Posted on June 30, 2023
In the northeastern part of Morocco and near the Spanish enclave of Melilla, you will find the small port city of Nador. For now, its economy is mainly focused on agriculture and fishery. For example, travel inland and you are surrounded by rolling hills, fields of olive trees, fig trees and vineyards. But new opportunities are about to emerge, because Nador breathes (development) opportunities.
Don’t be too hard on yourself if you’ve never heard of Nador. It’s still a hidden gem. The more western port city of Tangier, on the other hand, probably does ring a bell. In the early 2000s, Morocco invested heavily to turn the Tangier-Tetouan region – where the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean meet – into its economic hub. And with success: thanks to the construction of a new port along one of the busiest shipping routes in the world, a new football stadium and an airport, the number of jobs and the population increased rapidly. Based on the success of the Tangier port, the government of Morocco set up the Nador West Med project with a similar development and management logic. And so the idea of a brand new industrial port in Nador was created.
The Nador West Med complex is currently being built completely from scratch and will consist of a deep-water port and an integrated industrial port platform with free trade zone. The deep-water port will have the necessary infrastructure to develop an energy pool, tranship containers and process bulk products. The free trade zone, in turn, is intended to attract and accommodate investors and international companies.
To build Nador’s port, thorough dredging is needed. And we are happy to take on those works. Since 2016, our cutter suction dredgers have already moved more than 39.4 million m³ of soil to build two breakwaters, two container terminals, bulk and a diverse terminal. Enough ground to fill the Wembley Stadium almost ten times.
We are working closely with Turkey’s STFA Group and Morocco’s SGTM for this assignment. They are both taking on the civil construction activities. The planning of the dredging works runs parallel to the various construction phases of the port. So, a diverse and large fleet went to work on the project for this purpose. The cutter suction dredgers dredge away the material on the seabed, and the split hopper barges collect the dredged material and discharge it at sea. At the end of the works, a trailing suction hopper dredger will come in to clean the seabed.
