Lianyungang Port joined the ranks of international deepwater ports

From: Lianyungang Daily Updated: 2023-12-19 09:09

Yesterday, the Municipal Transportation Bureau held a press conference to announce that the second phase of the 300000-ton waterway project at Lianyungang Port has passed the completion acceptance. After 14 years of struggle, the 300000-ton waterway of Lianyungang Port has finally been completed. According to the national acceptance team, the 300000-ton waterway of Lianyungang Port is a typical project of open sea muddy shallow water waterway, creating four “world firsts” in terms of waterway grade, excavation thickness, excavation mileage and dredging volume. With this waterway, Lianyungang Port has successfully joined the ranks of international deepwater ports.

Lianyungang Port has the advantage of a hub channel that links land, sea and domestic transportation, as well as mutual assistance between the east and west, making it a unique strategic hub in its location. It is a hardware “standard configuration” to build a deep-water channel that can accommodate the entry and exit of 300000 tonnages and above super large ships. “But Lianyungang Port has an inherent weakness　of being located in　a muddy coast. Does this soil layer characteristic have the conditions to build a deep-water port?” Zhang, former president of Hohai University, recalled that he and more than 20 experts spent four years researching and demonstrating, and finally determined that a deep-water waterway can be built at Lianyungang Port.

In 2009, coastal development in Jiangsu Province became a national strategy, and the Provincial Party Committee and Government proposed to “support the development of Lianyungang with the whole province’s efforts”. The Ministry of Transport made the 300000-ton waterway project a strategic focus to accelerate the development of Lianyungang. But with the start of construction comes unprecedented technological challenges. “The biggest problem is whether a deep trench equivalent to an 8-story building can be manually excavated in the soft and sticky silt. Can the slope stand up?” said Ma, Vice President of Shanghai Navigation Institute, who participated in the design of the plan. “Even if the slope can stand up, the cost of annual channel dredging and maintenance is quite astonishing.”

In order to achieve the goal of being “diggable, stable　and affordable”, the 300000-ton waterway construction command center has collaborated with a group of top experts and scholars in the domestic water transportation industry to carry out a series of technical research and make breakthroughs.

“We go to the site repeatedly to transport water and mud from the Lianyungang sea area. We use the laboratory channel anti-siltation and reduction research and development platform to carry out on-site observation, indoor experiments, theoretical analysis and numerical simulation, and then go back to the field for demonstration.”　said Pang, a researcher at the Tianjin Institute of Water Transport Engineering Science and Technology. The research results have basically solved the main technical problems of seabed properties and beach stability, hydrodynamic sediment conditions and channel siltation.

“JUN YANG　1” and other advanced equipments　for the country　took turns to show up, with a channel excavation thickness of -23.1 meters, an excavation mileage of 70.5 kilometers, and a total dredging volume of about 200 million cubic meters... until the entire channel was opened and put into use, a series of innovative achievements were made in the construction of a 300000-ton waterway, which was identified as leading internationally. Now, this “human” shaped waterway with a total investment of over 10 billion yuan, connected to the main port area of Lianyungang Port on one end and Xuwei Port on the other, is steadily exerting the effectiveness.

“The 300000-ton waterway effectively consolidates the position of Lianyungang Port as an international hub seaport.” Mao, the director of Lianyungang Transportation Bureau, introduced that it provides the most convenient sea passage for building a “benchmark demonstration” of the new Eurasian land-sea intermodal transportation channel, and Lianyungang Port has since become one of the international deep-water ports.