The Georgia Ports Authority has secured federal approval for a new $2.3 billion container terminal in Savannah, clearing a major hurdle in its plan to expand the port’s annual handling capacity to 12 million twenty foot equivalent units. The US Army Corps of Engineers approved the Savannah Container Terminal permit after a three year review, Georgia Ports president Kevin Price announced on Wednesday.
The planned 350 acre facility on Hutchinson Island will add 3.5 million TEUs of annual capacity and accommodate the largest container ships. Savannah’s current capacity is 7.75 million TEUs. Construction is scheduled to begin in January 2028, with completion expected in the mid 2030s. The terminal is the centrepiece of a nearly $5 billion infrastructure programme for the next decade that includes five additional large containership berths and expanded roll-on roll-off capacity at Brunswick.
A second piece is already moving. At Savannah’s Ocean Terminal, a $1.6 billion redevelopment will lift annual container capacity from 200,000 TEUs to 1.75 million TEUs and was more than 60 percent complete in late September, with completion expected by the end of 2028. The authority said it invested $4.13 billion in port and inland infrastructure over the past decade.
Demand is keeping pace for now. Savannah handled a record 504,015 TEUs in September, up 3.7 percent from a year earlier, pushing fiscal first quarter traffic above 1.5 million TEUs. Read alongside Los Angeles’s record September, reported in yesterday’s edition, the US port system is committing capital on the assumption that elevated, rerouted container flows are a structural feature of the war economy, not a spike.