The port authorities of Duisburg and Rotterdam have jointly signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) to renew and expand their cooperation agreements that date back to 2020, according to Port of Rotterdam's release.
Besides existing agreements relating to the optimisation of logistical connections, the cooperation will be expanded to include initiatives in the area of digitisation and the energy transition.
duisport and the Port of Rotterdam have been trading partners for a long time. For example, each year more than one million TEU of containers are exchanged between the two logistics hubs. Almost a third of them are already shipped by rail. Digitisation and data sharing could further increase the part played by this sustainable mode of transport. This LOI is aimed at creating the most digital and most sustainable port-inland hub connection in the world by linking Duisburg’s ‘Rail Freight Data Hub’ initiative with Rotterdam’s ‘Rail Connected’.
The LOI also includes agreements on looking into the possibility of linking the port community systems Portbase (Rotterdam) to the RheinPorts Information System (Duisburg) and to learn from each other’s initiatives in the area of digital twin projects. With regard to the energy transition, both ports plan to investigate whether they can jointly take on the development of hydrogen hubs. Rotterdam as the future ‘hydrogen gateway’ to Europe and duisport as the hub for Germany. Setting up a physical link between the two is therefore an obvious choice.