The first $76.2m stage of a new container terminal in the Romanian Black Sea port of Constantza is scheduled to start operation in August.
Constantza official Costel Mitu told Maritime Journal that $34m were being spent on equipment, $37m on civil works and $5.2m on consultants' fees.
Reports put costs for all three stages about $150m.
The first stage of development on the 27.9 hectare site on Pier 2 South in the port covered two berths totalling 625m with alongside depth of 14.5m and 16m. The quays have been designed for vessels of up to 40,000dwt and will be equipped with three 50 ton gantry cranes.
Mitu told MJ capacity was put at 325,000 TEUs a year. The second stage of the new terminal will not be completed until after 2009, according to Mitu, by which time capacity will have increased to 405,000 TEUs.
Further development in a third stage after 2014-2015 will take capacities to 800,000-one million TEUs a year, Mitu said. The current container terminal is located in the North port on Berth No 52 which is 232 m long and 10.2 m deep. It has a storage area of 11.4 hectares for 3,000 to 4,000 containers.
Constantza, which handled 40.5 million tons and 136,272 TEUs in 2002, is located at the southeastern end of the Rhine-Main-Danube waterway.
That waterway, which spans the European continent between the Black Sea and Rotterdam, has just been cleared of debris which has blocked shipping at Novi Sad in the former Yugoslavia since the Kosovo Crisis in 1999.
Completion of that work has led Romanian officials to speculate that the new terminal, and indeed Constantza as a whole, could now take on particular value for containerised cargo now expected to move in larger volume along the Rhine-Danube waterway.
