Bulk Equipment News

Port Manatee is adding a 2-acre cargo pad to support storage of prilled sulphur, a new commodity for the Florida Gulf Coast port. Under an agreement signed Tuesday, June 16, with longtime port tenant Gulf Coast Bulk Equipment Inc., construction of the pad is slated to begin in September on the east side of Port Manatee. A Palmetto, Fla.-based stevedoring and marine terminal operations firm, Gulf Coast Bulk Equipment has been a Port Manatee tenant since 2008, handling fertilizers, salt, potash and other bulk cargos.

A reactor and a cold high-pressure separator is delivered to the site of Rosneft subsidiary Syzran Refinery for the constructed diesel hydro-treater. The unit is designed for the removal of sulphur and nitrogen compounds, as well as of other solids to improve diesel-fuel and to bring its environmental specifications to Euro-5 level. The weight of the reactor is 400 tons, the length is 36 m, and the diameter is 4.5 m. The weight of the cold high-pressure separator is 345.5 tons, the length is 26.5 m, and the diameter is about 4.5 m. The equipment has been delivered by water with the use of marine and river transport. It has made 4 thousand km from Port of Ortona to the Volga river within 45 days.

A development partnership including the Port of Marseilles Authority (PMA) has outlined plans for further expansion of inland waterways traffic following 60% growth in five years. The latest objectives, focusing on container and dry bulk trades for the period 2008-2012, maintain a co-operation agreement signed in 2002 by the port, waterways authority Voies Navigables de France and the Compagnie Nationale du Rhone (CNR) covering 550km of waterways in the Rhone-Saone corridor. In the first five years of the initiative, total cargo volumes for containers, oil products and dry/liquid bulks rose from 1.8 to 2.7million tonnes, giving the waterways a 5.34% share of hinterland traffic compared with 3.65% in 2002.