June 28 – 30, 2017
The theme of this year’s North Sea Conference is Sustainable Growth Corridors.
This year’s conference will explore how to interconnect people, organisations, and regions to foster sustainable growth across the North Sea Region.
DUAL Ports will be represented at the conference, an event designed to inspire and connect you to people and organisations sharing your interests, to discuss ideas, foster common visions, and form new partnerships.
Click to read more about the conference
May 9 – 12, 2017
Come and meet several of our project partners at the Transport and Logistic fair in Munich, May 9-12 2017. You can have a discussion with the Port of Oostende and the Port of Emden about their initiatives in DUAL Ports.
https://youtu.be/qU5j4dyPpHE
On March 2nd the partners of the EU Interreg programme DUAL Ports had their second partnership meeting at the Port of Zwolle, in Holland. Here, all partners in the project met with the status of development.
With the EU project DUAL Ports, eight different pilot projects focus on optimizing port operations and making port business more sustainable. Therefore, the aim is, that the eight projects together will create a 20% reduction in costs and a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions in connection with port operations.
At the partnership meeting in Holland on March 2nd, the five partnering nationalities were taken on a tour of the port in Kampen, guided by General Manager Marco Swenne. The mayor of Business and Economics, Geert Meijering, informed the partners of the rapid growth the port has been through. There is political support to the development of the ports of Zwolle, Kampen and Meppel, and the ports are participating in DUAL Ports with two pilot projects; i.e. a Low Carbon Harbour Plan, that will de-carbonise the ports activities and the Green Officer pilot, a management project that will gather the administration of the three different ports across municipalities, thereby saving operational costs.
The merge of the three ports equals a stronger competition profile in the international market, and the Central European waterway system is increasingly being used to reduce the load on the road network. The ports infrastructure is extremely important for the rapid development and growth, and from the Port of Vordingborg, Development Manager Jan-Jaap Cramer was also impressed with the project.
“It is interesting to see how the port in Kampen has evolved over the past ten years. There is enormous logistical work in the cooperation between the individual ports, which we can also let us be inspired by in Denmark. We expect a lot of international cooperation in the project, on both the development of the port and attracting new customers,” says Jan-Jaap Cramer, Development Manager at the Port of Vordingborg.
On the 3rd of November participants from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Scotland met in Denmark to talk about how the DUAL Ports project will help to reduce CO2 emissions by de-carbonising port operations in the North Sea region.
The meeting was initiated by Belgium’s Wim Stubble, who is Business Development Manager in the Port of Ostend and project leader the DUAL Ports project. The mayors of both Vordingborg Municipality and Guldborgsund Municipality put weight on the importance of a green future and expressed their optimism that DUAL Ports will create both economic and environmental results. DUAL Ports is a part of the Interreg North Sea Region Programme (NSR). Christian Byrith of the NSR attended the meeting, with the purpose to talk about the aim of projects such as the DUAL Ports. In the process since the Secretariat approved the first project in 1997, it has gone from examining various issues, to now having to explore possible solutions – “DUAL Ports is all about DOING something – something that yields tangible results”. DUAL Ports must therefore create noticeable results, which can be transferred and used by other commercial ports in the region.
DUAL Ports consists of 8 pilot projects, of which five of them were reviewed at the kickoff meeting; i.e. SOIL, LOW CARBON HARBOUR PLAN, LED, HYDROGEN and LNG. Five different countries have committed to the DUAL Ports project, each represented by Regional Entrepreneurial Ports (REP’s), cooperating with research institutions, as well as public and private companies. Paul Gerard is the CEO of the Port of Ostend. He finished the meeting off focusing on an important point; that the smaller ports participating in the DUAL Ports do not have to compete with larger industrial ports, but, on the contrary, should be a complement to the big players. There is a large market potential, which, for various reasons, are not covered by the major ports, and the DUAL Ports must help to save the smaller ports from both economic and environmental costs, making them more sustainable and robust for the future.
