FLOAT INC. PresentsConcept for a system of Offshore Security Ports

as adopted by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)

Livermore, CA 94550 

Operated by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration Lawrence Livermore National

Laboratory

Security Port design by Float Inc.

Illustration by Mark McDaniel/LLNL

The Portunus Project In May 2002, Float Inc. proposed a port security

strategy titled "Beyond the Horizon" and published a white paper which was distributed to most of the agencies that are involved in homeland security. Although the Department of Homeland Security was not yet established, the idea received much favorable response.

The exploration by LLNL of off-shore ports, dubbed the Portunus project, grew out of a report called “Beyond the Horizon” authored in 2002 by the staff of the San Diego company, Float Incorporated.

The Portunus Project Future U.S. ports could be located in the ocean, 20 to

40 miles from shore, under the proposed Portunus project. The off-shore port concept would allow cargo to be inspected far away from cities as one way to increase homeland security.

Float Inc. concept for a system of Offshore Security Ports has been adopted by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as the leading means to frustrate terrorist attack on the CONUS via maritime traffic.

Each offshore floating Security Port will facilitate the complete automated inspection of every cargo container offloaded from trans-oceanic carriers before they are transferred to coastwise shipping or local seaport delivery.

The Portunus Project The floating platform for the Security Port design is

Float Inc.’s Pneumatically Stabilized Platform (PSP): with a horizontal surface estimated at some 400 acres

(±162 hectares) 8,000 feet (2.4 km) overall span and providing 36,000 linear feet (10,972 linear meters) of

protected, calm water dockage segregated equally between arriving and departing shipping.

Inspection is applied between the two zones in their connecting surface transport. In addition to operational efficiency benefits, the Security Port is to be largely self powered by “Rho-Cee” wave energy converters and wind turbines arrayed along its windward faces.

Read more: www.floatinc.org/SecurityPort.aspx Float Inc LinkedIn & Slideshare presentation:

1. Float Inc and Portunus offshore port concept project http://lnkd.in/dMUnfkD

The Portunus Project Dr. Neal A. Brown, Vice-President of

technology for Float Incorporated, patent owner of one of the technologies to be evaluated, said floating off-shore ports could be about 400 acres in size and built with reinforced, pre-stressed concrete.

The off-shore ports would cost about $15 million per acre, weigh millions of tons and consist of modules that would be 1,000 feet long and about 200 feet wide, said Brown, who taught naval architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of New Orleans. The ports would be moored to the ocean floor.

The Portunus Project “Off-shore ports would not only achieve much

more security, but they would also help provide an economy of shipping,” Brown said. “The port business is all about real estate. In some cases, containers are moved several times inside a port before they are loaded onto trains or trucks. None have enough real estate.”

“With off-shore ports, there is a potential benefit to the U.S. economy because U.S. supply chain logistics can be improved”, said Hank Glauser of the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate and the principal investigator for Global Security’s Portunus off-shore port project.

The Portunus Project On June 8, 2010, three of the nation’s top 10

business schools: Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business

— presented economic analyses of the off-shore port concept during a day-long session at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco.

The economic feasibility studies were presented to a panel of government experts, who then interviewed the business school teams and recommended a path forward for the off-shore port concept.

The Portunus Project The panel recommended that the top priority at

this time should be a proposal on the technical feasibility of the off-shore port concept.

The technical feasibility study would include computer simulations, engineering research and small-scale wave testing of the proposed platform. It would focus on structural integrity, platform stability, wave attenuation, buoyancy limitations and other key engineering issues facing the design, deployment and operations of an off-shore port.

The Portunus Project In their presentation, Northwestern’s Kellogg

School of Business students recommended building six off-shore megaports located - Seattle, Washington Oakland, California Los Angeles-Long Beach, California Gulf of Mexico zone State of Georgia State of New York.

It was estimated that the six ports would cost about $60 billion to build, with an annual economic and tariff benefit of about $5.3 billion per year and a payback period of 23 years, according to the Kellogg School of Business team.

The Portunus Project The panel of government experts thought the Kellogg

team’s tariff income would be lower than expected, but added that the value of WMD avoidance would be much higher than the team’s $730 million estimate, probably running into the hundreds of billions of dollars, significantly shortening the payback period.

Under the Kellogg School’s plan, a phased-in approach would bring megaports on line from west to east. Experience from initial megaports would be applied to new ones, and there was an expectation that shippers would attempt to divert cargo from the new megaports during the implementation process unless a government mandate was in place.

The Portunus Project The best operational model for Portunus, in the

view of the Tuck School, would be to have a public-private partnership for constructing the estimated $10 billion off-shore ports. The federal government would raise the financing and private firms would do the construction.

“The panel members were impressed by the presentations and appreciative of the Laboratory’s efforts,” Glauser said.

“They found the business school analyses to be very educational.”

“They also decided that there was a significant and positive case to be made for the economic feasibility of the Portunus concept.”