Egypt set a date for completion of a side channel at East Port Said near the entrance to the Suez Canal that will allow better access to the port from the Mediterranean Sea.
The channel will cost $36 million to dredge and will be complete by the end of June 2016, Mohab Memish, head of the Suez Canal Authority said at a news conference at the SCA headquarters in Ismailia.
The Suez Canal Container Terminal was pressing the government to set a date for completion of the project, which it said is critical to the business model of the terminal and was committed to by Egypt as part of the initial investment agreement.
“We are building the side channel which will allow the ships to enter from open waters directly into East Port Said. There was a problem with the ships that enter East Port Said which have to wait between seven to ten hours to enter the port,” Memish said.
APM Terminals, which owns 55 percent of SCCT, said the construction of the side channel is vital to prevent capacity problems at the northern end of the canal going forward.
“We currently only have a few hours each day when vessels can come in and out of the container terminal,” said Klaus Laursen, managing director of SCCT. “On a yearly basis this gives us the ability to handle 2,500 vessels. We currently do 2,300 vessels so this is a potential bottleneck and capacity issue for the canal.”
The new channel will be 9.5 kilometers long (6 miles), 17 meters deep (55.8 feet), and 250 meters wide. According to Memish, it will support the handling of 12 million 20-foot-equivalen units a year at East Port Said by 2020.
SCCT handled 3.4 million TEUs in 2014.
Maersk Line vessels made 1,400 trips through the Suez Canal last year, paying $729 million in tolls, or around 14 percent of the total revenue of the canal.
Earlier, the SCA announced it signed a memorandum of understanding with Singapore’s PSA Internationalfor a study on the development and management of a new container terminal at East Port Said.
Egypt completed and opened a $8 billion Suez Canal expansion project in August that allows two-way traffic on the full length of the canal for the first time and provides increased capacity for larger vessels.
The expansion is part of a wider SCZone development plan that envisions logistics, shipping and industrial development at three primary nodes along the canal — Ismailia, Ain Sokhna-Suez and Port Said. The development project at Port Said is generally considered to be the most important part of the overall plan, with thousands of acres available for development of additional port, logistics and industrial facilities.
