German port Wilhelmshaven readies to take on Rotterdam
The small town of Wilhelmshaven on Germany's North Sea coast, with its population of only 81,000, is already the country's largest naval base, AFP reports.
But with its new Jade-Weser-Port container hub, Wilhelmshaven became Germany's only deep water port and hopes to give Rotterdam and Antwerp a run for their money and become the main stopping point in Europe for supersize container ships arriving from Asia.
The town was set up by Emperor William I of Prussia in 1869 and its port opened for civilian purposes in the mid-1950s, with the first oil tanker jetty constructed not much later.
Since then, Wilhelmshaven has become the largest German import terminal for crude oil, with pipelines supplying refineries in the Rhine-Ruhr region and Hamburg, and also a major handling location for goods such as petroleum products, coal and chemical products.
Nevertheless, the Jade-Weser-Port Container Terminal will catapult the port into the world's premier league, with the capacity to handle the largest container ships - including the future triple-E class ships that have a carrying capacity of 18,000 TEU or "Twenty-foot equivalent unit" which is the unit of measure in the sector.
Wilhelmshaven's 18-metre deep port will allow these huge new giants to dock here fully loaded independent of the tide at any time of night or day.
At the moment, the site is a vast stretch of sand with a few diggers and excavators, a scattering of buildings still under construction.
On the waterfront, sit four giant 83-metre high cranes newly arrived from China, which will load and unload vast container ships that Wilhelmshaven hopes to soon welcome.
"They are the highest in the world," boasts Jan Miller, director of the logistics zone next to the new container hub.
But just when the cranes will start their work is still not certain.
Officially, the port, which is costing more than 1.0 billion euros ($1.25 billion) mostly from the regional state of Lower Saxony, is scheduled to open for business on August 5.
A ship of Danish group Maersk will be among the first to dock there, a spokesman said for the company which is currently the only customer of the new port.
"We're in talks with others, but we haven't yet signed any concrete agreements," said Marcel Egger, director of the port operator Eurogate.
A neighbouring industrial zone will be home to logistics and services companies, but there is only a single one there at the moment.
"Sure, there's not going to be frenetic activity on the first day," concedes Miller, but he predicted the port would be operating at full steam "in five or seven years."
The worldwide trend is for ever larger container ships.
Currently there are some 250 ships with carrying capacity of more than 10,000 TEU, but new ships are currently under construction with capacity of 16,000 TEU or even 18,000 TEU.
The bigger they are, the deeper the port needs to be to handle them.
"We don't want to let Rotterdam have" all the traffic in these giants, said Miller.
"In the long term, the German coast has need for additional capacity," with Hamburg and Bremerhaven unable to handle the future supersize ships, said Soenke Maatsch from the Institute for Maritime Transport and Logistics in Bremen.
From that point of view, the project "makes sense. It's just the timing isn't so good," the expert said.
Since the decision to build the port in 2001 and the start of construction work in 2008, maritime shipping has been sideswiped by the economic crisis of 2008/2009.
And the volumes of freight passing through German ports "is currently at the levels seen four or five years ago," Maatsch said.
It could therefore be some time before the bet taken 10 years ago pays off.
Nevertheless, the trend is upwards, "volumes are increasing," said the spokesman for Maersk. "We'll be using Wilhelmshaven for additional volumes," he said.