Mexico to commit $2 billion to create five major commercial ports
The Mexican government, aggressively moving forward with an ambitious overhaul of the national infrastructure system, has announced a nearly $2 billion commitment to construct five new commercial ports over the next five years, according to Latin and South American news outlets.
A recently released study from the transport and communications ministry of the Mexican federal government, known as SCT, details plans to spend just over $1 billion on the Punta Colonet port and $504 million on the Manzanillo II port, both on the West Coast of Mexico. According to Mexican news outlet Expansi'n and Chilean media outlet Mundo Maritimo, the SCT envisions both ports dealing almost exclusively with the other 20 member nations of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, of which Mexico is a member.
On the Mexican East Coast, the SCT is also planning to spend $340 million to develop the Veracruz II port, $65 million to develop the Puerto Morales port, and $46 million to create a port at Seybaplaya. The three East Coast ports are expected to handle trade with Europe and the U.S. East Coast, as well as ports in Central and South America on the Atlantic.
The five new ports will boost Mexico's total nationwide commercial terminal capacity from a current 112-terminal network to 124 terminals.
The funds to develop the ports were included in Mexican President Felipe Calder'n’s five-year $250 billion national development plan announced in July. Under the plan, the Mexican government would earmark nearly $45 billion to upgrade and expand the nation's transportation infrastructure, including $27 billion on highway development, $5 billion on the national rail system, $7 billion to expand ports in the country, and $5.5 billion on the nation's airports. The plan calls for the Mexican federal government to provide $22 billion of the total, with private sector sources picking up the remaining $22.5 billion.
The $7 billion port component of Calder'n’s plan calls for creating a total of 12 intermodal cargo terminals at the five new ports and modernizing 22 existing port terminals. Calder'n’s goal is to nearly double Mexico's national intermodal capacity by 2012, from a current 4 million TEUs annually to more than 7 million TEUs per year. The plan also calls for the creation of 13 new passenger cruise terminals.
The bidding process for the construction of the Punta Colonet port is set to start by the end of February, with an announcement of the winning bidder expected by the end of the summer.
Differing versions of the Punta Colonet port plan have ranged in cost from $1 billion to $9 billion and varied in scale from smaller than the Port of San Diego to as large as the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles combined. It is being envisioned as a nearly all-intermodal operation, with containers being transported via rail to the American mainline rails near the intersection of the California, Arizona and Mexican borders.
The Mexican government's current long-term vision of the port is in the 5 million-TEU-a-year size range, about one-third the size of the busiest U.S. port complex in Southern California. This plan would make Punta Colonet, when fully constructed in about 2020, about the size of the current New York-New Jersey port complex. Container volumes in 2006 for NY/NJ, the United State's third busiest container port complex, were just over 5 million TEUs.
Bids for the Punta Colonet project will be sought for a single firm to develop the port/rail projects and to operate the facilities. The Calder'n administration is predicting that the bids will be in the range of $5 billion to $6 billion. Mexican government officials have said they hope to start construction on the Punta Colonet port, located about 150 miles south of the U.S./Mexico border near San Diego, Calif., by the end of 2008.
