The U.S. state of Maine is finally moving forward on building a new cold storage facility in the city of Portland.
The Maine Department of Transportation and the Maine Port Authority, and a consortium of multiple businesses including Treadwell Franklin Infrastructure and Amber Infrastructure, have joined together to build a new 107,000-square-foot cold-storage facility on state-owned land at the International Marine Terminal in Portland, Maine. The new facility, which has been dubbed the Maine International Cold Storage Facility, will be able to serve the nearby operations of Eimskip USA, a shipping company operating the terminal.
The new facility has taken several years to get its start. In 2015, Americold Logistics won a successful bidding process to build the facility. However, after lengthy meetings, those plans never materialized, the Portland Press Herald reported.
Then, in 2021, the consortium announced it planned to break ground in the fall. After the project was delayed once again, it finally had a groundbreaking ceremony on 22 August.
Currently, most of the state’s cold-storage needs are handled out-of-state, Maine Governor Janet Mills said during the groundbreaking ceremony.
“Right now, about 90 percent of what we export internationally, and virtually all of what we export domestically, leaves our state by truck,” Mills said.
The project, Treadwell Franklin said, will help meet the growing needs of Eimskip. The Iceland-headquartered shipping company has increased its presence in Portland, Maine, and introduced a new larger cargo ship to its Maine line in 2019. Its cargo volumes through Portland are heading for a new record in 2022, it told the Press Herald in mid-August.
According to Treadwell Franklin, the new facility will be large enough to “accommodate customers from Maine’s growing food, beverage, and bio-pharmaceutical industries.”
Mills said the new storage facility will help a number of the state’s industries.
“We’re expanding Maine’s competitive edge on the international stage by ensuring that businesses can keep food production, storage, and distribution local,” she said on her Twitter. “This is a win for our fishermen, our local businesses and our economy – and we’re getting it done in a climate-friendly way!”
Photo courtesy of the Maine Port Authority
