Cargo master plan jets toward Miami International Airport

Conversations about bringing jet fuel and other alternative fuels to Miami International Airport (MIA) continue as part of a cargo master plan.

As Miami Today reported in March, Commissioner Raquel Regalado asked the county to study either bringing aircraft fuel to the airport by train or constructing fuel facilities at the airport that would be accessible by rail.

This direction stems from Ms. Regalado’s actions on the airport committee, where she has focused on infrastructure and cargo, she said.

“I brought an item – I want to say like two or three months ago – we’re redoing all the generators and all the electrical at the airport because we had a generator fail,” said Ms. Regalado. “The generators are like 60 years old, and it’s really important on the cargo because we have refrigeration for the flowers and the vegetables. If we have an issue with the electricity, it really could do a lot of damage to the cargo.”

Separate and apart from passengers, Ms. Regalado said, her focus has been on growing cargo, making the best use of the cargo footprint, and future-proofing operations.

“Four years ago,” she said, “one of the first things I did was eliminate this idea of putting cargo in other airports, and then what I’m bringing in the next few months is a cargo master plan. We’re going to have a cargo master plan and I had a discussion item about that a few months ago when I brought it up to the airport committee just to make sure that everybody was on the same page.”

Historically, cargo at MIA has “just happened,” said Ms. Regalado. She said she wants to do something that is more thoughtful and incentivizes users to “consider reconfiguring earlier than their lease expiration, and to let us know where we’re at.”

As a result of these conversations, said Ms. Regalado, the issue of fuel arose “because the fuel line that we have – similar to the generators that we’re going to be replacing – is 60 years old. I cannot do work on the fuel line because you can only shut it off for two hours and that’s not enough time to do work. Plus, over the years, one of the things that has come up as being an indicator of a certain level of service for airports, particularly in the area of cargo, is to have redundancy for fuel in case an issue comes up with your main fuel source.”

“Now that we have the generators,” she said, “now that we’ll be doing the electrical, on the infrastructure side I really want to have redundancy because if something happens to one, I don’t want us to have to truck in fuel, because that’s really chaotic.”

Additionally, from an environmental side, Ms. Regalado said she wanted a vehicle in which the airport could bring in alternative fuels because there is just one pipeline.

“If we had the redundancy I could work on and then you would have that pipeline and then we would have the trains,” she said.

“What kind of birthed the idea was looking at the infrastructure, looking at the master plan, and kind of figuring out in terms of future-proofing the cargo side of the airport what did we need to do?”

Although a fuel farm on site is being considered, said Ms. Regalado, her concern was in building the nearby soccer stadium and the airport hotel there will be a lot of construction and movement, and moving the rail line and connecting it to where the fuel would be would lessen traffic’s impact. “If we activate the line, then we could also potentially move cargo on the rail line. Those are the conversations we’ve been having with FEC [Florida East Coast Railway].”

It is all part of the cargo master plan, said Ms. Regalado, and reconfiguring of the cargo area to make room for bigger airplanes and better utilize cargo space.

Conversations with FEC are ongoing, she said.

A rail spur used for cargo is “another thing that would be really helpful to the cargo master plan,” she said, “because the concern is: how are you going to get in and out of the airport, right? With all this development around it and at what times can you do that and what is the cost of that and obviously moving it by train is easier…. It’s a lot cheaper to move things by rail, and then from an environmental perspective it’s a much smaller carbon footprint.”