[photopress:Nantongport.jpg,full,alignright]It was the moving of Nantong Port to an annual handling capacity of 100 million tons in 2006 that made China the country with the world’s largest port handling capacity. Nevertheless, the facilities are, in general, overloaded.
Nantong Port, located in Jiangsu province on the Yangtze River, with it 88 berths and eight anchorages helps — but not enough. Now Rizhao Port, in Shandong Province, is reported to have accommodated a 200-ton-class mineral ore ship which makes it China’s 11th 100-million-ton-class port.
The others are Shanghai, Ningbo, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Shenzhen, Qingdao, Qinhuangdao, Dalian, Nanjing and Suzhou.Shanghai Port alone handled 443 million tons of cargo in 2005 and is the world’s largest freight port.
The total capacity of coastal ports is somewhere over one billion tons — and it is not enough.
Shen Yihua, vice director of the MOC Waterway Transport Planning Institute said depite massive expansion problems still remain. These problems include low turnover capacity, a lack of large ports and too shallow entry routes.
In 2005, the turnover capacity of overloaded coastal ports was officially 2.52 billion tons, but 3.38 billion tons were actually handled. Mao Jian, head of the MOC planning department’s waterway transport office, thinks this will improve and the turnover capacity of coastal ports and their handled freight quantity would equalize by 2010.
Shen Yihua said, ‘In the next ten years, the development of port construction should be faster than economic growth.’
Source: Xinhua
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