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Mersey the lifeblood of region's economy
What does the future hold for Peel Ports, following their £771m purchase of MDHC?
Peel Holdings is a company with a reputation for thinking big. Its £771m purchase of Mersey Docks and Harbour Company two years ago is evidence of that.
The motive behind the deal was to take advantage of the integration of MDHC's Liverpool and Wirral dock estate with their existing docks along the Manchester Ship Canal, which the company has owned for two decades.
The vision now is for what Peel Ports, as the merged division is called, to build a water highway stretching inland for 44 miles from the Irish Sea.
It would incorporate a battery of modern terminals and berths on both its banks, capable of accommodating ocean going ships carrying every kind of cargo from all corners of the globe.
Together with a plan to build more in-river berthing facilities on the River Mersey, the aim is to grow port activities to better serve the North West region with its two cities with a combined population counted in millions - the lifeblood of an economy of more than 120,000 industrial and commercial enterprises.
Between them, the Mersey ports already carry more than 40m tonnes of international trade to and from the heart of Britain's strongest container cargo generating region outside London.
This already includes wine shipped from Argentina to Liverpool before being switched to barges and carried to Irlam, near Manchester.
Similarly, Proctor & Gamble deliver tons of raw paper product into Manchester which originates in Georgia, USA.
Combining 70 berths in the Port of Liverpool's enclosed docks and another 40 berths on the river and Ship Canal, Peel's ports handle a diverse range of cargoes - containers, grain, animal feed, timber, forest products, steel, coal, cocoa and scrap metal, crude oil, edible oils, liquid chemicals, molasses and people carried on Irish Sea services and a growing number of cruise ships.
Port customers include blue-chip international operators such as Shell, Cargill, Rank Hovis, Tate and Lyle, Kaneb, sVG Intermol, Ineos, E.on, European Metals Recycling and Norton and Co, not to forget Irish brewer Guinness.
A planned £100m-plus investment in modern facilities to meet the demands of tomorrow's global trading community includes an in-river terminal with an 820-metre quayside at Seaforth to host the new generation of large post- Panamax container ships and a further container handling facility at Port Salford, in Manchester's industrial heartland.
The engineering studies to support the Seaforth investment are expected to be completed in the first half of the year with construction anticipated to commence in the second half of 2008. Frank Robotham, marketing director of Peel Ports, said: "We are getting to the point where container traffic to the port has grown so much that we have to ask what do we do next?
"If you want to plan for the long-term growth of container traffic at Liverpool, the only answer is Seaforth.
"We need to be in line with shipping trends. The Atlantic will be post-Panamax by 2010.
"The future of the Port of Liverpool should not be constrained to just the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, but beyond that to the Far East."
The post-Panamax ships can be in excess of 100,000 tonnes.
They carry many more containers than vessels that can squeeze into Liverpool's traditional enclosed docks.
Ships of such size deliver larger cargoes. As a result, quayside storage has to grow. Liverpool, which already has about 4.5m sq ft of warehousing, is currently adding another 500,000 sq ft and expects to build even more in the future.
An additional 40-acre container park is also planned.
It is part of a strategy that has seen a growth in in-river berths in recent years for different reasons. At Birkenhead's Twelve Quays terminal, Irish Ferries travelling between Liverpool and both Dublin and Belfast can turn around much faster than they could using the docks locking systems.
Now the post-Panamax facility will allow the port to service the growing number of ships that exceed the size that the locked docks can handle.
Government approval has already been granted for the post-Panamax development to take Liverpool into the new era of post- Panamax giant container shipping.
At the moment, Felixstowe and Southampton serve these larger ships in the UK.
The ships themselves link to places in the Far East such as Malaysia, Singapore, China, Japan and Taiwan.
At the moment, Port of Liverpool customers can use feeder services that link up with post-Panamax facilities at Antwerp and Le Havre, in France.
But being a feeder port for Continental- based services is unsupportable for an operation that has global aspirations.
By the end of the decade, Liverpool - the UK's third largest container port - will almost double capacity from 800,000 teus to nearly 1.5m teus. All of this extra trade will require 42 acres of extra dockside container storage, as well as dozens of extra cranes of all types.
The new facility is expected to be in operation after 2010.
Liverpool's established in-dock container terminal handles 645,000 teus a year on services operated by some of the world's leading lines, including Mediterranean Shipping Company, CMA CGM, China Shipping, Evergreen, Hapag Lloyd, Atlantic Container Line and Maersk.
The new riverside container terminal will add another 500,000 teus of capacity and will be capable of simultaneously accommodating two of the new generation of post-Panamax container ships.
With a second container terminal, Liverpool is set to expand into new sectors, building on its ranking as the leading UK container port for trade with North America and enlarging the range of more than 100 destinations it already serves around the world.
But how far can Liverpool and the Manchester Ship Canal grow?
There have been suggestions that the Port of Liverpool should benefit from Merseyside's next injection of European Union economic development aid.
This money, argues City of Liverpool councillor and executive member for economic development and Europe Cllr Flo Clucas, could assist the port to grow even faster, and even over many years match the size of Europe's largest port, at Rotterdam Europoort.
Mr Robotham said: "We love her vision. Its great to have a politician speak so positively about the future of the port and the contribution it can make to the local economy."
Peel Holdings is a company with a reputation for thinking big. Its £771m purchase of Mersey Docks and Harbour Company two years ago is evidence of that.
The motive behind the deal was to take advantage of the integration of MDHC's Liverpool and Wirral dock estate with their existing docks along the Manchester Ship Canal, which the company has owned for two decades.
The vision now is for what Peel Ports, as the merged division is called, to build a water highway stretching inland for 44 miles from the Irish Sea.
It would incorporate a battery of modern terminals and berths on both its banks, capable of accommodating ocean going ships carrying every kind of cargo from all corners of the globe.
Together with a plan to build more in-river berthing facilities on the River Mersey, the aim is to grow port activities to better serve the North West region with its two cities with a combined population counted in millions - the lifeblood of an economy of more than 120,000 industrial and commercial enterprises.
Between them, the Mersey ports already carry more than 40m tonnes of international trade to and from the heart of Britain's strongest container cargo generating region outside London.
This already includes wine shipped from Argentina to Liverpool before being switched to barges and carried to Irlam, near Manchester.
Similarly, Proctor & Gamble deliver tons of raw paper product into Manchester which originates in Georgia, USA.
Combining 70 berths in the Port of Liverpool's enclosed docks and another 40 berths on the river and Ship Canal, Peel's ports handle a diverse range of cargoes - containers, grain, animal feed, timber, forest products, steel, coal, cocoa and scrap metal, crude oil, edible oils, liquid chemicals, molasses and people carried on Irish Sea services and a growing number of cruise ships.
Port customers include blue-chip international operators such as Shell, Cargill, Rank Hovis, Tate and Lyle, Kaneb, sVG Intermol, Ineos, E.on, European Metals Recycling and Norton and Co, not to forget Irish brewer Guinness.
A planned £100m-plus investment in modern facilities to meet the demands of tomorrow's global trading community includes an in-river terminal with an 820-metre quayside at Seaforth to host the new generation of large post- Panamax container ships and a further container handling facility at Port Salford, in Manchester's industrial heartland.
The engineering studies to support the Seaforth investment are expected to be completed in the first half of the year with construction anticipated to commence in the second half of 2008. Frank Robotham, marketing director of Peel Ports, said: "We are getting to the point where container traffic to the port has grown so much that we have to ask what do we do next?
"If you want to plan for the long-term growth of container traffic at Liverpool, the only answer is Seaforth.
"We need to be in line with shipping trends. The Atlantic will be post-Panamax by 2010.
"The future of the Port of Liverpool should not be constrained to just the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, but beyond that to the Far East."
The post-Panamax ships can be in excess of 100,000 tonnes.
They carry many more containers than vessels that can squeeze into Liverpool's traditional enclosed docks.
Ships of such size deliver larger cargoes. As a result, quayside storage has to grow. Liverpool, which already has about 4.5m sq ft of warehousing, is currently adding another 500,000 sq ft and expects to build even more in the future.
An additional 40-acre container park is also planned.
It is part of a strategy that has seen a growth in in-river berths in recent years for different reasons. At Birkenhead's Twelve Quays terminal, Irish Ferries travelling between Liverpool and both Dublin and Belfast can turn around much faster than they could using the docks locking systems.
Now the post-Panamax facility will allow the port to service the growing number of ships that exceed the size that the locked docks can handle.
Government approval has already been granted for the post-Panamax development to take Liverpool into the new era of post- Panamax giant container shipping.
At the moment, Felixstowe and Southampton serve these larger ships in the UK.
The ships themselves link to places in the Far East such as Malaysia, Singapore, China, Japan and Taiwan.
At the moment, Port of Liverpool customers can use feeder services that link up with post-Panamax facilities at Antwerp and Le Havre, in France.
But being a feeder port for Continental- based services is unsupportable for an operation that has global aspirations.
By the end of the decade, Liverpool - the UK's third largest container port - will almost double capacity from 800,000 teus to nearly 1.5m teus. All of this extra trade will require 42 acres of extra dockside container storage, as well as dozens of extra cranes of all types.
The new facility is expected to be in operation after 2010.
Liverpool's established in-dock container terminal handles 645,000 teus a year on services operated by some of the world's leading lines, including Mediterranean Shipping Company, CMA CGM, China Shipping, Evergreen, Hapag Lloyd, Atlantic Container Line and Maersk.
The new riverside container terminal will add another 500,000 teus of capacity and will be capable of simultaneously accommodating two of the new generation of post-Panamax container ships.
With a second container terminal, Liverpool is set to expand into new sectors, building on its ranking as the leading UK container port for trade with North America and enlarging the range of more than 100 destinations it already serves around the world.
But how far can Liverpool and the Manchester Ship Canal grow?
There have been suggestions that the Port of Liverpool should benefit from Merseyside's next injection of European Union economic development aid.
This money, argues City of Liverpool councillor and executive member for economic development and Europe Cllr Flo Clucas, could assist the port to grow even faster, and even over many years match the size of Europe's largest port, at Rotterdam Europoort.
Mr Robotham said: "We love her vision. Its great to have a politician speak so positively about the future of the port and the contribution it can make to the local economy."
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