The container port at Manzanillo, one of Mexico's largest, is expected to almost double its container handling capacity in the near future to alleviate ongoing port congestion problems, a senior Mexican port official said on Monday.
Also, the ambitious $1 billion container terminal project at Punta Colonet on the west coast the country is scheduled to begin operation in 2010, Angel Gonzalez Rul Alvidrez, the national port director of Mexico, told Reuters on the sidelines of the 25th IAPH World Ports Conference held in Houston.
The Manzanillo port will expand its container cargo handling capacity by 1 million 20-foot-equivalent units (TEU) within the next three to four years to 2.2 million TEUs, he said.
"The port congestion problem is caused by the huge increase in container traffic in the past two years," Alvidrez said. "The container volume was up 45 percent in two years." The congeston problems were limited to onshore operations at the port, he said. The port expansion plan is a two-step process, with the first step encompassing the development of the north port, he said.
For Punta Colonet project, the port will begin with an initial capacity of 800,000 TEUs, rising to a maximum of 8 million TEUs eventually, Alvidrez said. The new port is expected to compete with west coast ports in the US and Canada for container traffic. The plan is to transfer containers from Asia through Mexico to the heartlands of the United States via rail.
However, Alvidrez believed that the would be more than enough containers to go around to all west coast ports as container traffic flow across the Pacific is projected to grow substantially over the next several years.