We have needed direct rail from LA/Long Beach to the East Coast for a long time, as long as I’ve been watching California Logistics. There hasn’t been anybody with the power to force it into existence. The West Coast Ports would have been wise to fertilize such an arrangement years ago.
It would cut logistics emissions and costs for many shippers.
Now comes Amazon. They have the market power in logistics and shipments to make it happen. Amazon partners, and that includes most anyone with any volume, can choose this service for ocean freight through LA to Amazon’s East Coast fulfillment centers. It’s called Amazon Global Logistics Standard Ocean Express.
Amazon has not named the rail partner, nor published rates, nor identified which fulfillment centers it will deliver to.
We can guess that it will be faster than many current rail offers, and faster than trucking. It would not be hard either to route around the ‘Chicago bottleneck’, the switching yards causing delays in the Chicago area, or, with enough volume, force better performance there.
BNSF already is investing in faster rail with their Barstow area intermodal transfer yard, and has an agreement with CSX in place for full East Coast access. It will go by way of Kansas City. And the UP merger with Norfolk Southern (NS), if it goes through, will provide a competitive coast-to-coast route.
Amazon has quite a few major customers who will possibly find this offer attractive. Procter & Gamble, 3M, Lands’ End, and American Eagle Outfitters are three early customers for Amazon Supply Chain Services.
It should have happened years ago, but better late than never.
Copper is an important mineral in this electric and electronic age. It’s not exactly in short supply, but it takes a long time to start up new supply sources in the US. Taseko Mines harvested its first copper cathodes at Florence Copper in early March 2026, ending an roughly 18-year drought of entirely new US copper mines built from scratch. (See second article below).
Several mines are under development in Arizona. I’m an interested observer of mining; I worked for a very fine mining company long ago, which operated a very large copper mine outside Tucson AZ USA. I learned a lot about copper and other mining operations, much of which is now out of date— the world moves on!
The interest in this story is the intricacy of metals supply chains. It’s been impossible to build a smelter in the US in recent years. Smelters produce many noxious materials, and no one wants them nearby. So copper mined in the US must either be processed on-site, using a process called solvent extraction-electrowinning (SX-EW) or be shipped elsewhere to be upgraded to commercially usable copper. Affinity highlighted a critical bottleneck: smelting. Only two primary copper smelters remain operational in the country, meaning new domestic mine production does not necessarily translate into domestically refined metal. It has to be shipped overseas to be processed.
Rio Tinto’s giant Resolution Copper project in Arizona could eventually supply more than a quarter of US copper demand, according to Affinity. This project is forging ahead despite intense criticism from Native American tribes and citizens who deplore the landscape devastation an open pit copper mine creates. US law does not require mining operators to remediate land they have destroyed while mining.
To process the deep underground ore, Resolution Copper will perform the initial extraction and concentration on-site, but they will not do the final chemical refining on-site. Instead, they will use a two-stage approach: processing the ore into a high-grade powder called “concentrate,” and then shipping that material to external commercial customers for smelting and refining.
So many current plans do not eliminate the need for foreign involvement in metallic copper production.
Broker Banchero Costa reported that the US imported a record 225,094 tonnes of refined copper and copper alloys in July, the highest monthly total in data going back to 1990. The figure was up 78% month-on-month and 8% year-on-year as traders rushed material into the country ahead of possible tariffs.
It’s really hard to eliminate dependency on foreign infrastructure in today’s world. and perhaps we should not want to, but rather cultivate alliances and friendships with countries that can help us. Copper smelter capacity is spread around the world. Data below is from World Population Review.
Japan and Korea and India would be good candidates. Except for Chile and Canada, these countries are far from the US. Both also produce large quantities of copper. That means a large need in the US for shipping capacity to and from the foreign smelters.
If carbon capture technology is ever to be useful, there have to be places to store the captured carbon. One place is deep in the earth, in abandoned oil wells. We’re seeing somewhat more interest in carbon capture in maritime, and also in manufacturing areas. Maritime is more of an issue, because the captured carbon must be stored onboard, and offloaded periodically.
One option is to sell the compressed cold carbon to industrial users. But there’s not enough demand if most ships were producing captured carbon. Already, onshore carbon capture can supply a good deal of the commercial need for CO2.
Reuse of carbon in this way is simply circular; it does not actually remove carbon from the natural environment, it simply recycles it. And many onshore facilities like power plants and cement processes could rather easily capture their carbon emissions.
All this carbon can’t simply be recycled; there must be a place to put it. It’s odd that there has not been more investment in places to sequester the captured carbon.
That’s why the INEOS announcement in the article below is interesting. INEOS is an international chemical company with headquarters in many countries. (They also co-own and operate Manchester United, a Premier League football club).
They have designed a complete system to sequester the carbon in the North Sea, called Greensand. The full value chain will be established. The captured CO2 will come from Danish biomethane plants.
Once captured, CO2 is liquefied, delivered by truck to a dedicated CO2 terminal at Port Esbjerg, shipped aboard Carbon Destroyer 1, the EU’s first purpose-built CO2 carrier, and injected into the Nini West reservoir in the Danish part of the North Sea, a depleted oil field some 250 km offshore, approximately 1,800 m beneath the seabed.
Currently the project can store 400000 tonnes annually, but plans to expand to between 4 and 8 million tonnes annually.
There are still institutional barriers limiting capture of CO2 at scale — regulations, infrastructure, and investment. Since we’re not going green on energy anytime soon, it’s time to start investing big time in carbon capture — technology and infrastructure.
