Despite a face-to-face appeal to Chancellor Angela Merkel last week by China's top shipping executive, Germany's work to upgrade main seaports is still being held up by government delays. At a riverbank lookout at Wedel, just west of the port of Hamburg, giant freighters come so close that it needs a wide-angle lens to photograph them as they pass, piled high with containers on their way to the docks.
Top shipping companies say the old "big" is today's "regular size," and complain that Hamburg, 100 kilometres up the Elbe river, cannot handle today's super-size container ships, such as the Emma Maersk or the Christophe Colomb. The problem: the stony bottom of the river has been dredged many times, but it is still too shallow. The maximum draught - the height from a ship's bottom up to the waterline - is 12.5 metres. If a ship rode deeper, it might scrape its bottom on reefs under the river.
When the eight Emma-class vessels belonging to Danish line Moller-Maersk come to call, they will have to lighten up, to stay high in the water, and wait for high tide. Jens Meier, chief of the Hamburg Port Authority, told a city newspaper this week that the regulatory approvals under German and European Union law to make the channel 1 metre deeper are still being sought. Germany's other main port, Bremerhaven, has a draught limit of 12.7 metres, but is investing in a new quay at Wilhelmshaven, where the channel through mudflats to the open sea will be only 43 kilometres long and have a draught limit of 16.5 metres. The two ports are not only bitter rivals of the Dutch port of Rotterdam - Europe's biggest - and the Belgian port of Antwerp, but also with one another.They belong to separate states, Hamburg and Lower Saxony, which are at loggerheads over money.
Even in Hamburg, few people claim to fully understand this complex political chess game. Last week, four years of German domestic political manoeuvring and no action on the Hamburg dredging project became too much for Wei Jiafa, chief executive of China's biggest shipping line, Cosco. Chancellor Merkel was visiting Xi'an, China and he told her in person that the dredging scheme was too little and too late. The fact that only 1 metre, not more, is to be shaved off the high points along the Elbe channel was a concession to Germany's Green Party when it joined the Hamburg state government and to the states bordering the river.
They contend that a deeper channel would allow both the tides and runoff from distant Czech mountains to rush faster through the river, sweeping away feeding space for fish and pressing harder on levees along the bank. Hamburg faces demands to pay for higher, stronger embankments in Lower Saxony state. Engineers are studying whether they are needed.
The cost of the project, including restoration of wetlands, has ballooned to 385 million euros (497 million dollars). The port authority's Meier rejected complaints that making the river 1 metre deeper would not be enough. "The deepening and the widening will meet the market's requirements," he told the Hamburger Abendblatt. "It's more the exception than the rule that container ships travel fully laden."
A shipping industry insider said this week that despite having a choice of Dutch, Belgian and German ports, shippers constantly worry about bottlenecks along the coast that might force them to wait half a day before docking, or to leave a port only half full. Shuttling between Asia and Europe, the giant container ships call at a handful of ports at each end, trying to arrange the big boxes so that the containers to unload at the first port of call are at the top of the stack. "To cut transit times, they might want Hamburg to be their last station on the European seaboard before heading to Asia. But if they could not leave Hamburg fully loaded, that would not be an option," the insider explained.
Some suspect that Lower Saxony is quietly obstructing Hamburg's dredging plan to gain market share for its own site, Wilhelmshaven. Lower Saxony's environment ministry said it was still waiting to see a draft of an EU consent for the river deepening, and would only accept it if Lower Saxony's levees along the Elbe continued to be proof against the higher floods expected.
Ecology groups are expected to go to court to challenge any planning consent.
"Dredging that worsens the ecological situation to that extent is in breach of EU nature protection law," said Heike Vesper of WWF Germany, an environmentalist group which says opening up the channel would cause shallower areas to silt up and cut fish populations.
Comments
Comments are closed.