Construction has begun of a new ‘ heavy lift’ inland port costing about € 32m at Rendsburg on the Kiel Canal, the world’ s busiest manmade waterway, linking the Baltic and the North Sea.
The new port is at Osterroenfeld, near Rendsburg, about half way along the 100 km long waterway. It is being named Neuer Hafen Kiel-Canal and will cover about 40,000m2 and be adjacent to an 110,000m2 industrial area. The port will have 300m of quayside and two berths on 9.5m of water and be capable of turning over 20,000 tons a day. The sinking of 26m long steel piles is being carried out along a 661m riverside stretch up to about May next year. That will be followed in June by port basin dredging work and it is hoped to have the complete facility finished in 2010. German group Johann Bunte is in charge of construction.
The Neuer Hafen will become the third major port on the canal after Kiel, on the Baltic and Brunsbüttel on the Elbe. It will however be less of a universal facility than the other two general purpose ports.
The new port is designed specifically to handle and tranship heavy plant, mainly to booming offshore wind energy farms. Officials said from 2010 as many as 300 wind power plant items will be produced in the industrial area and shipped to ports servicing offshore wind parks or to the sites themselves. Rendsburg is already a hub for plant production and home to major producer Repower as well as an important autobahn and rail junction.
Officials said the port’s advantages would be short distances to Scandinavia and the regions of Hamburg and Copenhagen/Malmö as well as a modern, high performance infrastructure.
The federal state of Schleswig-Holstein is paying about half of the port construction costs. Studies predict high growth for the wind energy sector over the next two decades.
By Tom Todd
