Germany to upgrade Kiel Canal for ¢420m

Planning is already underway to dredge the easternmost 20km of the 98.6km canal by a metre to 12m to handle deeper draught vessels. That work, due to start in 2014, will cost €140m.

Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee has now announced approval for upgrade plans for the rest of the waterway. It will be deepened by a metre to 10.5m up to 2018, he said, at an additional cost of € 280m, for ships up to 280m length and 33m width. That compares with a current capacity for ships of 235m length. Locks of 310m by 42m in Brunsbüttel and Kiel are too small for bigger ships.

The Kiel Canal, opened in 1895, currently has a surface width of between 102.5m and 162m and a bed width of between 44m and 90m. That will change to average 130m and 79m after the improvements, the same dimensions as the current Panama Canal. Last year the German waterway carried a record 100m tons of cargo and 43,000 ships.

Canal use declined in the early 1990s during unexpectedly slow economic growth in Baltic after EU expansion, German unification and the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Since 1999 however, cargo volume has doubled.

Tiefensee said that already more ships were using the waterway than forecasts had predicted for 2015. ‘We must get more cargo onto environmentally friendly ships and off the roads’, he said.

He declared that the upgrading ‘is a clear sign to German seaports on the North Sea and Baltic’ and would increase the attractiveness of shipping. He noted that the canal route saved shipping an additional journey of hundreds of miles around Skagerrak.

By Tom Todd