A FEASIBILITY study supports the plans to build a second container terminal at the deep water Port of Wihelmsaven, long the home of the German Navy and Germany main gateway for crude oil imports.
A FEASIBILITY study supports the plans to build a second container terminal at the deep water Port of Wihelmsaven, long the home of the German Navy and Germany main gateway for crude oil imports. Adding a second terminal to the JadeWeserPort facility "is not only technically realisable, but also economically prudent in the medium term," according to the study by the Bremen-based Institute for Shipping Economics and Logistics, reported IHS Media. The JadeWeserPort terminal, which opened in 2012, will reach the limits of its capacity by 2027, the study forecast. Said Lower Saxony Port Minister Olaf Lies: "We will invest in the construction planning in future when this forecast is increasingly underpinned by facts. "We have therefore decided to only push ahead with more planning when JadeWeserPort has clearly passed the one million TEU milestone for the first time." The EUR650 million (US$715 million) terminal struggled to lure container services from its well-established neighbours Bremerhaven and Hamburg in its first two years of operations, raising fears it might become a white elephant. Traffic at the terminal, which has an annual capacity of 2.7 million TEU, was just 67,000 TEU in 2014, down from 76,000 TEU in 2013. Volume soared, however, to just short of 427,000 TEU in 2015 largely as a result of a decision by the 2M Alliance partners - Maersk Line, whose unit APM Terminals has a 30 per cent stake in JadeWeserPort, and Mediterranean Shipping Co - to start twice weekly calls on an Asia-Europe service.