California's First Inland Port Approved in Mojave Desert

Kern County has approved the establishment of California’s first inland port in the middle of the Mojave Desert, a 410-acre container hub that will receive cargo by rail from congested ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Houston-based Pioneer Partners will develop the Mojave Inland Port on a tract at the southeast corner of Highways 14 and 58, a few miles north of the Mojave Air and Space Port and the desert town of Mojave, according to a report in the Antelope Valley Press.

The new logistics hub will have the capacity to handle 1 million containers that will be shipped by rail—on two-mile-long Union Pacific freight trains—90 miles along the Alameda Corridor track to Mojave from San Pedro Bay at the port in Long Beach.

Cargo will be transferred to trucks at the new inland port, with empty containers returning by rail back to the SoCal ports. The developers estimate that the Mojave Inland Port will handle as many as 3,600 trucks per day, operating around the clock.

The inland port also may make use of the lengthy runway at the Mojave Air and Space Port to handle air cargo shipments, according to the newspaper report. The project is expected to break ground next year and be completed in 2024.

“Being surrounded by the dense urban areas of Long Beach and South Los Angeles, there is limited real estate available,” said Mario Cordero, executive director of the Port of Long Beach, in a statement.

”Mojave Inland Port is the type of innovative solution that will alleviate congestion and allow dockworkers to do their jobs more efficiently, getting goods to businesses and consumers faster,” Cordero said.

The backlog at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, which has seen container ships lined up for miles at sea since the pandemic began—causing supply-chain delays across the US—prompted the Golden State earlier this year to ink several contracts for temporary “pop-up” container yards throughout the state.

In March, California partnered with the online on-demand warehouse marketplace Chunker to create six pop-up logistics hubs on state land, GlobeSt.com reported.

Chunker, which bills itself as “the Airbnb of short-term, on-demand warehouse space, is leasing a total of 150 acres at three armories, two fairgrounds and a former prison site in California that can handle an estimated 20,000 containers.

According to state officials, Chunker’s one-year contract to equip and manage the pop-up container yards requires the company to pay the state 5% of its profits from the temporary logistics hubs. The deal includes a second-year option.