Sydney Harbour looks to attract larger vessels with the completion of $38 million dredging project

24 Jan 2012 - Port Planning, Dredging

• Canadian port becomes the newest deepwater port on North America's East Coast

• Project invloved the dredging of more than 4.5 million cubic meters of seabed material

The US$38 million Sydney Harbour Dredging Project was finally completed last week, as the port located in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia moves a step closer to welcoming some of the world’s largest ships to its docks.

With the completion of the project, a result of a port master plan commissioned by the Sydney Marine Group, Sydney Harbour is now the newest deepwater port on the East Coast of North America.

“It puts us in a very, very elite group of ports, although it’s going to take sometime for us to kind of get that message out to everybody who needs to hear it,” Jim Wooder, dredging project manager and chair of Sydney Marine Group, told the Cape Breton Post.

The project, which began on October 1st last year, involved the dredging of more than 4.5 million cubic meters of seabed material at Sydney Harbour, which has been used to create a 175.5 acre Greenfield site near neighboring Edwardsville.

The site, located in the Sydport Industrial Park, has been created with the idea in mind that it could one day become a future marine terminal.

The deepening of the harbor will now allow vessels with a capacity of 160,000 tonnes to make Sydney its port of call. Before the dredging, coal being brought into the harbor was typically unloaded by vessels with a capacity range of 60,000 tonnes and under.

However, larger vessels will have to wait until an environmental study is completed before they can call at the Canadian facility.

The study is being carried out to assess the proposed deepening of the berth located at the Harbourside Commercial Park.

The arrival of larger ships will also have to wait for the installation of new navigational aids and upgraded charts that will be needed to guide larger bulk cargo vessels into the port.

“You’re going to continue to see rock, barges and tugs moving around the harbour placing rock in the various locations that have been identified to try and improve the habitat for the fishermen. So that’s going to run until mid-February,” added Wooder.

“We’ve got another month to six weeks of work before we sort of shut down for the winter and then in the spring we’ve got to build a wetland and a few things like that.”

“China and places (like) India they’re screaming for bulk products that are exported out of North America. You get constraints in port because of that demand, and all of a sudden a place like Sydney pops up on the radar and people start asking questions and they’re trying to understand if rerouting cargo through Sydney makes economic sense in the context of their supply chain,” added Wooder.

When all the elements of the project are completed, Sydney Port will be in direct competition with the Port of Norfolk in the US state of Virginia. Norfolk is currently the only port on the American Eastern Seaboard accessible to the largest container vessels operating the world’s oceans.