Mediterranean Port News

Turkish tug builder Sanmar at the close of 2023 delivered a fifth tug to Mersin International Port, Turkey’s largest container port.Known as BOĞAÇAY LIX while under construction at Sanmar’s purpose-built eco-friendly shipyard, the newbuild multi-purpose Boğaçay Class tugboat, renamed MIP-5 by its new owners, is based on the exclusive-to-Sanmar RAmparts 2400-SX MKll design from Canadian naval architects Robert Allan Ltd.Measuring 24.4m LOA, with a molded beam of 12m, least molded depth of 4.48m and overall maximum draft of 5.5m…

China has called for an end to attacks on civilian vessels in the Red Sea that have dramatically widened the Hamas-Israel conflict and placed Beijing's commercial interests along the Suez Canal at risk.The Iran-backed Houthi militia from Yemen that seeks "Death to Israel" is challenging the ability of the world's biggest trading nation to defend billions in strategic investments in Egypt.Since President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi came to power in 2014, China has stepped up its investment and commercial activities along Egypt's Suez Canal…

CK Hutchison Holdings port unit said on Thursday it would invest about $700 million in two major Egyptian ports, bringing its total investment in the country to more than $1.5 billion.Hutchison Ports said it would invest in the development of a new container terminal in the Red Sea port of Ain Sokhna, and in B100, a new container terminal in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria.In a separate statement, Cosco Shipping Ports Limited said it would invest 25% in the Sokhna New Container Terminal - a new terminal built by the Egyptian government.The operating period for the project is 30 years…

The cargo ship MKK 1, travelling from Ukraine to Turkey, was grounded in Istanbul's Bosphorus Strait on Monday and traffic in the strait was suspended for a few hours, shipping agents Tribeca said.Several tugs were among vessels sent to provide assistance to the ship, the coastguard authority said.

Morocco is studying options at several ports to build a floating or land-based facility to import liquefied natural gas (LNG), Energy Minister Leila Benali said on Friday.Morocco relied for much of its gas needs - about 1 billion cubic meters (bcm) annually – on a pipeline that used to channel Algerian gas to Spain, until it was halted last October by Algiers, against the backdrop of worsening relations between the Maghreb's most populous countries.Whether floating or onshore, studies are underway to choose the "most immediate solution", Benali told reporters.The country tendered in January fo

Spanish authorities on Wednesday detained a mega-yacht called "Crescent" that is believed to belong to Igor Sechin, the sanctioned chief executive of Russian oil giant Rosneft, a police source told Reuters.The 135-metre-long yacht, described by specialist publications as one of the biggest in the world, sails under a Cayman Islands flag and arrived in Spain from Italy in November 2021, according to monitoring site Marine Traffic.Spain's Transport Ministry, which confirmed the detention but not the ownership, said it docked in the Mediterranean port city of Tarragona on November 2 and had sought permission from the coast guard to depart…

French customs have seized a yacht belonging to Rosneft boss Igor Sechin as it tried to leave the Mediterranean port of La Ciotat in a breach of EU sanctions on Russian oligarchs, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said.The move came as western states are implementing massive sanctions, including asset freezes, against Russia for invading its neighbor Ukraine. A separate nearly $600 million luxury yacht owned by Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov has also been seized, by German authorities, Forbes reported. The 88-meter "Amore Vero" arrived in La Ciotat on Jan.3 and was due to stay there until April 1st for repairs, the finance ministry said in a statement…

The first cargo ships from Dubai that docked last year in the Mediterranean port of Haifa were met by celebration in Israel. Flags waved. Reporters gathered. The prime minister walked the pier and gave a speech about the fruits of making peace.There was zero fanfare, however, when oil tankers began arriving at the smaller Israeli port of Eilat on the Red Sea in an arrangement with Emirati partners. Rather than washing machines and cleaning supplies for consumers, the ships unloaded…

A small fire occurred in one of the engines of a tanker off the coast of Syria's Mediterranean port of Banias, state media said.The fire was extinguished by the crew quickly with no casualties, it said."The technical fault took place in one of the engines of the oil tanker near the coast...it caused a small fire and a plume of smoke," state media said.Local radio station FM Sham earlier said an explosion had hit a tanker during maintenance works after it had caught fire a few days earlier while offloading its oil cargo.Last month, Syria's oil ministry said firefighters put out a fire on an oil

A shipload of Spanish cattle that had been drifting for months due to concerns over the bovine bluetongue disease docked in Spain on Thursday, the government said, but the fate of the animals remains unclear.The Karim Allah left the Mediterranean port of Cartagena on December 17 carrying 895 cattle destined for sale in Turkey. A second ship, the ElBeik, set sail the next day from Tarragona with a cargo of nearly 1,800 cows.Even though the cattle had clean veterinary certificates, according to Spain’s government, Turkish authorities rejected both vessels and suspended live animal imports from Spain after an outbreak of the insect-borne…

Fire broke out onboard a nuclear submarine docked at the Mediterranean port of Toulon on Friday and was still raging but under control by afternoon, local officials said.Nobody was hurt and no nuclear materials or weapons were on board the vessel, the Perle, which is in dry dock for repairs, the prefecture said in a statement.“The fire is under control. It will not spread, but it has not yet been put out,” a spokeswoman for the Mediterranean prefecture told Reuters.The prefecture also said that smoke coming from the Perle was not radioactive.Dozens of firefighters were on the scene…

French-based CMA CGM, the world’s fourth-largest container shipping group, said on Tuesday it would aim to become carbon neutral by 2050.The company, headquartered in the Mediterranean port of Marseille, also announced in a statement a target for 10% of its energy supplies to be made up of alternative fuels by 2023.CMA CGM, which was citing objectives set out by Chairman and Chief Executive Rodolphe Saade during a United Nations conference, is following market leader Maersk in aiming to reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2050.The French group…

Container shipping firm CMA CGM will use the French Mediterranean port of Marseille for refueling some of its planned gas-powered vessels, backed by a supply partnership with energy group Total.Total will supply liquefied natural gas (LNG) and a refueling barge to enable CMA CGM to refuel LNG-powered vessels at the Marseille-Fos hub starting in 2021, the companies said in a joint statement on Wednesday.The initiative covers five vessels with a capacity of 15,000 twenty-foot equivalent…

The European Commission has cleared a French extension project for the Mediterranean port of Port-La-Nouvelle.The project involves the construction of dikes and a platform for the handling of heavy parcels, jointly financed by the Occitanie region, the department of Aude and the agglomeration of Greater Narbonne.The Commission has concluded that the financing of the dikes, amounting to approximately EUR158 million, does not constitute state aid because this infrastructure will not only benefit the economic activities of the port but will protect the entire coastline against hazards climate and tides. As for the wharf, it will initially…

A clash between trading house Vitol and Azerbaijan's SOCAR over Caspian Sea oil shipments is forcing Turkmenistan to slash exports of crude due to a lack of tankers.Turkmenistan typically exports about 200,000 tonnes of oil per month via the Caspian to world markets, mainly from fields operated by the UAE's ENOC and Italy's Eni, but flows have halved in recent weeks, six traders involved in operations said.That happened after Turkmen producers decided to export oil via Russia with the help of Swiss trader Vitol and ditch the previous Azeri route…

Indian multipurpose port APM Terminals Pipavav has launched a rail connection to its Kanpur Inland Container, giving customers the opportunity to connect more efficiently to the gateway port.The new connection was named the 'Polymer Express' as the first train on the route was carrying 90 TEUs of polymer for Gail, the natural gas transmission company.APM Terminals Pipavav is one of India's gateway ports for containers and liquid and dry bulk cargoes, serving customers in the state of Gujarat with road and rail networks to India's hinterland and northwest.“This new connection will help exporters and importers to move their cargo faster and more safely using an environmentally friendly mode of transport…

Exports of Turkmen oil via Russia's Black sea port of Novorossiisk will resume in February, four market sources said.Turkmenistan stopped transit of its oil via Russia in 2016 and has been exporting all its crude via the Azeri Caspian port of Baku.Pumping Turkmen oil through the Makhachkala-Novorossiisk pipeline could add as much as 200,000 tonnes of crude per month into Russia’s Transneft system. Turkmenistan is currently shipping oil via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline…

Russian state oil giant Rosneft will buy its first shipment of oil from Iraq's Kurdistan in early April, becoming the first oil major to take Kurdish crude directly into its refining system, trading sources said on Friday. The shipments aboard tanker Minerva Sophia will sail from the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan to Italy's Triest, from where the oil can be taken by pipeline to Rosneft's refineries in Germany.     (Reporting by Dmitry Zhdannikov)

Key export chains in Spain could face major disruption if a long-running dispute between the government and the country's dock workers extends beyond a planned three-day strike next week, industry sources warned on Thursday. The standstill will take place every other hour on Feb. 20, 22 and 24 at dozens of Spanish ports which employ more than 6,000 stevedores and handle an estimated 500 million tonnes of merchandise a year. "The strike action could cause a lot of problems, not only for the ports but also for the companies," said an administrative source at the busy Mediterranean port of Valencia, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Spain's export sector is worth more than 330 billion euros ($352 billion) a year, or about a third of economic output.

Oil prices extended gains in post-settlement trading on Friday after Turkey's armed forces said they had taken power in the country to protect the democratic order and to maintain human rights. Supply outages across the world have led to crude prices rallying from 12-year lows touched earlier in the year. For the oil market, a military coup raises concerns of an impact to the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline, which runs from Iraq's Kirkuk oil fields to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in Turkey. (Reporting by Devika Krishna Kumar in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

TonenGeneral imported Japan's first cargo of Kurdish crude from northern Iraq in January, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Tuesday. Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region began selling oil directly to world markets in 2015 to get money for its survival and to fight Islamic State. Typically, Kurdish oil, exported via Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, has gone to Europe. TonenGeneral imported about 1 million barrels of Kurdish oil last month, classified as "export blend of Iraqi origin" in data from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's (METI). The cargo was delivered to TonenGeneral's refineries in Kawasaki and Chiba, both of them near Tokyo, according to the source and Ministry of Finance data. TonenGeneral declined to comment on the deal.

China's state-owned shipper China Ocean Shipping (Group), also known as Cosco Group and owned by China COSCO Holdings,  is on track to acquire Greece's largest container port, gaining a key foothold to expand China's economic and military presence in Europe and Africa under the "One Belt, One Road" trade route initiative. There were no other bidders, which suggests that China’s strategic aims of using the Greek port of Piraeus as getaway to Europe is one step closer to realization. Greece's privatization agency board said that Cosco was the only confirmed bidder for a binding stake in the country's biggest harbour. It had asked Cosco for an improved financial offer which Cosco would consider during the next week.

A new masterpiece from Beiderbeck Designs: in Taiwan, the yacht designers from Bremen are using the technical platform of a 33-metre long Horizon motoryacht for their latest commission for an experienced German owner. They are combining maximum comfort and all-round visibility at all levels in a particularly elegant way with a whole range of cleverly thought-out features. The customised 108-foot long double decker with its half-raised pilothouse (RP) on a tried and tested hull is already under construction and will be equipped with 2x 2,600 HP MTU-engines. This high-sea cruiser will let you directly experience the elements from every angle. The launch is scheduled for the start of 2017 and will be from the world-renowned Horizon superyacht shipyard.