A private investment group led by Highstar Capital has agreed to invest as much as $1.3 billion to expand the Port of Baltimore as ports in the eastern U.S. push to make changes needed to serve a new generation of supersize cargo vessels.

The deal, announced Friday, is essentially a 50-year lease between the Maryland Port Administration and Ports America Group, a company owned by Highstar Capital, a New York private-equity fund. In exchange for the right to operate Baltimore's cargo-container terminal for 50 years, Ports America will make an upfront payment of $100 million and a series of infrastructure improvements at the port. Chief among them: deepening the water at the cargo terminal to 50 feet from its current depth of 45 feet.

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Posted by claire at November 21, 2009 7:34 PM