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Egypt seeks private investor to build and operate new dry port outside Cairo

THE government in Egypt has opened a bidding process to design, finance, build, equip, operate, maintain and utilise a new dry port under a public-private partnership (PPP). The dry port is intended to relieve land congestion at the nation's major sea ports.

Located 20 kilometres from Cairo, the new facility will have a direct rail connection to the greater port of Alexandria (GPA) and the port of El Dekheila.

Interested companies or consortia are invited to submit pre-qualification applications to compete to enter into a 30-year public-private partnership contract with the Egyptian government.

Construction is expected to commence in late 2018 after a winning bidder has been selected and the project is estimated to take two years to complete, reported UK's Container Management (CM).

The government will be responsible for the rail connection and the site's utilities while the investor will take care of everything within the site.

Initially, the dry port will have an annual handling capacity of 130,000 TEU, but this will eventually double as the existing rail infrastructure serving the port is upgraded.

Project team leader Khalid Bichou told CM that studies showed the GPA's throughput could double or even triple from 1.2 million TEU per year in the next 20-30 years, heightening the need for solutions to bottlenecks.

"The port [of Alexandria] suffers from the classic symptoms of all the old ports," Mr Bichou was quoted as saying. "It's in a major city. The port will expand at waterside - berths, quaylines and so on - but there is no space to stack containers, inspect them and process them.

"Hence the idea of a dry port - to relieve land congestion from the sea ports. Containers won't need to be inspected or stacked. They can go straight from a railway connection to a final destination."

All customs processes and security checks could be performed in the dry port, he added.