Port of Gdańsk to build an Agro Terminal. This will be constructed by Port Gdański Eksploatacja.

One of the leading bodies in terms of grain handling in the Port of Gdańsk is Port Gdański Eksploatacja (PGE), part of the group of companies in Port of Gdańsk Authority SA (ZMPG), which intends to invest in 9 additional grain warehouses. This will increase its storage capacity by as much as five times – to 152,000 tonnes per year. The company’s cargo handling capacity is set to increase from 0.7 million tonnes to 2.9 million tonnes per year.

This project is going to be carried out by PGE together with ZMPG, which means that the state will maintain control over the development of cargo handling capacity and grain storage conditions.

‘The value of PGE’s entire investment project in the area of the Wiślane and Szczecińskie Quays is approximately PLN 400 million. This includes the construction and reconstruction of infrastructure on the land side (rail, roads, storage and warehousing areas) and on the water side (reconstruction of quays, strengthening and deepening of the bottom to enable the handling of larger vessels), as well as the purchase of cranes and other handling equipment. These investments are going to be accompanied by improvements in the organisation and servicing of business partners from the grain and feed industry, including IT, advance shipping notice, control, and inspection systems. The biggest advantage of this project is the implementation time. Some of the infrastructural investments and the purchasing of handling equipment are already underway’, said Dorota Pyć, President of the Port of Gdańsk. ‘These investments have a universal character. They will make it possible to handle and store not only grain, feed or meal, but all kinds of unitised general cargo requiring a roof. This location has a very high development potential. Depending on market conditions, it allows us to realise an even larger investment project in the form of a Grain and Feed Terminal, including silo batteries’.

Thanks to this investment, Port Gdański Eksploatacja should see an increase in its potential, helping it to become a key actor in the Polish grain export market.

PGE operates on five quays, but grain cargo handling is carried out on the Szczecińskie and Wiślane quays. This is where it intends to build new warehouses with the capacity to handle ships with cargoes of up to 36,000 tonnes and a maximum draught of up to 10.6m.

Five grain warehouses are to be constructed at Wiślane Quay. On the Szczecińskie Quay, four warehouses will be built in the location of the former container terminal on Chodackiego Street. The total length of both quays is 1.9 km.

‘The terminal that is already in operation has well-developed technical facilities, such as access roads, rail tracks, handling equipment, paved areas and warehouses. The planned upgrade and expansion allows for an increase in capacity without the need to build these elements from scratch, which reduces the cost and time of the investment’, said Andrzej Kuźmicz, President of PGE. ‘In the case of growing demand for cargo handling in the Port of Gdańsk, the expansion of the existing PGE terminal allows for faster adaptation to suit the customer’s needs. This allows the terminal to handle higher cargo volumes in a short period of time, thereby attracting more new business partners.

PGE is successively investing in modern cargo handling equipment. It has spent more than PLN 153 million over 3 years on the purchase of handling equipment, as well as on the construction of storage yards and warehouses. It has acquired, for example, three Liebherr LHM 550 quay mobile cranes, each with a lifting capacity of 124 tonnes, which makes it possible to better handle the cargo. The cranes are equipped with a variety of grippers for the handling of loose materials of different densities and automatic container spreaders for handling unitised cargo. It has also purchased two smaller Liebherr LHM 280 cranes, each with a lifting capacity of 80 tonnes, and a 50 m long REMO 1400 conveyor belt for the loading of loose materials directly on the ship. Thanks to such investments it has become a major player in the market.

Grain in the Port of Gdańsk

In Gdańsk’s inner port, grain is handled by eight operators: Port Gdański Eksploatacja (PGE), Magrol, Gdańskie Młyny, GBT, Handel i Minerały, Jargut, Speed and Fast Track.

Thanks to its own investments as well as those of its business partners, the Port of Gdańsk has more than doubled its grain handling capacity over the past five years, from 2 million tonnes (2019) to 4.3 million tonnes (current). Last year, grain handling increased to 3.1 million tonnes, mainly through exports. Between January and October of this year, 2.4 million tonnes of grain were handled.

The Port of Gdansk Authority is going to spend more than half a billion zlotys on the reconstruction of quays and railway lines in the inner port over the next three years.