Gene Seroka

With the Port of Los Angeles set to receive 233 million dollars in state infrastructure grants, as well as being one of the recipients of 1.2 billion dollars of federal funding being put forth to develop California’s hydrogen hub, Mayor Bass and Gene Seroka, Executive Director of the Port of LA, each recently offered stakeholders a POLA progress report. In their annual addresses, Mayor Bass and Seroka highlighted their Port priorities for the coming year: job creation, increasing container volume, and pushing towards a zero emissions port.

This year’s LABC Sustainability Summit took place at USC on September 22nd, bringing together both local and national industry and political leaders to discuss what's being done and what should be done to bring us closer to a sustainable future. One panel, moderated by Mary Nichols, Director of the Climate Group, featured a discussion with Executive Director of the Port of Los Angeles, Gene Seroka, addressing what's happening with sustainability at the Port of LA. VX News presents here a transcribed excerpt from this panel.

Following the announcement that California had been awarded 1.2 billion dollars in grant funding for hydrogen, Mayor Bass, members of the Los Angeles City Council, and POLA, hosted a conference at the Port of Los Angeles to celebrate and voice their intentions towards utilizing the grant to create a hydrogen hub, a major step forward for the region in terms of reaching zero emissions goals. The grant will help LADWP create one single platform where distributed energy resources like Electric Vehicles (EVs) and EV chargers, energy storage, solar photovoltaic systems (PV), and demand response infrastructure can be controlled, in response to grid needs. Doing so will enable LADWP to quickly rebalance the electrical system after an extreme climate event like wildfires, heatwaves or tropical storms. VX News brings you the complete transcript from the announcement, featuring comments from the Mayor, Gene Seroka, Councilmember Tim McOsker, Nancy Sutley, and Aram Benyamin.

While the Port of Los Angeles’s Executive Director was in Asia and Australia this week to meet with various groups to promote trade in LA, Director Gene Seroka was interviewed by Bloomberg Asia’s Heslinda Amin and David Ingles to discuss where the Port stands at the midpoint of the year and just before its peak season. Based on the high inventory levels and the movement of some cargo to other ports around the country, Seroka anticipates a lower than usual peak season.

With the pandemic-induced container ship backlog at the Ports of LA and Long Beach officially cleared, VX News spoke with the Port of Los Angeles’s Executive Director, Gene Seroka, to elaborate on POLA’s efforts to ease supply chain congestion.

Port of LA Executive Director Gene Seroka highlights opportunities to accelerate the Port’s plans for zero-emissions operations and reminds readers that with 40 percent of the nation’s exports coming through the Ports of LA & Long Beach, the impacts of capital investment at the Ports are magnified well beyond LA city limits.

With COVID-19 reducing the output of Chinese manufacturers by half—sending shocks through the global supply chain and reducing the volume of goods moving worldwide—VX News reached out in late March to Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka to offer a platform for sharing Port priorities for safeguarding operations at the West Coast’s largest trading port.

Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka has innovative initiatives around zero-emission equipment and data-driven routing, even incubating new cleantech at the port.

Dr. Gene Seroka of the Port of LA and Jeffrey Burgin of Pasha Stevedoring & Terminals share how the Green Omni Terminal demonstration proves zero-emission technologies can be integrated into our goods-movement system.