Saudi Arabian ports’ quantum leap to the future

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) currently comprises eight commercial and industrial ports. The ports' busy history have now paved the way to modern new developments and the KSA ports are now poised to take a quantum leap into the future.

In the 1970s, the ports were experiencing high levels of port congestion. "Instant port" concepts were proposed to rectify the problem. Thus the 1970s were a chaotic decade of rapid growth and poor infrastructure in KSA. This was eventually overcome in the late 70s and early 1980s, a period referred to as the "golden times" for contractors and developers, triggered, no doubt, by the oil boom.

1975 saw the turning point with the decision to build the twin industrial cities of Jubail, on the Arab Gulf coast and Yanbu on the Red Sea coast. These twin cities and their associated newly built ports, with refineries and petrochemical plants, along with continuous  improvements at both Jeddah and Dammam, modernised the KSA port scene by the early 1980s.

The present

The eight commercial and industrial KSA ports are:

2008 Statistics (annualised) at all KSA ports

Approximate total tonnes handled by ports in 2008, all commodities:

Jeddah Islamic Port (JIP), ranked 30 in world rankings, is KSA's largest port by volume of tonnage and containers (TEUs). Dammam KAAP is the second largest in terms of container throughput. Both JIP & KAAP have had recent upgrades. JIP now has a third container terminal of 1.5 million NTEU design capacity, on a 40 hectare site, giving the port a total capacity of about six million TEUs between three terminals. It also has 58 berths, and can take the largest box ships currently in service.

KAAP underwent an extensive upgrade to increase its container capacity from 800,000TEU per annum to two million TEU. All in all, the Kingdom's ports now have about ten million TEU capacity at the three largest box ports of JIP, KAAP and KFIPY.

For comparison purposes, shown below is the container throughput for the world's top ten box ports as of December 31, 2007.

Gordon O'Rourke