Dredging & Port Construction
“Who could have thought, five or six years ago, that the Middle East market would be what it is today or what used to be a large dredging job, say 20M m3, is today a small job?”
That was Dutch contractor Van Oord’s chairman Koos van Oord’s comment when asked about the veritable explosion of capital projects over the past 18 months - €10Bn worth have either started or are about to reach the market, including the many artificial island projects and the Panama Canal expansion.
A glance through recent issues of DPC highlights the reality of those huge projects - Dubai’s Palm Deira alone needs 1.2Bn m3 of sand and 45M tons of rock. In turn, such ventures have fuelled demand for ever more sophisticated dredgers, with a revival of large, sea-going cutters and immense trailers. At leading Dutch shipbuilders IHC Holland Merwede, the orderbook leapt €1.2Bn in just three months during early 2007, with the firm opening yet another yard to cope. And as this is written, Belgian contractor Jan De Nul is building what will be the largest trailer ever seen, 46,000m3, at Spanish yard Construcciones Navales de Norte. Port construction and expansion projects too continued apace around the world, with LNG, oil, bulk and cruise terminals sometimes stealing the headlines from the seemingly unstoppable march of ever bigger, ever deeper container ports. The fear at one point was that the dredging industry wouldn’t be able to cope with the amount of work on offer.
DPC has responded with increased coverage: what was a column of port notes in World News has expanded to a regular four-page roundup and we’ve recruited experts in many countries to assess and write about individual projects. So the boom continues. Most analysts see it continuing over the next five years at least. And DPC will keep you up-to-date in what’s now a fast-moving and truly global industry.
Sincerely,
Tony Slinn
Editor-in-Chief |