Port of Kiel’s Ostuferhafen, a cargo and logistics hub, has received US$10.75 million in funding from the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany for further expansion.
Ostuferhafen has been integrated into the Port of Kiel over the past three years and serves primarily as a handling, operational and cargo management area with facilities for cargo allocation and transit storage.
The investment has come from the Forward Planning Programme: Economy (ZPW), which is co-financed by the GRW – a community-based initiative aimed at improving regional economic structures.
State Capital of Kiel Dr Ulf Kämpfer, said: “From an economic point of view the development of the Ostuferhafen could not have been better.
“Expansion has secured the jobs of more than 350 skilled operators and created 75 additional jobs on site.”
Since the mid-1980s the Ostuferhafen has been expanded in five phases into a cargo and logistics hub for the Port of Kiel, which supports ferry services into the Baltic and to Russia and the handling of bulk goods like grain, scrap metal and coal.
Project and heavy lift consignments are also part of its operations and are loaded and unloaded using two port cranes.
A new forest products terminal started operating last year and is now served twice a week by SCA cargo ships from northern Sweden.
A total investment of $17.9 million has been made to integrate the former industrial site and increase the size of the Ostuferhafen by around 43,500 m² to a total area of 42.3 hectares.
Dr Dirk Claus, Managing Director of the Port of Kiel, said: “This year we will probably reach the 3.4 million ton handling mark – which would be the best performance recorded to date in the Ostuferhafen.
“So we can already say that the re-activation of the expansion area has been a complete success.”
The Port of Kiel recently extended its services in combined traffic by establishing a new direct train connection between Kiel and the Adriatic port of Trieste in Northern Italy.
