The year 2022 saw many changes, upgrades at the Port of Pori

Port of Pori Ltd is a limited liability company that produces regional rental, vessel- and conveyor services. Port of Pori Ltd consists of a total of three terminals, including Mäntyluoto harbour, Tahkoluoto deep harbour and Tahkoluoto liquid bulk and chemicals harbour. The depth of the Tahkoluoto fairway is 15.3 metres, which is one of the deepest in Finland and enables big Panamax and even Capesize-ships operations in its deep harbour quay. Very short navigation along with easiest winter conditions of the area allow safe arrival at all of the port’s terminals along its excellent fairways.

The Port of Pori's traffic and operations focus especially on dry and liquid bulk goods, energy-related cargo, metal processing products, raw materials and recycling economy products. That’s also why its main investments support precisely these traffic flows.

Last year 2022 was a year of many changes at Port of Pori. In August, it sold its whole crane operations business to a new Dutch-owned port operator, Olmar Pori Ltd., who started in the port. This was not only a booming start for the new port operator, but in addition the port is now able to focus more on its main tasks, acting as a ‘landlord’ and developing its fairways, berths and areas to make its port even more tempting for its customers’ and stakeholders’ businesses.

The war in Ukraine and the related European energy crises caused big and partly even quite surprising changes in the Port of Pori’s traffic. Russian transit coal traffic stopped completely in the middle of the year due to the sanctions, but at the same time — and for the same reason — many other similar import cargo flows had to seek for new sources and routes and Port of Pori’s role as an excellent hub for big bulk cargoes became increasingly important. Another of its port operators, Rauanheimo Group, has done some excellent work finding replacement volumes to replace its dry bulk terminal cargoes instead of lost Russian transit coal.

Therefore, the majority of the lost Russian transit volumes have been compensated for with volumes from other origins.

The threat of possible electricity deficit situations as a result of the energy crisis contributed to the restart of production in the local coal powerplant after many years in reserve, and this also played a large part in increasing total imported coal volumes via Port of Pori last year.

This development has meant that Port of Pori is also an increasingly important energy hub from the national security perspective of supply.

In Mäntyluoto terminal the port’s new Kallonlahti 2 pier with 12m draught is now ready. The state-of-the-art modern concentrates discharging system — with anti-dusting equipped hopper and crusher, closed conveyors, automatic weighing and sampling station and new high capacity concentrates warehouse — is in the final stages, and will be able to receive its first vessels within the next few weeks.

Also, the new berth in the port’s Tahkoluoto chemicals and liquid bulk terminal will soon be ready to receive bigger tankers than before. Access is now possible for tankers of 200m length and 12m draught. The new berth replaces its old Dolphin-structure pier and increases both safety and efficiency in its liquid bulk operations.

The simultaneous construction of these two new quays represents a major undertaking and investment for the Port of Pori, so it was extremely pleased to receive support from the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) funding instrument. This means substantial contribution to the project and is helping the port greatly to ensure that the full scale of works is completed.

This year, the Port of Pori looks forward to continuing this good development of volumes and in addition it will be waiting for the next steps in the Vanadium Recovery Project of Australian company, Critical Metals Ltd. Their plans to build a vanadium recovery plant in the Port of Pori’s Tahkoluoto deep harbour will create