Posted on June 21, 2016
By Rob Ward, JOC.com
More draft restrictions due to a lack of dredging is preventing three marine terminal at the Brazilian port of Santos from handling fully loaded ships with capacities of 9,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units.
The restrictions at the busiest container port in Brazil and South America could lead to less cargo moving through three terminals as competitors within the port that enjoy deeper drafts grab the business away. The draft of Ecoporto Santos, Brasil Terminal Portuaria and Embraport has gone from 14.1 meters (nearly 46.3 feet) in mid-May to 12.7 meters.
“The various draft restriction are creating irreparable consequences, creating hundreds of thousands of reais of extra costs for the Port of Santos, the City of Santos and Brazil, which they will never get back,” the Union of Port Operators State São Paulo, or Sopesp, said in a statement, “And it will cause further serious damage to our competitiveness with international Latin American rivals and within the Brazilian port system.”
Shippers and the three affected terminal operators are furious that long-promised dredging has not been completed, despite intense lobbying of the central government in Brasilia to release funding. In the short term, Santo backers want to switch ongoing maintenance dredging from one stretch of the channel to another.
A spokesperson for Brasil Terminal Portuaria told JOC.com that the latest reductions in draft mean that 9,000-TEU vessels can no longer call at the terminal fully laden. These restrictions could lead to 1,000 TEUs less cargo per vessel.
“Three and Four of the Santos channel have now officially been given reduced drafts so we now urgently need emergency dredging,” said the spokesperson. “There could be a possible solution if the port authority can persuade Van Oord (the Dutch dredging outfit) to change its maintenance dredging contract to one for this emergency dredging.”
The BTP spokesperson added that Van Oord was currently carrying out dredging in the first stretch of the channel, but the work should be focused on the third and fourth stretches.
Antonio Passaro, chief executive officer of BTP, told a local Santos newspaper that he felt “tremendous anger” towards the lack of dredging in Santos. The draft restrictiions have given an unfair advantage to three terminals, Santos Brasil’s Tecon Santos facility and Libra Terminais’s Terminals 35 and 37, which had maintained their drafts at 13.2 meters.
One of the main reasons for the dredging delays is the constant bickering between port authority Codesp and the Special Ports Ministry, which has now been subsumed into the Department of Transport. Port users worry about about the lack of draft and that it’s shrinking, despite their initial hopes that a campaign to get the draft deepened to 15 meters and then 17 meters by 2017 was going to guarantee the port could handle even larger vessels. Some in the industry speculate ships up to 13,000 TEUs could be displaced to the Brazilian trades as more 20,000-TEU ships are introduced on the Asia-Europe and trans-Pacific trades.
Source: JOC.com
