Plus there is not enough space to stack all those containers and cars that go up to Houston. And the majority of cargo is oil which goes directly to refineries which are in Texas City and Passastinkingdena since Galveston is a narrow barrier island.
“Plus there is not enough space to stack all those containers and cars that go up to Houston. And the majority of cargo is oil which goes directly to refineries which are in Texas City and Passastinkingdena since Galveston is a narrow barrier island.”
While a common belief, the storage space issue is mostly a myth. Containerization encourages just-in-time. A ship can unload containers and reload new ones in hours — two, three day max. A container just sitting around acting as a portable warehouse is costing someone money. They tend not to sit at port storage yards for weeks like cargo did back in the 1950s. They are put on railroad cars and shipped out in a day or two.
Ditto all the cars that get unloaded. If Galveston has space for all of the cars of people driving there to board cruise ships (it does), it has space to hold unloaded cars from car carriers bringing them from overseas until they get loaded up.
A better case might be made that Galveston lacks the rail capacity, but while that may be true today, it wasn’t in the 1960s. I believe that at least two sets of railroad mainlines going to Galveston Island in the 1930s have been removed. I know that there used to be a rail line paralleling 146 that isn’t there today — removed sometime in the 1980s.
The real reason all the port facilities were built in Houston was that the land on which they were built (mostly in the 1960s through 1980s was cheaper than land in Galveston and that Houston was more business-friendly to new shippers because it was hungrier than Galveston for that type of business back in the day.
Nowadays? I suspect that Houston is still more business-friendly, but I suspect that Galveston land (with deep-water access) is now cheaper than Houston land (with deep-water access). Certainly the cruise ship industry found Galveston a better buy than Houston back in the 1990s.
As for petroleum products, I think Freeport is where the bulk of those go in. With pipelines it doesn’t really matter where the refinery is relative to the port.