Nearly four years after it first opened for business, Abu Dhabi’s vast Khalifa Port container terminal is to be expanded to accommodate the world’s largest ships.
Abu Dhabi Ports, the government-owned company that runs the US$7 billion terminal, has announced plans to expand the port’s quay wall so that it can handle more cargo and to dredge the port to make it two metres deeper.
In a statement on Saturday, Abu Dhabi Ports said that it planned to build 1,000 metres of quay wall, adding 600,000 square metres of space for cargo handling and deepen its main channel and basin to 18 metres from the current 16 metres.
The company has signed a contract with the National Marine Dredging Company (NMDC) to start preparatory work on dredging the channels and using this material to build the new quay wall and a yard behind it.
The work, which will involve 250 workers, is scheduled to be completed in mid2018.
The expansion is part of ambitious plans for Khalifa Port, which replaced Abu Dhabi’s 1960s built Port Zayed as the city’s main container port in December 2012 with the capacity to handle 2 million containers a year and is projected to have the capacity to handle 15 million a year by 2030.