Waterways: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

By Felicity Landon

In a feature story from Issue 4 of Breakbulk Magazine, we look at how technology and the expertise of project cargo specialists are ensuring the continued use of canals and waterways as an effective means of transporting breakbulk in Europe.

The desire for ‘greener’ transport solutions, the trend towards more modularized construction projects requiring movement of large modules to site, and the practicalities that were always there add up to continued demand for the shipment of project cargoes by inland waterways.

The specialists involved are well used to ‘thinking outside the box’ here. Now they must find innovative ways of working around the growing uncertainties of water – too much, or too little – as well as changing expectations from authorities.

The challenges have increased over the past 10-20 years, with a number of floods, said Frederik Geirnaert, global group project manager at Antwerp-based Drewes Logistics. “As a result of those disasters, the authorities have of course become increasingly mindful about the importance of riverbanks and dykes, which in turn can make it complicated to receive permission to move heavy cargo over those banks in some locations. But we fully understand that the integrity of the riverbanks is paramount and, to our good luck, with a proper technical study we have so far always managed to propose a technical solution that was accepted.”

He noted that on the one hand there is flooding to contend with and on the other there are droughts. “More than a few inland waterways have always had seasons where inland waterway transport was not possible on some sections of this or that particular river, but in the past five years we have noticed that these periods have become significantly longer,” he said. “There have also been regions and seasons where transport was possible, but at a restricted draft. That in turn caused barges to travel with less load, creating a lack of space and big rate hikes.”


Impacts of Changing Climate

Climate change is affecting inland waterway transport worldwide, but the form of this change and how much a region is already suffering is very diverse, said a spokesperson for deugro. From low water levels due to hot, dry summers, to high water during rain periods, to blockages during icy periods.

deugro highlighted a project to move four liquefied natural gas tanks, each weighing 225.4 tonnes and measuring 48.93 x 5.8 x 6 meters from a manufacturer’s yard in Decin, Czech Republic via the Port of Hamburg to the construction site in the Caribbean.

The transport had been scheduled to start in December 2020, but challenging weather conditions forced a change to plans. With only 90 centimeters instead of the required 1.90 meters, the water level of the river Elbe was too low for any barge transport. deugro had to quickly arrange a secure storage area at the quay near the Port of Rozbelesy, Czech Republic, to store the tanks until the Elbe water level was sufficient.

“At the Port of Rozbelesy, the barge loading operations were executed directly from the trailers onto four barges, one for each tank. After two days of loading and cargo securing, the barges were ready for their voyage to the terminal in Hamburg, with the four river barges connected and then pushed by a tugboat in twos,” deugro said.

Eight days after leaving Rozbelesy and after 536 kilometers of river transit, the LNG tanks arrived at the Port of Hamburg.

Franco Ravazzolo, head of project logistics and breakbulk at Gebrüder Weiss in Austria, said the ongoing increase, and expected future increase, in the use of inland waterways is very much linked to the road permitting situation in Germany, “which is getting worse.”

“We now have waiting times of three to four months for permits, which in the past took three to four weeks,” he said. “Right now (in June) we have had to shift some of our shipments from road to river ship just to get them going, otherwise we would have to wait until September to move them. So, we are experiencing already a strong shift from road to river.”


Vital, But Problematic Routes

Like every forwarder in landlocked Austria, GW uses the Danube, Main and Rhine as vital transport links. GW is preparing to move even more cargo by river, but at the same time this option is throwing up more problems, he said.

“The water levels in the rivers were always a problem. Now it’s more acute, more pressing, especially during the dry season. Here in Vienna, we don’t suffer so much from the low level but in the upper part of the Danube, the German part around Regensburg, for example, the water level in the past 5-6 years has been dropping year after year. This means vessels are still able to call at the ports but sometimes only loaded to 50 percent of capacity to reduce draft.”

There have been frequent draft problems on the Main-Danube Canal, he added: “At one point the lowest level in August was 25-28 centimeters. This is a disaster for river ships, which need at least 1 meter of water under the keel. August is a challenge going north.”

Going south to the Black Sea, the Danube being deeper and wider is not so sensitive to low/high water, Ravazzolo said, but the war in Ukraine is making this option far less attractive, with higher shipping rates and higher insurance costs.

GW is also active in the Czech Republic, sometimes using the Elbe from Prague to Hamburg. “There, the situation is even worse – basically 4-5 months a year where navigation is seriously limited and, on some days, not even possible because of the drought. On the other hand, heavy rainfalls in late autumn and winter can have the reverse effect, with the water too high so we have a problem passing under the bridges.

Overall, he said this leads to negative conditions, with more days where navigation is not possible or very limited. However, on the other hand “we need river vessels even more than ever,” he added.

Normally, a forwarder would seek to bundle cargoes at one port – Linz, for example – to maximize the use of a vessel. However, Ravazzolo said: “This leaves us with a longer transit time and less flexibility.”

In summer 2022, GW was contracted to move two floodgates, each measuring 40 x 9 meters and weighing 140 tonnes, from Turkey to Austria. “We had to store the cargo for two months in Constanza, waiting for the ideal water level situation. Right now, we are working on moving some 6-meterwide units to the U.S. We already know the road permits in Germany will take too long. Some of these cargo movements will take place at the end of July/beginning of August, a critical phase on the Rhine in Germany. We have explained the situation to our client; if we wait for a road permit it will definitely be too late. Using the Rhine gives a 70-80 percent chance of making it before the water is too low.”

The solution agreed was to bring the cargo to Linz on the Danube to head out in the last few days of July to get through the tricky parts of the Rhine early in August.


Blazing a Trail

In the UK, the transport of a 57 x 6-meter cold box and 10 vast storage tanks to a new Air Products site at Alloa, Scotland, in May, effectively led to the reopening of a navigation channel on the River Forth.

Kestrel Liner Agencies was approached by Air Products for proposals to move a complete factory to the construction site. After ruling out road access due to buildings already at the site, Kestrel approached the statutory authority, Forth Ports, about river transport – the company was told that no commercial ship had ventured this far up the tidal river for more than four decades.

Shipping company Robert Wynn and Sons was contracted to provide the 80 x 16.5 meter heavy-lift roll-on, roll-off barge Terra Marique for the task and before any movement could be confirmed, Kestrel was required to carry out a bathymetric survey to identify a channel from the Port of Rosyth to the site. A re-survey would also be required three months before the actual moves, because the riverbed changes frequently due to tides and currents, and Kestrel was required to set out navigation buoys to mark the channel. Forth Ports could not provide a pilot because none of its pilots were trained upriver.

The cold box was shipped into Rosyth by an AAL heavy-lift vessel while the tanks arrived on the Nordic Kylie.

Meticulous plans were made around tides, said Des Nott, Kestrel’s head of breakbulk and projects, to ensure enough water for navigation but also that it was not too high, as the loads had to pass under two bridges. Kestrel carried out laser measurements of the bridges at different points of the tide and Forth Ports required an emergency anchorage site to be identified in case the barge missed the tide on its way out.

The cold box and tanks were taken to the site on the Terra Marique in a series of shipments, loaded on to Mammoet self-propelled modular trailers and rolled off within extremely tight tidal windows.

The survey carried out by Kestrel has been uploaded onto the Admiralty charts. “Where Kestrel has led the way, others can follow – the extensive survey work completed for the Air Products job has opened the river for future opportunities to transport freight,” Nott said.


Inland Moves Encouraged

Wynn has championed the movement of abnormal indivisible loads along at least 16 rivers and waterways in the UK in the last 20 years and others have followed – to an extent – because Wynn proved it could be done, said company secretary Tim West. “Some of the rivers are used for access to inland ports such as Ellesmere Port, Goole, Sharpness, Sutton Bridge and Truro. The cargoes moved include items for power generation and transmission, large silos, brewery vessels, construction equipment and offshore structures.”

West, however, is frustrated by what he says is a lack of political will and focus from a transport perspective on the opportunities of inland waterways for low-carbon freight movements in the UK. While rail and road come under the Department for Transport, inland waterways are now controlled by the Canals and River Trust, or CRT, which falls under the remit of Defra (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs). “Government strategy documents talk about a national freight network but we don’t have all the transport modes under the same roof.”

There is also the issue of suitable loading/offloading points on waterways, he added. The Port of London Authority has a safeguarding policy to prevent residential development of identified wharves on the Thames and has forced some facilities back into operation via compulsory purchase. “There are other similar ideas outside London – for example, Leeds planners have safeguarded some facilities,” West said. “But it is a constant battle. You can safeguard them, but you can’t necessarily force them to operate as a wharf.”


Modularization Drives Waterway

Use Drewes’ Geirnaert said inland waterway transport is becoming more important in the drive for decarbonization, but this is a “rather indirect effect.”

“We find that more and more of our customers are investigating and executing modularized construction projects where larger modules are produced in a location where that can be done very efficiently and then those larger modules are shipped to site, often requiring inland waterway transport. This method saves on carbon emissions as the production can be done in a controlled, efficient and cleaner location and, when compared with the more traditional ‘stick built’ method, it also requires a lot fewer transports to move structural steel and other parts to the jobsite.”

He also highlighted the importance of using historic water level figures for calculations to schedule the transport of units on the Elbe.

It has become ever more important to make customers aware of seasonal restrictions and to assist them in monitoring and trying to predict water levels that could be too low or too high to make the transport possible, Geirnaert added. “Customers will have to take these factors into consideration and where possible construction schedules should be planned to account for this. I am, however, always optimistic that these and other problems outlined above can be worked around.”

For all stakeholders using this mode of transport – shippers, freight forwarders, terminal operators, barge operators and also authorities and waterway managers, this requires continued and reinforced effort. “In an ideal future, more inland waterways might be opened up for navigation and those which are already open might be improved upon. Sluices and water level management are important, not only for navigation but also for irrigation and water supply,” he said.

Air draft clearance can be an issue at times and Geirnaert encouraged authorities to investigate that and solve existing bottlenecks to help the movement of project cargo.

“I also hope that at some point more consultation can happen in each region or area and that where needed more critical moves may be given precedence.” For example, he noted, it is fairly easy to split 80 containers over two or three barges when water levels drop or rise, but the same cannot usually be done for big modules and other cargo items.


MAIN PHOTO: Wynns has championed the movement of abnormal indivisible loads on along at least 16 rivers and waterways in the UK. CREDIT: Wynns
SECOND: Drewes moved three LNG storage tanks weighing 247 metric tons a piece from the Czech Republic to Cologne in Germany. CREDIT: Drewes