricultural production,” Silvester said, with its farmers enduring back-to-back years of drought in key farming areas.

“With efficient supply chains and efficient production capacity in Canada, we’ve been able to help them take up the gap effectively,” Silvester said.

Increasingly, those shipments of pulse crops are being put into containers, rather than being loaded as bulk commodities, Silvester said, which helped drive record container traffic of 3.1 million twenty-foot-equivalent units. (The typical 40-foot seaborne container equals two TEUs.)

That represented a five-per-cent increase in total container movements through the port. Port Metro Vancouver and terminal operators are investing in these operations to increase capacity.

Results for container shipments were swayed by the diversion of U.S.-bound cargo from American ports in the early months of 2015 due to a labour dispute and threat of a strike, but Silvester said there has been consistently rising domestic demand for container-based trade.

“We’re seeing significant export volumes (via container) now,” Silvester said, “nearly three million tonnes of specialty grains (in 2015) and significant amounts of lumber and pulp were exported in containers.”

By weight, specialty crops represented the port’s second-biggest containerized export at 2.8 million tonnes, a three-per-cent increase from a year ago just behind lumber at about four million tonnes, up one per cent from the previous year.

However, the biggest increase was in empty containers being sent back to foreign ports, the Port Metro Vancouver report shows.

Of the 3.1 million TEUs terminals handled in 2015, 407,588 TEUs were empty, outbound containers, a 33-per-cent increase from 2014. And the 446,046 empty containers that moved through terminals in 2015 represented 14 per cent of the total.

depenner@vancouversun.com

Twitter.com/derrickpenner

with file from Tiffany Crawford, Vancouver Sun

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