-David Allen
Director for Energy and Environmental Resources, University of Texas

"Water transportation is inherently more energy efficient and therefore a lot less polluting than truck traffic.

Ten times the amount of energy is required to ship things overland as opposed to by barge.

We can put 50 to 100 containers on a barge and therefore remove 50 to 100 trucks from the road.

We did a preliminary study to look at what some of the environmental benefits might be in converting some of the truck traffic going into the Port of Houston into barge traffic going back and fort from the Port of Victoria and we the Port of Houston. What we found was the emissions reductions would be substantial.

We did a rough calculation of what the air pollutant savings would be for not having a truck drive between Victoria and Houston. The cost we came up with is somewhere between 20 and 50 dollars for every truck going between Victoria and Houston. "