This morning the Council of Ministers approved the construction project of the container dock in the northern expansion of the port of Valencia for an amount of 656.7 million euros (VAT not included). That today would be the day was already advanced last Thursday by the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, who communicated in first person the news that the Port Authority had been waiting for for a long time and who highlighted, as the Government does now, that the expansion is conceived “under strict criteria of environmental respect and coupled with the objective of diverting container traffic from the road to the train”.
The Executive points out that with the execution of the work, the Port Authority of Valencia will make available to operators a new “innovative, flexible and sustainable” public container terminal, which will allow the largest state-of-the-art vessels to operate. And he endorses the argument of current traffic saturation by pointing out that it is “close to its saturation point”, which is why he argues that the project that is given the green light seeks to “respond to the growth of activity and continue to be an infrastructure of reference within global container traffic”.
For weeks the air had been in the air that approval was close. The Government delegate, Pilar Bernabé, did not hesitate to highlight this weeks before in an interview in À Punt and the president of the Generalitat Valenciana, acknowledged having “good feelings” just two days before Puente’s visit. The confirmation by the minister was met with thunderous applause in the Port Authority house, where the cava for the Christmas toast served as a good companion.
The total cost of the work is valued at 1.6 billion euros and will be financed following the public-private collaboration scheme. Thus, the Port Authority of Valencia will be in charge of building the basic infrastructure (dredging, dock and consolidated filling), while the company TIL, of the MSC shipping company chaired by Valencian Francisco Lorente, will invest in the superstructure, facilities and rolling stock.
Also in its argument, the Government of Pedro Sánchez highlights that this expansion is a “strategic investment at the national level with an undoubted economic impact in terms of generation of employment and wealth” and points out, as Puente did, that it is also a “decided” commitment for decarbonization and for the railway as an alternative for the transport of goods”. In this aspect, the connection with the Mediterranean corridor will be capital for the Valencian economy.
For this reason, the Government’s statement continues, the northern expansion of the Port of Valencia “will serve as a lever for a change towards more sustainable mobility with fewer emissions”, since it aims to reduce the number of trucks at the accesses to the port and will allow decongest the roads surrounding the metropolitan area of ??the city of Valencia.
“This expansion of the Port will help decongest the V-30 highway as the southern entrance to the Port of Valencia and, with this, will improve the metropolitan mobility of Valencia. For example, the objective is to fill the trains with ceramic trucks with origin and destination Castellón, reducing transport between the Port and Font de Sant Lluís”, he concludes.