Online discussion of China’s inland shipping experience to continue on December 9 at joint PortNews/MEB webinar
Participation in the webinar "Billions of tonnes of freight moved on the Chinese rivers” is free with preliminary registration "Billions of tonnes of freight moved on the Chinese rivers”.
The event slated for December 9 is to begin at noon. The online webinar organized by PortNews IAA in conjunction with the Marine Engineering Bureau is supported by the organizing committee of the International Exhibition NEVA.
Gennady Egorov, Professor, D.Eng.Sc, General Director of Marine Engineering Bureau, prepared his report as a basis for discussion. Leading experts of the river and marine shipping sectors were invited to join the discussion. The main question: what can be learned from China’s experience to "restart" the project on large-scale development of IWW fleet?
Today, more than 100 million tonnes of cargo are transported annually in the world only on six rivers and river canals. Of these, the first three (by volume) are the Chinese Yangtze, the Pearl River and the Grand Canal, then the Rhine, Mississippi and Mekong.
We started the discussion on December 2. Now we will continue with a focus on shipyards building vessels for inland shipping.
In 1995, 346,148 were operating on China’s IWW. Their average capacity was 51 tonnes with average age exceeding 30 years.
In the beginning of the 21st century, an ambitious programme on fleet modernization was launched by the Chinese Ministry of Transport in cooperation with the authorities of the provinces. Service life limit was set at 30 years. More than 40,000 of junks were scrapped with their owners having obtained a compensation totaling 1 billion yuans. From 2009, 2 billion yuans was allocated by the Transport Ministry for unification of the Yangtze fleet, By 2019, average capacity of ships on the Yangtze was raised to 1,880 tonnes.
As of the end of 2019, China numbered 131,600 water transport ships (75% of them were self-propelled cargo ships with average age of 9.8 years, 14% - passenger ships with average age of 10.6 years, 9% - barges with average age of 11.4 years, 1.2% - tankers with average age of 11.7). The list includes 556 container ships with average age of 9.5 years and 244 Ro-Ro ships with average age of 14.1 years.
The entire fleet of China has undergone modernization and shipbuilding continues.
Those ships were built by Chinese shipyards mostly located in basins of the rivers of future operation. The ships were fitted with equipment of domestic origin.
Participation in the webinar is free. Prior registration is required (av@portnews.ru). There are advertising opportunities.
