The expansion of the Port of Valencia was not hindered by bureaucratic procedures. A year after the board of directors of the Port Authority of Valencia (APV) sent the new container terminal construction project (with associated environmental changes and improvements to the State Ports) to the central government, Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility Óscar Puente said yesterday in the capital of Túria that the central Government would ensure that the Grao site is “sustainable and sustainable.” confirmed its commitment to “emission-free development”.
Therefore, the head of this department, which protects ports of general interest in Spain, announced before a wide representation of business and political leaders that the next Council of Ministers, which will meet on Tuesday, December 19, will allow tenders for more ships. More than €656 million for the construction of a new “innovative, flexible and sustainable” container terminal.
Under the watchful eye of Carlos Mazón, president of the Generalitat; from mayor María José Catalá; Government delegate Pilar Bernabé, as well as APV president Mar Chao, head of transport and mobility policy of the Central Executive, among other political and commercial authorities, announced without hesitation the expansion of the above-mentioned maritime position. It is a “general interest” project. Away from the controversy and criticism of Podemos as well as his government partners in Sumar-Compromís, who openly rejected Valenciaport’s construction of this huge infrastructure, Puente assured that with the new terminal “rail connections will also be promoted to develop rail freight transport”. “This will serve to remove heavy vehicles from the road and the metropolitan area.”
“An ecological project”
“We are talking about an ecological project because initially from an energy perspective it will be 100% sustainable, self-sufficient and self-sufficient with clean energy,” Puente said. he added. There is also another fundamental problem, which is that the terminal construction is accompanied by a project to divert traffic from containers to trains. «The northern terminal is equipped with the largest railway terminal that any port on the Iberian Peninsula can have. Therefore, we are not only talking about a port operation, but also a very important railway operation,” he said.
In this sense, the Minister drew attention to the importance of encouraging the modal transition to train. “Not for nothing, 92% of land traffic in the Port of Valencia is still carried out by road and this is something we want to change,” he warned.
Public-private collaboration
While administrative procedures and deadlines for tendering and awarding works are awaited, the new terminal will be developed in public-private sector cooperation and will exceed 1 billion 600 million euros in total, which will represent the largest private investment in its history. Spanish port system. “It is a port with a very serious traffic volume and has been operating in its own congestion band for a while. He stated that forward-thinking managers should foresee such conditions and work to ensure that the infrastructure will serve its purpose, that is, facilitate the traffic of goods, when that time comes. In this sense, work is being done on the new northern terminal project in Valencia. The Port of Valencia is the first port in Spain and the fourth port in the EU in container traffic.
Government Partners
Speaking to the press and referring to Compromís’ warning that Sumar’s ministers would not vote in favor of the project, Puente explained that he did not know what the government partners would do, but that PSOE was “completely consistent”. with their defense of having supported the project “for years” at both the state and regional level.
Puente sent a message to “Valencians to calm down” and stated that “environmental objections to the project are unfounded” and that the project should be analyzed “globally”. According to him, “we should not only think about the impact” on the Saler beaches, which “are the subject of remedial works in which 30 million euros have been invested”. “I hope they change their focus and events take them in another direction,” Puente concluded.