USACE engages efficient permitting mechanism for Tradepoint Atlantic’s redevelopment of storied Baltimore industrial site

Much of the 168 acres at the southwestern edge of Sparrows Point now under construction for a container terminal is not, strictly speaking, land. It is slag, the byproduct of 19th and 20th century steelmaking, deposited over decades until what had been water became Coke Point, so named for the coking operations that fed the blast furnaces of the iconic Bethlehem Steel Mill on the site from 1887 to 2012.

But on Dec. 18, 2025, after two years of federal environmental review, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) issued a permit decision authorizing its next incarnation: a container terminal capable of receiving the largest ships that can reach the Port of Baltimore with the potential to reshape the logistics landscape of the mid-Atlantic.

The Sparrows Point Container Terminal (SPCT) project, developed as a joint venture between Tradepoint Atlantic and Terminal Investment Limited (a container terminal operator owned primarily by the shipping heavyweight MSC), calls for an approximately 3,000-foot marginal wharf, up to nine ship-to-shore cranes, a container yard, an intermodal rail yard, and the supporting architecture of a modern port facility. That includes a widened and deepened Sparrows Point Channel with a turning basin and a final navigable depth of 50 feet.

Getting there will require moving roughly 4.2 million cubic yards of dredged material.

USACE's Baltimore District issued the permit under authority provided by statutes that cover fill into U.S. waters, structures built over them, alterations to federal harbor improvements, and the ocean disposal of dredged material. It also served as lead agency under the National Environmental Policy Act, with the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service, and the U.S. Coast Guard participating as cooperating agencies.

What makes this particular review unique (aside from the project’s scale) is its utilization of FAST-41, a federal initiative to coordinate agency input and shorten permitting timelines on major infrastructure projects through synchronization.

“We initially had trepidation entering into the FAST-41 process,” said Joseph DaVia, chief of the Maryland North Branch in the Baltimore District Regulatory program. “However, it proved instrumental in keeping the project on schedule, ensuring accountability, and helping USACE honor our commitments.”

Before Congress established this process with the creation of the Permitting Council in 2015, a major project requiring permits from multiple federal agencies (as SPCT did) typically moved through them sequentially, with each agency working on its own timeline and asking its own questions. Conflicts between their requirements often surfaced only after years of parallel work had already been done. With FAST-41, cooperating agencies review concurrently rather than in series, utilizing a plan that maps every required federal authorization against a publicly posted schedule where anyone can track progress milestones.

The Permitting Council touts that projects supported through FAST-41 achieve a Record of Decision nearly 18 months faster than those that opt-out, and in this instance, the applicant had a signed Record of Decision in hand just two years to the week after the original Notice of Intent. This was the first FAST-41 project in the nation to have all actions completed ahead of schedule.

“The FAST-41 collaborative process prioritized active communication, analyzing alternatives, and addressing public and agency comments,” said Maria Teresi, the Baltimore District regulatory project manager who oversaw the review. “We were able to minimize aquatic impacts, including the avoidance of 100 acres of fill in the tidal Patapsco River.”

What Teresi is referencing is the review's central negotiation: where to put the dredged material. Tradepoint’s original 2023 proposal called for building a 100-acre dredged material containment facility — or DMCF — in the tidal Patapsco itself. USACE and the cooperating agencies asked the applicant to keep looking.

First, the proposed footprint shrank to 35 acres, and then to 19.6 acres in the existing Coal Pier Channel along the west side of Coke Point. After public comment on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and after further geotechnical work indicated that a planned upland facility at the nearby High Head Industrial Basin could be built taller than first designed, the in-water DMCF disappeared entirely. The Preferred Alternative, carried forward to the Final EIS, places no dredged material directly in the tidal Patapsco River.

To facilitate the community outreach and comment opportunity between the Draft EIS in January 2025 and the Final EIS in September 2025, USACE and the applicant held in-person and virtual public hearings in Feb. 2025, collected comments through March 2025, and folded the responses into the final document.

Other considerations made for building a modern container terminal include shielded high-mast lights that are directed downward and buildings finished in matte materials (both to reduce glare from a facility of this scale), plus shore power supplied to vessels at berth to reduce air quality impacts on adjacent communities. Even most of the cranes and gantries will run on electricity rather than diesel.

"Permit issuance for the Sparrows Point Container Terminal Project highlights how FAST-41 and integration of the USACE regulatory process can streamline environmental reviews," said Col. Francis Pera, the Baltimore District commander. Stakeholders, he said, held to a "steadfast commitment to collaboration, accountability and transparency" that produced a project alternative with the least impact to aquatic resources while still meeting the applicant's schedule.

The design also contemplates vessels that do not yet regularly call at Baltimore. The wharf is sized to hold two ultra-large container ships — those carrying up to 23,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (or TEUs, the standardized cargo capacity measurement in the shipping industry) apiece — simultaneously, anticipating a future in which the existing Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which connects western Maryland to its Eastern Shore, has been rebuilt at a higher clearance.

While Tradepoint Atlantic and its SPCT project are located geographically adjacent to the Seagirt and Dundalk Marine Terminals, the site is outside the portion of the harbor accessible only by passing under the Francis Scott Key Bridge and was therefore not impacted by its 2024 collapse.

When paired with the critical Howard Street Tunnel Vertical Clearance Improvement Project, which recently modified much of a historic train tunnel running beneath Baltimore City to allow double-stacked rail containers to move inland from Baltimore, the on-dock rail facility at SPCT is meant to push more goods through the Port toward the Midwest and to shorten inland supply chains relative to competing U.S. East Coast terminals. This will move Baltimore’s ranking from sixth to third in that category, according to Maryland Port Administration estimates.

As a result, Tradepoint Atlantic’s acquisition of the former Bethlehem Steel site and its subsequent growth into a 21st century logistics hub mean what is rising now at Coke Point after the May 1, 2026, groundbreaking are an amplification of what Sparrows Point has done for more than a century and a half: move American commerce.

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