Port Construction: Costa Rica

Print this Article | Send to Colleague

Costa Rica: APM Terminals Moin receives Environmental License; Construction Start Order 

The future Terminal de Contenedores de Moin
Source/APM Terminals

The Secretaria Técnica Nacional Ambiental (SETENA), the official environmental agency of the government of Costa Rica, has granted approval to the APM Terminals Moin Container Terminal project. The project is being developed under the auspices of the Junta de Administración Portuaria y de Desarrollo Económico de la Vertiente Atlántica (JAPDEVA).

The formal approval of the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) is another major milestone in the development of the new Terminal de Contenedores de Moín (TCM) project.

The Costa Rica government awarded APM Terminals a 33-year concession for the design, financing, construction, operation and maintenance of TCM in March 2011. The agreement received final endorsement from Costa Rica’s Comptroller General Office (CGO) a year later (Advisory, April 2, 2012).

The first phase of development, originally scheduled for completion in 2016, calls for the access channel and turning-basin to be dredged to 16 meters/52.5 feet, a 1.5-kilometer/0.93-mile breakwater to be constructed with a 40 hectare/98 acre container yard, 600 meters/1,970 feet of quay and 2 berths equipped with 6 post-Panamax cranes.

Upon the completion of the final phase, the TCM will have an area of 80 hectares/197 acres, with 1500 meters/4,921 feet of quay, 5 berths, a 2.2 kilometer/1.4 mile- breakwater and an access channel 18 meters/59 feet deep, creating a potential shipping hub for the Caribbean and Central America. The TCM project represents an overall investment of approximately US$1 billion.

The ESIA was completed by Centro Científico Tropical, a well-known and highly regarded pioneer natural conservation group, with a track record of more than five decades of study, research and conservation of natural resources in Costa Rica and throughout Latin America.

The Environmental License was issued yesterday and is valid for the life of the project. The Construction Start Order was also issued by the National Concession Council and states that construction must start within 30 days of January 19, 2015. The first steps will be the construction of a new breakwater, followed by dredging.

Costa Rica is currently the world’s largest exporter of pineapples and the foutth-largest exporter of bananas. Sugar and coffee are also major export products, with high-technology an increasingly important trade component.

The Puerto Limón/Moín port complex is the largest in Costa Rica, handling 1.05 million TEUs in 2013. The current port is limited to vessels of up to 2,500 TEU capacity. The deep-water TCM will increase the port’s annual throughput capacity by 1.3 million TEUs at opening, with a potential build-out of 2.7 million TEUs. APM Terminals Moin is designed for fully-cellular container ships under JAPDEVA’s master plan. Containers carried on conventional ships can continue to be handled in JAPDEVA’s existing Moin facility.