Just south of this, the new 305-metre long Kaiserschleuse lock was put in place to improve access for Bremerhaven’s auto terminals, while the Osthafen project was also initiated (again mainly for the car-market), providing several new, flexible berths.<\/p>\n
In addition, the Bremen side of the port business has also invested substantial sums in recent years – for instance in the construction of a container and short-sea terminal, new loading facilities and additional warehouses and logistics facilities.<\/p>\n
It all looked solid enough – between them, the ports of Bremen and Bremerhaven offered a comprehensive cargo handling and logistics services and last year, Bremerhaven, which is made up of Eurogate’s three container terminals, (one run in partnership with Maersk Line, one with MSC and another common facility) recorded a 12.4% increase in container volumes to 5.5m teu.<\/p>\n
However the impending fall was already becoming apparent by last December.<\/p>\n
One problem is Bremerhaven’s exposure to car handling – until recently it had over 2m vehicles passing through per annum. As the port itself says, vehicle transhipment, along with general container handling, has since the 1970s “evolved into a cornerstone of the economy with one of the highest value added factors and is also a mainstay of the local labour market”. Sadly, this left it particularly vulnerable to the downturn.<\/p>\n
But both operating company Eurogate and the city-state of Bremen have been encouraged to keep faith with the new project across the river at Wilhelmshaven; partly because development at Bremerhaven has been curbed by physical limits, and partly because they believe they need to be positioned to take on the large ships the port is courting – when the world comes round.<\/p>\n
The idea seemed to be that since Bremerhaven would reach capacity in the next few years (pre-crunch predictions), JadeWeserPort would offer an additional premium service for mega-container vessels. So, the federal states of Lower Saxony and Bremen agreed on long-term cross-border cooperation for the purpose of implementing the deepwater port project.<\/p>\n
So, it has to be asked, what will happen to Bremerhaven when the new JadeWeserPort gets going, given the present shortage of ships?<\/p>\n
Hendrik Witt of JadeWeserPort doesn’t see it as too much of a problem saying that Bremerhaven will still have its dedicated and specific user terminals, while the new development at Wilhelmshaven will be entirely common user – and this itself will cut down competition between the two.<\/p>\n
He continues: “Over the years, Bremerhaven access port has been traditionally a US east coast bridgehead. For example, it has vehicles and ro-ro cargo – it is not just dependant on containers. JadeWeserPort is going to be more naturally attracting ships on the Asian trade routes than Bremerhaven. So as far as this is concerned, the Wilhelmshaven port sees itself as more a natural competitor to Rotterdam.”<\/p>\n
However, Mr Witt did not say “no competition” – adding that, “At the end of the day, the shipping companies will have to see which port gives the lowest costs and lowest times.”<\/p>\n
Roman Poersch of BMT Transport Solutions is more candid, saying that the looming presence of the new port at Wilhelmshaven is still “a highly political subject”. “It is often said that competition is always good for the market, but it’s known you can’t afford to put an additional player onto the market if it endangers the existing ports,” he says.<\/p>\n
While Eurogate Wilhelmshaven is contributing \u00a2350m ($475m) toward the new port for superstructure costs, the realisation company – 50.1% owned by Lower Saxony and 49.9% by the city state of Bremen – is committing itself to spending \u00a2600m ($814.9m) on things that aren’t so negotiable, like quay facilities, land reclamation and dredging.<\/p>\n
However, the project has been heralded as a huge, needed boost to the economy of the entire region, attracting major technological and industrial projects from the like of INEOS and WRG\/ConocoPhilips, so the authority of Lower Saxony has huge pressure bearing on its continued decision to support the new development. It has to see it succeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is no doubt about it, trouble seems to be brewing on Germanys North Sea coast. A couple of years ago, Bremerhaven box port started throwing itself body and soul into an expansion plan that included the construction of a new container terminal and 90 hectares of operating and storage\u00a0 space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":6866,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-6865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-container-cargo-handling"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6865"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6867,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6865\/revisions\/6867"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6865"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=6865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}