Port of Cape Town

The Port of Cape Town is Africa’s gateway to Europe and the Americas; and it’s being prepared to continue this role through the 21st century.

When the Africa Ports and Harbours Congress opens at the Sandton Centre in Johannesburg in July, a lot of interest will focus on Transnet’s massive R80 billion capital investment programme. Ports all around the African coast are expanding, adapting and re-equipping rapidly to meet the changing patterns of export and import, transhipment and intermodal support affecting African trade.

Much of the attention at the congress will centre on specific projects that can be seen as benchmarking the best way to progress, and one of the most interesting will certainly be the Cape Town Container Terminal Expansion Programme and the knock-on effect it will have on the port’s other facilities.

The R5.6 billion project was launched in 2008 and is on target to be completed early in 2013—five years of work, at the end of which Cape Town will have virtually doubled its container capacity to 1.4 million TEUs (twenty foot equivalent units). During this time the port’s management, led by port manager Sanjay Govan, has to maintain the service and meet the sometimes conflicting demands not only of the container lines but the other port users as well.

Cape Town was established by the Dutch on 6 April 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck arrived in Table Bay to establish a victualling station for ships of the Dutch East India Company. Today the port consists of two distinct sections—the larger outer Ben Schoeman Dock in which lies the container terminal, and the older inner Duncan Dock containing the agricultural ro-ro and fruit terminals, as well as a dry dock, repair quays and tanker basin. “When we started to look at expansion,” explains Govan, “we considered two options: reclamation or reconfiguration. Building new facilities on reclaimed land would have overcome a lot of our space constraints and offered a good long term solution, but due to time and environmental considerations we decided to take the reconfiguration route.”

This involved rationalising or even relocating some of the existing facilities as well as a dredging programme to increase the available draught for larger container vessels. The ongoing work has presented the dock management with a series of challenges, he says. “We lost some transhipment cargo to the new port at Coega near Port Elizabeth, and some cargoes bound for West Africa to West African ports. Our strategy at the moment is to make sure that for all the cargo that we have—containers, dry cargoes and perishables—we turn round those ships more efficiently and faster.”

Natural constraints are the port’s narrow entrance and windy conditions. “During all this construction work we are constantly losing one or two berths anyway, and challenging weather conditions have always made it difficult to manoeuvre and turn large vessels in the restricted space we have.”

Another factor that has made it difficult to capture container traffic applies to all ports in the world, not just South Africa. This is the constant increase in the size of container vessels as the shipping lines try to capture economies of scale. “You can’t blame shipping lines for doing that,” says Govan. “But the size of the container ships has increased faster than we had anticipated. We are already getting bigger vessels than our plans allowed for: in 2008 we were looking at 4,000 to 6,000 TEU vessels but we are already getting ships up to 8,000 TEUs calling.” With 10,000 TEU container ships already coming out of the Korean yards and 13,000 TEU ships being ordered, it will be challenging indeed for Cape Town to capture that market.

Still, solid progress has been made. The first phase of the project which involved deepening the Ben Schoeman container berth from 12.8 metres to 15.5 metres, allowing vessels of up to 10,000 TEUs to visit, is now completed. The four container quays have been refurbished and equipped with the latest handling equipment. For example, the 20 year old ship-to-shore cranes are being replaced by modern Liebherr super post-Panamax cranes with a double lift capacity and longer reach. Six were assembled on the quayside and installed in late 2010 and a further two will be arriving shortly, says Govan.

The container stacking yard is also in the process of being converted from a straddle carrier operation to a modern rubber tyred gantry (RTG) system. Half of the 32 RTGs supplied by the UK heavy materials handling firm Kalmar Industries are already in use and the remainder will arrive in the course of this year. They allow for denser stacking of containers than was ever possible before and operate more quietly and quickly than their less efficient predecessors.

Capturing more of the container market is important but the port serves other markets too. “We have seen tourism picking up at a tremendous rate, and the bigger cruise ships now want to call here,” Govan says. “The difficulty there is that vessels under 200 metres can dock at the famous Victoria and Albert waterfront, which is ideal for them. But anything bigger than that has to come into the main harbour.” He would love to see a dedicated cruise liner facility built but fears it may not happen soon enough.

In addition, the Western Cape’s food and wine industries are booming. Cape Town’s ability to command the markets of the Middle East and Far East gives it an edge over competing producers in South America and southern Europe, but it depends very much on the port being able to ship out these vital, perishable exports without delay.

With fast increasing activity in the oilfields off the coast of West Africa, Cape Town has been getting increasing demand from the owners of rigs and FPSOs (floating production storage and offloading units). It is an ideal staging post on the way from the Middle East and the Bight of Benin. “Cape Town has a lot to offer the oil industry,” says Govan. “We have the engineering facilities and the skills to carry out the work, and all the consulates are here to deal with staff changeovers.” He would like to welcome these customers, but congestion gets in the way. The main dry dock, though in excellent operational condition, was built before World War II and is too narrow. “We have been talking to our neighbouring port at Saldanha to see if we can share the work and capture more of this trade.”

The only effective long term solution to these constraints would be a land reclamation project; though the current project will transform Cape Town’s effectiveness as a container terminal, Govan believes.

www.transnetnationalportsauthority.net/NPA_ports_cape_town_overview.html