Morocco Planning Second Port in Tangier

Morocco is planning to build a new 14 billion dirham (USD 1.7 billion) port in Tangier. The announcement of this port with a capacity of five million containers occurred last Thursday at a meeting that King Mohammed presided over. Also in attendance was Said Elhadi, chairman of the Tangier Mediterranean Special Agency (TMSA), the agency that will be overseeing the project.

Many different facilities are planned for this new port. These include five terminals with a capacity of a million containers each. The terminals will be built in deep waters with 2.5-kilometer dock capacities. A liquefied natural gas (LNG) reception terminal and a regasification installation are also in the project’s blueprints.

The announcement of this new port precedes the expected July opening of the Tangier Mediterranean Port, a project which began in 2002 and cost more than USD 2 billion. The Mediterranean port has oil storage, a cereals terminal, a container terminal with a capacity of three million containers, as well as a passengers’ port that will not be operational until 2009. Moreover, its oil site will be able to store 20,000 tons of petroleum products at a minimum.

The newly-announced port is expected to be built near to and to supplement the soon-to-be-opened Mediterranean one, bringing the combined capacity of the two ports to up to 8.5 million containers. Intended to be fully operational by 2015, this second port is anticipated to strengthen Morocco’s international marine transportation assets. This would thus make the kingdom a leading international container platform.