Antwerp setting records again

On 31 December the figure stood at 208,423,920 tonnes of freight handled. That’s 4.7% more than the previous year, which ended with a volume of 199 million tonnes. Another million-tonne record was broken in the container handling sector, with a volume of more than 9.6 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units, i.e. standard containers). In comparison with 2014, 7.5% more containers were handled.

With these growth figures Antwerp says it is performing significantly better than Rotterdam and Hamburg, the N° 1 and 3 respectively in North-West Europe. The port of Antwerp has seen its container volume growing strongly since the beginning of 2015, in particular from Asia.

During the past year not only did work go ahead on investments that had already been planned by among others Total (Optara), ExxonMobil (Antwerup EPC2) and Evonik (expansion of the butadiene and MTBE plants), but also new investments were announced. Invoyn is planning a major investment in a large-scale potassium hydroxide plant that is due to enter production in 2017, while the Japanese company Nippon Shokubai began work several months ago on an investment that will give its Antwerp plant more capacity for production of super-absorbent polymers and acetic acid by 2018. Together, the port says that all these investments are significantly reinforcing Antwerp’s position as the largest integrated petrochemical cluster in Europe.

During the past 12 months a total of 14,417 seagoing ships called at the port of Antwerp, 2.9% more than the previous year. The overall gross tonnage also grew considerably in 2015, up 9.7% to 367,709,003 GT.

By Jake Frith