FEATURE
While the outward appearance of ship-to-shore cranes remains mostly the same, the push toward onshoring, cutting carbon emissions, and the advent of AI is driving their evolution.
Written by Tom Gibson, P.E.
MOST MAJOR COASTAL CITIES are home to busy shipping ports, another cog in the wheel of global commerce. It’s here that huge ship-to-shore (STS) gantry cranes, recognizable by their A-frames and booms, pick colorful rectangular-shaped containers off enormous cargo ships and stack them on shore for shipment to places further inland.
While the majority of STS cranes appear unchanged from decades past at first glance, at some of the world’s largest ports—Shanghai and Singapore, for example—the latest shipping technologies are changing how these cranes operate.
Tuas Port in Singapore first opened in September 2022, but it’s in the middle of a massive expansion that should be complete by the 2040s. The port will eventually occupy about 1,337 hectares of land (approximately 3,300 football fields) when finished. Some 66 berths will span 26km, capable of handling the largest container ships.
It will be an automated, intelligent, and sustainable port that will deploy AI in its operations. Tuas will feature the Next Generation Vessel Traffic Management System to provide accurate, real-time situational awareness of the shipping traffic. Electrified yard cranes and automated guided vehicles (AGVs) will move containers between the yard and the wharf.
Tuas Port also aims to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, as the cranes and AGVs will reduce carbon emissions by about 50 percent compared to the diesel machines most ports use today. It will also use a smart grid management system.
Tuas Port, Singapore. Photo: Getty
If Tuas represents the industry’s future, the Port of Los Angeles shows how American terminals are working to catch up. Located in San Pedro Bay 25 miles south of downtown Los Angeles and ranking as the busiest seaport in the Western Hemisphere, the port encompasses 7,500 acres of land and water along 43 miles of waterfront.
Currently in the midst of a multi-year, $2.6 billion infrastructure investment program aimed at improving cargo efficiency, the port is also focused on new technologies to enhance digital information flow. But infrastructure alone doesn’t move containers—the cranes do.
“Ship-to-shore cranes are probably the most valued asset on a marine terminal because if they don’t work, the cargo can't come on and off the vessels,” said Joe Gregorio, Jr., president and chief operating officer at the Pacific Companies, parent company of Pacific Crane Maintenance Company (PCMC).
It’s easy to see the role STS cranes play in the shipping world, he noted. Massive investments in port upgrades will only matter if the equipment moving the cargo keeps moving.
Long Beach Container Terminal. Photo: Pacific Crane Maintenance Company
Behind the Boom
An STS crane consists of a gantry—a three-dimensional square or rectangular frame that moves toward or away from the ship on rails or rubber tires—a boom attached to the gantry goes over the vessel, and a trolley slides on the boom all the way back to the girder to the inshore side. A spreader with cables on it latches on to the corners of the container that hoists it up and down. An A-frame structure with cables above the gantry and boom provides gusset-like strength. There’s also an operations room where everything is tracked and cranes can be controlled with a joystick.
“DC motors used to drive the cranes, but we slowly evolved to variable-frequency-drive AC motors to control the speed,” explained Alfonso Meckel, senior vice president of technical services and training projects at PCMC. “As for speed, about every 30 to 45 seconds we get a container off the ship.”
Photo: Getty
PCMC Welder. Photo: Pacific Crane Maintenance Company
Keeping these machines operating safely and efficiently requires a dedicated workforce with deep technical expertise as well. Across the West Coast, PCMC provides maintenance and repair services for ships and terminals and associated equipment, including STS cranes.
The company also provides consulting and engineering services for all container handling equipment, and maintains automated STS cranes, straddle carriers, stacking cranes, rail-mounted gantry cranes, and guided vehicles.
“PCMC has many engineers on staff, including several licensed engineers in the workforce and on the management team,” Gregorio said. This includes Meckel, who shared that his Swiss education was in electrical engineering, primarily electromechanical and electric motors.
“I moved to the U.S. in the early 1980s, and I spent quite a bit of time on commercial ships doing repairs and upgrades,” Meckel said. “I ran across PCMC in 2000, and here I am 25 years later.”
Designing cranes is arguably as complex as maintaining them, and the engineering considerations begin long before the equipment reaches a port.
“The basic design is the same as from the 1950s,” said Troy Collard, general manager of sales at shipping crane manufacturer Paceco in Hayward, Calif. “The first crane from our partner Mitsui in 1958 is still that A-frame design. It’s still popular today.”
A lot of engineering goes into cranes, from structural to electrical and mechanical. “Every time that a customer wants to change the dimensions, maybe they want to go a little higher or they want the boom to go out a little farther, then we have to redo all the structural calculations,” Collard said.
Location will dictate other needs, he added. “On the West Coast, we have to deal with seismic concerns. If there’s an earthquake, you don’t want your crane to tip over. In other areas, you need to withstand the high winds of hurricanes,” Collard said.
Weight is another concern. “These cranes have to be light because the STS cranes are sitting out on the wharf. That means it’s on pilings, not firm ground,” he added.
“The steel used to be the majority of the cost of a crane. Now it’s electronics. Electrical and computer engineering for the PLC [programmable logic controller] programming and logic are all necessary for designing and manufacturing a crane.”
—Troy Collard, general manager of sales at Paceco
More Automation
While the basic A-frame crane technology remains much the same, the electronics are continuing to improve, Collard shared. One example is the optical character recognition (OCR) that’s used to read containers as they come off the vessel.
“The steel used to be the majority of the cost of a crane. Now it’s electronics. Electrical and computer engineering for the PLC [programmable logic controller] programming and logic are all necessary for designing and manufacturing a crane,” Collard said. “We have our own software, and we integrate the PLC and logic software into the crane. That includes a CMS [crane management system] just for the crane versus a TOS [terminal operating system] for the entire terminal.”
Another trend in the STS crane industry is unquestionably automation. One of the biggest reasons is that it results in fewer injuries as a result of less interaction between man and machine, Meckel explained.
“We are receiving more requests for automation,” Meckel added. “The trend is to automate the so-called yard. That’s going to take some time. It’s probably a five-year process.”
Once completed, Meckel envisions that such an automation scenario could look something like this: “When the operator picks a container off the vessel and drops it around the dock, an unmanned automated machine grabs it and takes it to the pile. Then it goes to the trucker. He backs into this gate, and another machine gets the same container, and eventually it gets loaded onto the truck to be delivered. Or they go on trains. There’s a lot of train cargo.”
But automated equipment isn’t necessarily geared toward fewer people, Gregorio added. “The second thing is efficiency. You can do more with less and increased density, and by densifying you allow additional throughput. There’s only so much footprint and so much land,” he said.
A 19th Century dock crane. Image: Getty
Cranes operate at the Port of Los Angeles. Photo: Yusen Terminals Inc.
Cargo ships line up for deliveries at the Port of Los Angeles. Photo: Yusen Terminals Inc.
Aerial shot of a docked container ship in New Jersey. Image: Getty
Manufacturing Complexities
Technical challenges are only part of the picture. The global supply chain for cranes adds another dimension.
Paceco started the container ship-to-shore crane business back in the 1950s as the container industry expanded. It built the first dedicated STS crane in the world in 1958 for Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding (later Mitsui E&S) in Alameda, Calif.
“All these A-frame cranes you see everywhere are based off that first crane we manufactured,” Collard said.
However, as global demand for STS cranes grew, Paceco could no longer meet production needs on its own.
The company began licensing its crane designs to manufacturers around the world. One of the earliest license agreements was with Hyundai in 1983, allowing the Korean firm to build cranes based on Paceco’s specifications. Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding was also a licensee in Japan and took it a step further by purchasing Paceco’s assets, drawings, and trademarks in 1988. This brought manufacturing in the U.S. to a halt and made Paceco a wholly owned subsidiary of what is now Mitsui E&S.
“The last company to make cranes in the U.S. was Paceco in 1988,” Collard added.
This brings up a key point: “There’s a monopoly of Chinese and Japanese port equipment in the United States and the possibility of cybersecurity and national security concerns. In 30 years, China went from zero share in STS cranes to over 80 percent market share of STS cranes worldwide,” Collard explained.
These concerns have renewed interest in America’s own crane-building past. “The federal government is now helping us to move manufacturing back into the States,” Collard shared. “That’s exciting. In February 2024, the White House announced that as part of its $20 billion scheme to upgrade and secure the country’s port infrastructure, Mitsui E&S and Paceco will resume manufacturing cranes in the U.S.”
Today, Mitsui E&S is the largest supplier of gantry cranes in Japan with a market share of nearly 90 percent. Its products are used at major ports around the world, including Los Angeles.
“We manufacture cranes at our factory in Oita, Japan,” said Akihiro Isezaki, export sales section chief at Mitsui E&S. "We can build a crane on the terminal site; however, that is quite rare.”
Collard described their unique arrangement. “We are a subsidiary of Mitsui E&S and license crane manufacturing technology to them. Paceco's engineering group mainly deals with crane modifications, including raising cranes and extending booms in the United States to work on larger vessels. We also support offload and commissioning of cranes that arrive in the Americas from MES.”
Photo: Getty
Sustainable Lifting
Alongside automation and advancement, ports are facing growing pressure to reduce emissions.
One way the STS crane industry has attempted to improve its carbon footprint is through electrification, converting fossil-fuel engines to electric motors to cut emissions.
“We’re trying to get away from diesel for the shore side equipment,” Meckel said. This includes rubber-tire gantry cranes and vehicles such as forklifts used to move containers from the ship-loading area to the yard, for delivery to trucks and railroads.
Although most ports now use electric STS cranes, in some more remote areas, they’re still using diesel, Collard noted.
“We’re converting diesel machines to hybrid for now,” Meckel said. “Hybrid is a partial diesel, a smaller diesel engine with batteries. That’s the general plan for converting to full electric. But it’s slow, I don’t know if the infrastructure is going to be able to take all this charging. We have to come up with a smart electrical grid to handle it all. Eventually, that plain diesel will get converted to hydrogen.”
Both the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have committed to reach zero emissions by 2030, added Frances Ohlheiser, director of communications at Yusen Terminals. “All the terminals in the port have made a commitment to do that. And each terminal has their own plans on what that future looks like,” she said.
Since 1991, Yusen TerminaI, Inc. has provided marine terminal services at the Port of Los Angeles to several global shipping lines and transportation companies. The company currently operates 10 Post Panamax Gantry cranes, including six state-of-the-art Super Post Panamax Gantry cranes.
Various trials are taking place in an effort to achieve these lofty goals. “We have one hydrogen powered rubber tire gantry (RTG) crane [at Yusen Terminals] and a USN terminal in the Port of Los Angeles,” Collard said. “It’s been running for over a year. I think they’re going to move in the direction of hydrogen.”
Of course, STS cranes already lend themselves to sustainability by virtue of intermodal shipping. The same standardized container used on a ship works on trucks and railroads as well. Containers are dictated by ISO standards, with lengths of 20, 40, and 45 feet. Ships are set up to also deal with the 53-foot containers that run over the road on tractor trailers.
Meanwhile, Gregorio pointed to another innovation: “You may see terminals being developed in the ocean in the future. They’re talking about that, but that’s 20 years away.”
So while STS cranes may look the same, there’s plenty of innovation that’s transforming their operations. From electronics and software to reducing the carbon footprint to domestic manufacturing, the shipping industry has a lot of change on the horizon.
Based in Sugar Grove, Va., Tom Gibson, P.E. is a consulting mechanical engineer specializing in machine design, sustainability, and recycling and a freelance writer specializing in engineering, technology, and sustainability.
Cargo crane at the port of Barcelona. Photo: Getty
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