The entire application that Niedersachsen Ports submitted today with the Niedersachsen Water Management, Coastal Defense and Nature Conservation Agency (NLWKN) for the plan approval notice consists of several thousand (digital) pages. With it, the approval procedure for the expansion of the existing port, along with the construction of at least one jetty for liquefied gases was set in motion.
“The ports of Niedersachsen play a central role for the future energy supply in Germany. We need the two locations in Stade and Wilhelmshaven for the enormous energy demand of our national economy, they will give us more independence from Russian gas deliveries. In the current situation, time is of the essence. As chairman of the supervisory board, I’m very happy that the NPorts team was in a position to assemble the planning documents on such short notice. That’s why we were able to make great progress in this project. The ports of Niedersachsen are sending a clear signal to swiftly build up the LNG infrastructure in a future-proof way“, the chairman of the supervisory board and Minister for Economic Affairs, Dr. Bernd Althusmann, explains.
Subject of the plan documents is a ships’ jetty with an overall length of some 660 meters to accommodate gas tanker vessels south of the existing port on the River Elbe, plus the expansion of the Südhafen (South Port) by another two berths.
Great Accomplishment
“During the past months, our Engineering and Technical department team has made great strides to complete the approval documents. This is quite an accomplishment that will contribute to propelling Stade towards a leading position as a crucial location for the energy transition and energy security”, Holger Banik, Managing Director of the Niedersachsen Ports GmbH & Co. KG and the JadeWeserPort Realisierungs GmbH & Co. KG, emphasizes.
The preparatory work leading up to this took about 2 years. During the planning approval process, the final legality of the envisioned transport infrastructure project is determined. In preparation, NPorts has ordered the necessary expert opinions. On the one hand, those expert opinions are of a technical nature, such as support structure investigations, ship simulations, and safety analyses. In other expert opinions, any potential effects upon the environment are front and center. There is, for instance, an environmental compatibility study, a biological fishing and zoological expert’s assessment, as well as investigations into noise and dust emissions. The scheduled construction constitutes an intrusion into the landscape and the environment. In order to create balance here, there must be commensurate compensations.
“For us at Niedersachsen Ports, anticipatory port planning is the basis for a sustainable port development. We have always viewed LNG as a bridging technology for a climate-friendly energy transition. Today, it has paid off that we entered into the planning for Stade at an early stage”, Banik continues.
The Next Steps
First off, the NLWKN will scrutinize the application for completeness. Once the documents are found to be approvable, they enter into the planning approval process.
The further process demands that the documents are laid out for public procurement.
After the plan approval notice is issued, the public procurement procedure can be started, with a target for the start of construction six months later. Construction completion is scheduled to occur 24 months after that.
Background
The Hanseatic Energy Hub GmbH (HEH) is planning to construct a terminal for liquefied gases as an energy source (the Energy Terminal) at the Port of Stade-Bützfleth. On the port infrastructure to be built for this purpose, various gases are planned to be handled, such as synthetic, climate-neutral gases like hydrogen and ammoniac, but also liquefied natural gas (LNG) that is needed in the interim, until complete climate neutrality has been reached. The further transport by ship is supposed to take place at the Discharge Head II in the Südhafen expansion area. Tank facilities for the storage of gas and an uncompressing facility for gases are as much part of this process as the cargo handling facilities on the discharge heads and also all the pipelines and a tanker truck loading station.
