Who will get their hands on the commercial port of Sines, Portugal? The local authorities created a surprise, Wednesday, April 7, by announcing that they had postponed the decision to award the contract for a second container terminal in this strategic port. Officially, the international call for tenders launched in 2019, for 642 million euros, was concluded without a proposal due to the crisis linked to Covid-19. “Taking into account the current strong macroeconomic constraints, the Port Authority proposes to adapt the tendering procedure to the current context, by relaxing certain aspects”, indicates its press release. According to José Luis Cacho, chairman of the port’s board of directors cited by the Reuters press agency, 52 entities (operators, financial companies, etc.) have consulted the file.
The affair, however, seemed to have started well. In Lisbon, at the end of 2018, President Xi Jinping signed an agreement on the “new silk roads”, the vast Chinese infrastructure project in the world, with his Portuguese counterpart, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who had unrolled the carpet for him. red. China, with its giant Cosco, was the favorite to invest in Sines, whose docks saw the fleet of Vasco de Gama, the builder of the Portuguese Empire, set off in 1497. But, since 2018, the tide has clearly turned.
100 km south of Lisbon, Sines is the gateway to Europe on the Atlantic seaboard – the first deep-water port remote from Panama and the United States. Its physiognomy allows the maneuver of giant container ships. In strong growth, it handled 42 million tonnes of oil, gas and products in 2020, and more than 2 million containers. Since its creation in 1970, the “Sines Industrial Complex” has thus been at the heart of Portugal’s development projects. If the port experienced poor performance in 2019, it has major expansion plans. The first investor in the current container terminal, the Singaporean concessionaire PSA, will commit 661 million euros. And another 300 million in public investments are planned. The new Vasco de Gama terminal, covering 46 hectares, will eventually have to handle 3.5 million containers.
“Sines is an important industrial and energy center, it could become a European hub”, explains Joao Pedro Matos Fernandes, the Minister of the Environment. The port already provides 30% of imports of American liquefied natural gas, and the government aims to make it a site for the production of green hydrogen, from photovoltaic energy. “We have six projects there around this production, weighing 7 billion euros, adds Fernandes. Our country has always imported energy: we believe that, in ten years, we will be able to export it from Sines, thanks to green hydrogen. “ Particularly to the Netherlands and Germany.
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