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Displaying items by tag: 12 Quays Terminal, Birkenhead

On the Irish Sea a major £17m port modernisation project on Merseyside will help grow the region’s import and export capabilities significantly.

Work is been carried out by Peel Ports and Stena Line at the Twelve Quays terminal in Birkenhead. The project will see the dock expand to service next-generation RoRo (Roll-on/Roll-off) ferry vessels by investing in best-in-class facilities to reduce turnaround times, increase route capacity and improve health and safety by implementing one way traffic.

The newly developed terminal is expected to be fully operational by January 2020, ready to welcome Stena Line’s new fleet of E-Flexer ships which will utilise the Belfast-Liverpool route from spring 2020 following a multimillion pound investment into the region as part of a 25 year commitment.

David Huck, Managing Director – Group Ports from Peel Ports said: “The past two years have seen heavy investment in the infrastructure at Twelve Quays to offer enhanced berthing facilities for larger, more modern vessels, helping reduce turnaround times and open up opportunities to grow the region’s import and export offering by expanding capacity by 20%.

“It’s also allowed us to extend our long-term partnership with Stena Line as it takes the next steps in its major fleet investment programme, with freight and travel customers able to take advantage of faster and easier loading and unloading.”

Stena’s new E-Flexer ships are larger than today’s standard RoPax vessels and will provide freight capacity of 3,100 lane meters and the space to carry 120 cars and 1,000 passengers and crew. They are also highly fuel efficient to help reduce emissions, feeding in to Peel Ports’ goal of providing sustainable ports for the future.

Work carried out by Peel Ports includes a new multi-level berth to accommodate double-deck, simultaneous vehicle access to and from vessels as well as bigger berthing facilities for importers and exporters to take advantage of the port’s connectivity.

Published in Ferry

About Brittany Ferries

In 1967 a farmer from Finistère in Brittany, Alexis Gourvennec, succeeded in bringing together a variety of organisations from the region to embark on an ambitious project: the aim was to open up the region, to improve its infrastructure and to enrich its people by turning to traditional partners such as Ireland and the UK. In 1972 BAI (Brittany-England-Ireland) was born.

The first cross-Channel link was inaugurated in January 1973, when a converted Israeli tank-carrier called Kerisnel left the port of Roscoff for Plymouth carrying trucks loaded with Breton vegetables such as cauliflowers and artichokes. The story, therefore, begins on 2 January 1973, 24 hours after Great Britain's entry into the Common Market (EEC).

From these humble beginnings however, Brittany Ferries as the company was re-named quickly opened up to passenger transport, then became a tour operator.

Today, Brittany Ferries has established itself as the national leader in French maritime transport: an atypical leader, under private ownership, still owned by a Breton agricultural cooperative.

Eighty five percent of the company’s passengers are British.

Key Brittany Ferries figures:

  • Turnover: €202.4 million (compared with €469m in 2019)
  • Investment in three new ships, Galicia plus two new vessels powered by cleaner LNG (liquefied natural gas) arriving in 2022 and 2023
  • Employment: 2,474 seafarers and shore staff (average high/low season)
  • Passengers: 752,102 in 2020 (compared with 2,498,354 in 2019)
  • Freight: 160,377 in 2020 (compared with 201,554 in 2019)
  • Twelve ships operating services that connect France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain (non-Covid year) across 14 routes
  • Twelve ports in total: Bilbao, Santander, Portsmouth, Poole, Plymouth, Cork, Rosslare, Caen, Cherbourg, Le Havre, Saint-Malo, Roscoff
  • Tourism in Europe: 231,000 unique visitors, staying 2.6 million bed-nights in France in 2020 (compared with 857,000 unique visitors, staying 8,7 million bed-nights in 2019).