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Port of Shanghai Becomes World’s Number One by Tonnage

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Port areas of Shanghai and Yangshen. Click to enlarge.

The cargo throughput of China’s Shanghai port reached 443 million tons in 2005, displacing Singapore port as the largest in the world, according to the Shanghai Port Administration.

The ports of Los Angeles and Shanghai recently executed two reciprocal environmental agreements—a Friendship Port Agreement and Letter of Intent for Collaboration on Air Quality Issues—as part of a mutual accord to cooperate on air quality (earlier post).

Total Shanghai port throughput has grown by more than 200 million tons over the past five years. Throughput in 2005 increased 16.7% over 2004. Container throughput of the Shanghai port reached 18.09 million TEUs (20-foot equivalent of units) in 2005, 242.2% more than in 2004. Hong Kong is currently the leading container port, with more than 22 million TEUs moved this year.

But Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangtze River, is a tidal port. The city’s main waterway has an average depth of nine meters, barring ships laden with more than 5,000 container boxes from docking. Large vessels must wait for up to five hours for the daily tides to rise two meters before the harbor is deep enough.

In mid-December 2005, Shanghai opened the first phase of the new $16-billion Yangshan deep-water port, designed to handle the world’s largest container ships—those carrying 8,500 units.

Yangshan port is located at Yangshan Island at the mouth of Hangzhou Bay, 27.5 kilometers away from Luchao Port in Shanghai’s Nanhui District, and connected to there by a bridge.

The operation of the first phase of the project concluded a 1.6-kilometer long dock with five berths. It is designed to have an annual handling capacity of over 3 million TEUs. When the whole project is fully completed in 2020, Yangshan will have 50 berths altogether and the total annual throughput of the port is expected to reach 15 million TEUs. The Shanghai/Yangshen port complex may displace Hong Kong as the number one container port by 2007.

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