Officials in Baltimore were plannning to open a deeper channel for commercial ships to enter and leave the city’s port starting on April 25. This would be a significant step toward reopening the major maritime shipping hub that has remained closed to most traffic since the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed last month. The new channel will be 12 meters deep, which is a substantial increase over the three other temporary channels established in recent weeks. It puts the cleanup effort slightly ahead of schedule, as officials previously had hoped to open a channel of that depth by the end of April.
News
Sines
The Portuguese government announced an investment of 547 million euros in the expansion of the Port of Sines in the southwest of the country and an agreement to extend its concession from 2029 to 2049. The agreement was reached last week between Portugal and PSA Singapore for the completion of the 3rd phase of expansion of Terminal XXI, so as to greatly increase its capacity and give another 20 years of operations in Portugal to PSA Singapore. The Sines port, 58 nautical miles south of Lisbon, is one of the major European ports and the great hub port of the Iberian-Atlantic front.
Barcelona
BEST terminal in the Port of Barcelona has recently increased its storage and connection capacity for refrigerated containers, from 1,600 connection points up to 2,750, an increase of 70%, making it one of the terminals with the most connections for refrigerated containers in the whole of the Mediterranean area.
ABDULLAH
Unloading of cargo from the 'Abdullah' at the port of Al Hamriyah started on April 23 at 12 a.mn., two hours after the ship berthed at the jetty. Meanwhile, all 23 crew members have decided to come back home on the same ship, according to the ship’s owning firm SR Shipping Ltd, a subsidiary of KSRM Group. Earlier, two out of 23 crew members wanted to sign off from the vessel at the UAE port and return home by air.
Rotterdam
APM Terminals Maasvlakte II’s new rail service between its Rotterdam terminal and Venlo, a key logistics hub on the Dutch-German border is proving popular. Following the success of the initial five-times-per-week service, plans are already in place to scale this up to 14 times per week over the coming weeks.
Genova
A 24-hour national labour strike is planned on Jul 24, in all Italian ports and all transportations. The planned strike is subject to confirmation in the coming days.
BIRGER JARL
The 'Birger Jarl'/'Baltic Star', which is mooredin Lunde, right next to Sandöbron, has now been sold. Threats of heavy fines if the ship is not moved have caused the relationship between the owner Leif-Ivan Karlsson and the municipality of Kramfors to become completely frozen. Now a Gothenburg company wants to refurbish the 81-year-old ship to operate the route Gothenburg - Travemünde. An agreement was to be signed on April 24, 2024. The ship was then to be towed to Gustavik, a half a mile south. Here is Norrland's only really large dry dock, big enough to handle the ship. Report with video: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasternorrland/uppgifter-skandalbaten-i-lunde-sald-till-goteborgsforetag
ROYAL ROMANCE
The Dutch auction house Troostwijk Auctions may auction the 'Royal Romance' of the pro-Russian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk from Ukraine. This was decided by the Ukrainian government agency Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA). According to Troostwijk director Arno Hendrikse, this is the most expensive object that his auction house has ever auctioned.
Churchill
Canada’s arctic port of Churchill is set to resume its first grain shipments since 2015 after a group backed by investor Prem Watsa stepped in last year to buy the facility and a related rail line linking the northern town with the rest of Manitoba. The 88-year-old port on the shores of Hudson’s Bay will resume operations in the next few months, reducing by several days the shipping time to deliver grains to Europe and the Middle East across the Atlantic Ocean.
King Abdullah Port
In the largest commercial operation of its kind in the history of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah Port has received 28 state-of-the-art Liebherr cranes to start the expansion of the container terminals. The latter was decided through a MoU signed with National Container Terminal on the day the port was officially inaugurated in the presence of the Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman last February. The new cranes include 20 gantry cranes and 8 ship-to-shore (STS) cranes, which are the largest of their kind, with an outreach of 70 m (25 rows) and a safe working load of 65 t. The cranes that were supplied in this deal will join their operational counterparts in the port. They are the largest cranes exported by Liebherr and can serve mega container ships easily and seamlessly.