BRUSSELS: North European ports must invest in more automated ship-to-shore cranes to achieve the 6,000 daily lifts that container lines want for their biggest ships, says Netherlands-based consulting firm Dynamar.
“Without automation, the ports cannot reach the productivity levels that carriers would like to see in order to get the maximum return on their investments,” Dirk Visser, senior shipping consultant at Dynamar, told JOC.com.
While carriers want 6,000 moves per ship per day, terminals see 3,500 as a more realistic maximum, Dynamar said in a new report on North Europe container volumes and terminal capacity.
No European ports currently approach 6,000 daily lifts per ship, and none was among the top 10 ports in last year’s JOC Port Productivity Rankings, which are based on a calculation of total container lifts divided by a ship’s hours in port. The highest-ranking port in the JOC rankings was Yokohama, with 186 lifts per hour. The top European ports were Bremerhaven, with 90, and Rotterdam, with 84.
Unless productivity improves, a new generation of ships with capacities of 18,000 TEUs or more will continue to spend several days in port, reducing carriers’ expected savings, Visser said.
The first 18,000-TEU ships hit water in mid-2013. By 2019, the number of ultra-large container ships, or ULCCs, will swell to more than 100. All are deployed on high-volume routes between Asia and Europe.
Ships’ growth in capacity comes mainly from increased breadth, not length. Cranes must be larger to reach across additional rows of containers and into deeper tiers on or below decks. But even the largest ships can be worked by only nine cranes at a time, compared with six for a typical 8,200-TEU ship.
This requires more lifts per hour, and only way to do that is with automation, Visser said.
New facilities such as the Rotterdam terminals of APM Terminals’ Maasvlakte II and DP World’s Rotterdam World Gateway are designed with quay cranes that are automated, with only the final lowering of the container guided by an operator.
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