STORAGE TERMINALS 11
HUB SCOUTS EVENT REPORT • TARRAGONA’S ANNUAL MED HUB DAY FOCUSED ONCE AGAIN ON THE POTENTIAL FOR GROWTH IN REGIONAL LIQUIDS TRADE AND THE ROLE OF THE PORT AUTHORITY THE STUDY OF logistics has been honed down the centuries largely by the military – getting personnel and materiel to the right place at the right time is a matter of life or death for them. So when one hears that the Romans chose Tarragona – or Tarraco, as it was to them – as their capital in Iberia primarily for its location and logistics potential, it is worth taking notice. Indeed, during the Port of Tarragona’s annual Med Hub Day, which took place this past 21 and 22 November, for delegates sitting outside watching the late autumn sun lighting the waters of the western Mediterranean and picking out the
silhouettes of the various ships waiting at anchor, it was easy to see that the Romans got it right. But the port authority has ambitions to leverage its location and its possession of a natural deepwater harbour to expand on its existing role as one of the major regional ports and instead become a true hub for international trade – and not least in chemicals. More than 80 professionals from the chemical industry and its logistics partners attended the 2019 Med Hub Day, the third time it has been held by the Port of Tarragona and the ChemMed chemical cluster, attracted
by the opportunities offered to hear about current development plans and to meet with their peers in the industry. “The Med Hub Day is one the most important events hosted by Port of Tarragona,” said commercial director Genoveva Climent. “It means lots of efforts by the whole commercial team, but the results are very positive. One of the strategic developments of the port is to become a regional hub for liquid bulk freight and this event helps on expanding this vision in an international way. We are working very hard on explaining our hub vision through many different presenting opportunities at events, and the growth of the Med Hub Day gives us lot of confidence.” SETTING THE SCENE The 2019 Med Hub Day started with a detailed and engaging introduction to the Port of Tarragona by Josep Maria Cruset i Domènech, president of the Tarragona Port Authority. Arnaud Waché, president of AWBPSolution, who also chaired the Med Hub Day sessions, spoke about the advantages that Mediterranean ports offer to chemical shippers. Delegates were also treated to a tour of Vopak Terquimsa’s sites in the port. Terquimsa, which is 50 per cent-owned by Vopak, offers some 430,000 m³ of tankage in 82 storage tanks in two tank farms on Tarragona’s chemical quay, and has another 27,500 m³ of capacity currently under construction. The tour also included a visit to the terminal’s traffic and operations rooms to see the advanced infrastructure and technologies being used to monitor every tank. Terquimsa’s investment and expansion is one element of Tarragona’s overall intention to double independent tank storage capacity by 2025. As part of that, the port authority is continuing to work on land reclamation to make further space available for tank pits and jetties, and to dredge the channels to those jetties. Liquid bulk currently accounts for around 60 per cent of Tarragona’s total cargo throughput, standing at some 22m tonnes in 2018 but rose by 14 per cent in the first half of 2019. Further acceleration of that growth in traffic is likely once the long-awaited extension of the
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