Future-proofing
Design principles: Getting planning right at the construction stage will pay dividends in the long run
The trick is to design a low cost terminal with an early start-up,which is ready for future expansion, as Felicity Landon finds out
"Therefore future-proofing may be required - such as the ability to dredge berths deeper without having to strengthen the quay.This usually requires additional cost at the beginning of a project when the future seems a long way off, revenues have yet to be generated and money is probably being borrowed.
"However, in the long-term the cost of early days future-proofing generally pays off when, for example, bigger quay cranes can be installed on a quay without having to undertake major engineering works, thereby minimising disruption to the core business of the terminal,which is handling containers."
Royal Haskoning is seeing a number of deepsea clients wishing to construct now for 16 metres alongside, with the future possibility of going down to 18 metres allowed for in the design of the quay structures, says Mr Tyler.
"The trick is to design a terminal that has low initial costs with early start-up of operations which allows revenues to come onstream swiftly, but also does not preclude future expansion of the terminal once demand and revenues approach the next trigger for expansion."
When considering "optimum design", in broad terms the overall thinking remains unchanged - which is to have a good flow of containers at the right cost per move, says Mr Tyler.
"However, the components of this equation have varied over time. Reduced availability of cheap land, or the increasing value of port land locations so that waterfront residential/commercial developments are more profitable, plus the increased cost of labour means that operations need to intensify.That generally means investing in stacking higher and with more efficient handling equipment." Twin-lift and now tandem-lift quay cranes are gradually filtering through into terminal design but this means that the next focus is on quay-to-yard efficiency, says Mr Tyler.
"The challenge is to allow the maximum efficiency of these new quay cranes to be realised, which means delivering and retrieving containers from the quayside as fast as possible. To decouple the stacks from the quayside and hence optimise enhanced quayside capacity, there is now talk of providing a buffer just behind the quay cranes so that containers can be rapidly moved away from the quay cranes to this buffer and then collected from there to be taken to the stacks.
"This sequence clearly introduces another 'hand shake' in the chain and the cost of this buffering must be less than the cost of incurring sub-optimal quayside efficiency.
Images for this article - click to enlarge
Unless otherwise stated, all images copyright © Mercator Media 2012. This does not exclude the owner's assertion of copyright over the material.
