13 minute read
Superhub primed
Stage 1 of the Ruakura Superhub includes inland port, logistics, industrial and service centre developments.
Sweet Spot Story Colin Smith
WITHIN A FEW MONTHS THE NEWEST SECTION OF THE
Waikato Expressway will be open, and trucks will be easing back from 90km/h to negotiate a new diamond interchange as they enter the initial stages of the Ruakura Superhub.
The huge Tainui Group Holdings (TGH) development on the eastern side of Hamilton promises to bring significant efficiencies to the North Island supply chain as well as importexport freight movements.
A 30-year vision for the 480-hectare (ha) Ruakura site extends to including residential, educational and retail elements. But the immediate focus of Stage 1 – due to open during the third quarter of this year – is a 90ha industrial and logistics hub anchored around an inland container port and also supported by a highway service centre.
The inland container port - a joint venture between TGH and Port of Tauranga – has road and rail accessibility alongside the new expressway and the East Coast Main Truck rail line. It will assume a key strategic position in the so-called “golden triangle” of Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga.
TGH Chief Executive Chris Joblin says the excitement is building and Ruakura will soon be able to reveal some of its scale and advantages.
“A project like Ruakura, with 480 hectares of land, is like a super tanker. It takes a while to get momentum, but when you do, it’s absolutely unstoppable,” says Joblin.
The components of Stage 1 comprise the Inland Port area (initially 17ha, later expanding to 30ha), the logistics precinct (35ha) and the industrial zone (25ha) with the service centre occupying 5ha and about 10ha dedicated to a wetland area adjacent to the expressway.
Logistics firm PBT Express Freight Network signed up in mid-2021 and is the first tenant expected to move into the Superhub’s logistics precinct around August this year. Recent progress sees the roof completed on the PBT building and roading constructed to provide access.
A more recent announcement from Big Chill Distribution
PBT Express Freight Network (above) and Waitomo Petroleum (below) were the first tenants announced for the Ruakura Superhub.
confirmed a 13,000m2 cold store facility within the industrial precinct. That site is currently pre-loaded, with the build scheduled to begin in August and an opening likely late in the year.
Adjacent to the interchange that provides the Waikato Expressway access to the Superhub is the first stage of a service centre.
Waitomo Group is the anchor tenant providing the energy offering – including a strategic location for one of its first hydrogen refuelling stations – and a couple of quick serve restaurant choices for travellers.
Fulton Hogan have been awarded the contract to build the first stage of the inland port that is scheduled to begin operations later this year.
“What we are doing at the moment is bringing together three big parcels of work,” says Joblin.
“One is all the roading infrastructure and the services. That’s the roads that adjoin to the Expressway, the diamond interchange and the roads within our site.
“Secondly, we are building the inland port and the rail sidings. That’s the JV with Port of Tauranga. Both are scheduled to be complete in the middle of the year.
“We are working to align those things with when the Expressway opens, which we are told is the middle of the year.
“The third leg of the stool at the moment is the tenants. The building for PBT is well underway and we’ll be starting the building for Big Chill shortly.
“We’ve got some other, unnamed, tenants, who we can’t share yet, and we’ll be looking to start those buildings this year as well.
“At the end of this year you will see a number of buildings under construction, you’ll be able to drive around the main arterial routes in the site and the inland port will be open and operating,” says Joblin.
With the first businesses in the Superhub only months
Dave Lovegrove (left), CEO of PBT Express Freight Network with Tainui Holdings Group CEO Chris Joblin (right) at the announcement of PBT becoming the first tenant for the Ruakura Superhub.
away from operating, Joblin says it’s an exciting time. And he expects Stage 1 to rapidly gain momentum as the first buildings are completed and business opens.
“I have been involved from an early stage and it’s my privilege to be here as it well and truly takes off,” says Joblin.
“We are working on a 60-hectare development [the industrial and logistics precincts] and you chew that up pretty quickly when you’ve got buildings that are 20,000 to 40,000 square metres.
“For several years we have been quietly beavering away behind the scenes. There have potentially been some players in the market that maybe wondered what we are doing or if we were going to push on.
“There is no mistake now around our intention. We have already spent a sizeable sum of money and once you see the roads, the connectivity and the buildings pop up, you can make no mistake, this going to be a pre-eminent logistics centre.”
Joblin says the heart of Ruakura is its ability to bring together the various logistics networks - the import and export supply chains and the domestic supply chain - while being able to utilise different modes of transport.
“What that does is deliver significant savings. If you have a full load coming in and full load going out, the economics of that and the productivity gains are really significant,” Joblin says.
“For the people who we work with, particularly in that domestic supply chain, they are looking at the truck kilometres served back to their retail footprints and networks.
“Being located in Hamilton, there is a definitely a reduction in truck kilometres served which goes back to the fundamental premise of why people want to be at Ruakura.
“For a lot of people, it will be the ability to take cost out and create efficiencies through geographical location.
“But secondly, you have a location with the ability to have importers and exporters together and there is a huge saving there. Rather than having a bunch of curtain siders or containers moving air.
“The wider amenity of the site is really important, so we have partnered with Waitomo Petroleum. They will bring the energy part to the equation. One of the things we really like about Waitomo is they are investing a lot in hydrogen.”
The Ruakura site is on the four initial hydrogen refuelling stations being built to support the Hiringa Energy trial using Hyzon fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) trucks leased to key operators through TR Group.
“The ability to have hydrogen fuelling in the Ruakura precinct is massive future proofing and really exciting,” says Joblin
“Longer term, as we develop out the service centre there is the option for hotels, motels, conferencing and other uses. We are really just starting with the convenience food and the energy offerings.”
Joblin says there also is interest from a variety of transport industry services and suppliers keen to be part of the action alongside the large industrial and logistics businesses.
“We have had interest from several of those groups. The opportunity is there for those types of uses and again it’s a great location. With a tyre business for example, you are importing product, so it makes sense.”
The Superhub project also has a strong sustainability component with green space, wetland and solar developments.
“There is 50ha of green space. We’ve just built a massive
Construction will begin soon on a 13,000m2 cold sore facility for Big Chill Distribution in the Ruakura Superhub.
wetland to store and treat the storm water off the whole precinct. That will be fully planted out and have walkways as a public amenity,” Joblin says. “We will be planting several million trees within Ruakura and looking to do work with the endangered bat species which were historically prevalent in the location. We will plant trees that can recreate some of that habitat that was lost some time ago
“The wetland has been designed to allow an eel habitat and we are putting in fish ladders.”
“We are really interested in creating solar farms on the roof space of the buildings and the ability to store and recycle water to take buildings from four-star to six-star green.”
There’s also a plan around electric vehicle charging.
“We are just working through where that would fit. Again, linking up the vehicle charging with the hydrogen and the solar is really important, so you have a clean energy source for creating that energy.
“Ruakura is an integrated development. It’s going to cover so many different uses. There will be logistics tenants, the inland port, industrial tenants and the various service industries.
“But at its heart, it’s about productivity and about the efficient movement of goods around New Zealand and to-andfrom offshore.
“It’s about bringing the supply chains together to create efficiencies for everyone. Location is everything and it’s right in the middle of the ‘golden triangle’,” says Joblin. T&D
The Waikato Expressway continues to take shape and will provide State Highway 1 access into the Ruakura Superhub from mid-2022.
Game changer Story Colin Smith
INLAND PORTS AND LOGISTICS HUBS ALREADY EXIST IN
New Zealand but not on the scale and with the significance which the new Ruakura Superhub will grow to deliver.
That’s the view of Tainui Group Holdings Supply Chain Strategy Director Dave Christie, who says Ruakura will be a game changer.
Christie says there are several key value propositions to attract prospective Ruakura tenants.
“There’s the strategic imperative around future-proofing your supply chain, being located within the ‘golden triangle’ but not actually being constrained by the traffic congestion that exists in Tauranga or Auckland, and the opportunity to scale.
“There is no other site in the ‘golden triangle’ where you have this level of scale and connectivity,” says Christie.
“Ruakura connects to the East Coast Main Trunk and North Island Main Trunk and more importantly to State Highway 1 with the new Waikato Expressway. And the cost of land in Waikato is cheaper than Tauranga, let alone Auckland.”
Christie believes there is significant inefficiency in the New Zealand supply chain.
“What Ruakura does is bring the three supply chains together – import, export and domestic. And when you think of a supply chain, you can’t just think about what’s happening within New Zealand.
“You’ve got to think about what is happening outside of New Zealand. If you are a Fonterra for example, you’re exporting north of the equator. If you are a Farmers, a Warehouse or a K-Mart you are importing products from north of the equator.
“From a supply chain point of view, it’s the end-to-end. It’s not just the individual transport piece or warehouse location piece.
“Currently, imports typically come into Auckland or Tauranga. In recent years Tauranga has picked up more volume,” says Christie.
“But because of our imbalance, for every three containers we export, two containers come in empty because we export more than we import as a country.
“In the macro view most of those containers go to Auckland. So, you are moving a lot of empty containers to Auckland. There is a lot of waste in the import network.
“In the domestic network the containers are de-vanned and products put into warehouses, predominantly in Auckland. And then trucks disappear out of Auckland to distribute these products throughout the country.
“And then many of them have an empty journey back to Auckland in order to fill up again. There’s an estimate that 30-40% of the trucks going back to Auckland are not fully loaded.
“If you look down on the North Island from above, the network has a lot of waste flowing around. A lot of empty trucks, multiple movements and inefficiencies,” says Christie.
“With Ruakura we are trying to change that game through a combination of aggregation, container de-coupling, a multi-modal network and a `base versus flex’ supply chain model. That’s the
concept that the part of your demand that is there every day, you flow through one mode, and the part that is flexible and variable, you flow through another mode.
“You have a major pipeline between Tauranga and Hamilton which is a rail pipeline to warehouses located in Ruakura. Instead of flowing inefficiently up to Auckland, you are doing your distribution out of the Waikato.
“You have future proofed your network, because by being at Ruakura you can connect to Auckland and Tauranga. You can lower your transport costs, both road and rail, because you are effectively paying for a one-way load rate rather than a return rate. “By removing waste, you drive productivity and also deliver more tangible sustainability.
“That’s the value proposition for the whole precinct. It’s not just the delivery leg or the warehouse location, but the whole end-to end supply chain that goes beyond New Zealand’s borders as well.”
It’s the scale of Ruakura rather than the concept itself that makes it something new for the New Zealand economy.
“Multi-modal hubs are not a new thing. They have been established in multiple locations through Europe and in the US,” says Christie.
“We’ve got inland ports in other parts of the country, but they are not on this scale. And they are typically there to support that particular port.
“The Auckland one in Wiri supports Auckland and you can argue Ruakura supports Tauranga, which it does.
“But Tainui came up with this concept and said, ‘this is what we think is the value proposition for the flow throughout the North Island’. And then [Port of] Tauranga said, ‘we agree’ and that’s when we formed the strategic partnership with them.
“So, this concept is not new. The question is, how do you make it work in the New Zealand environment?
“In my view, the problem with other inland ports or hubs is that in order to work well they have to have that interconnectivity between road and rail and drive efficiencies across the whole network. Otherwise, they become a localised solution rather than a New Zealand Inc. solution.
“The value proposition, we believe for Ruakura is that it’s not that localised solution. It actually changes the game for North Island freight flows. We think that makes it more strategic than some of the other developments that have been done.”
Christie says it requires businesses to think into the mediumterm future.
“What we are asking them to do is cast their mind into the future and project what is going to be different in the New Zealand supply chain and transport landscape in five to 10 years,” he says.
“Some of the commercial benefits will happen right from day one because of the road and rail connectivity, but in terms of the scale it might take 5 to 10 years.
“That’s a challenge. We are asking people to be fortune tellers but the people who have decided to locate here have obviously bought into, and agree with, that view of the future.
“One of the next tenants we expect to announce soon will have people raise their eyebrows and it will start to highlight that message.”
Christie says the Ministry of Transport is currently carrying out an NZ Freight and Supply Chain Strategy Review with the key areas of focus being Decarbonisation, Resilience, Productivity and Innovation, and Well Being to generate policy out to 2050.
“We believe Ruakura double ticks all of those. It delivers on the government’s future vision of what the transport and logistics networks will look like in the future. Not just regionally, but nationally as well,” says Christie. T&D
Big Chill CEO Michael Roberts (left) and Freightways CEO Mark Troughear have announced the company’s tenth distribution facility will be located at Ruakura.
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