Компания Shtandart установит новый стандарт

HIGHLIGHT: Maybe THE new headline for the Rotterdam port in 2010: the construction of the Russian / Dutch Shtandart terminal at the ‘Kop van de Beer’.

The news came from the Kremlin. In the presence of President Medvedev and Prime Minister Rutte, the 75 / 25 joint venture of the Russian Summa Group and the Dutch VTTI announced that an oil import terminal with a capacity of three million cubic meters will be constructed in the Europoort. We have to go far back in the history of the port to find such big transfer related project.

It is not just the big amount of money that makes the project special, but it is also good to know that it provides the port with a large amount of cargo in the shape of the semi-continuous supply of Russian petroleum. The Port of Rotterdam talks about twenty million tons in the official announcement, but VTTI Executive Rob Nijst, as right-minded entrepreneur, speaks of ten million extra tons and market rumors even estimate up to forty million tons of Russian crude a year, on top of the puddle of a hundred million tons that already enters Europe through the Rotterdam port every year.

A nice aspect of the project is the special name; Shtandart. It refers to the homonymous first frigate that Dutch shipbuilders (with help of British ship builders) built for Tsar Peter de Grote in 1703. With a series of these navy ships, Russia managed to hold a military position, and later a trading position, in the Baltic Sea, which was then governed by Sweden. That is how the Baltic Sea area was added to the standard map of Russia. The Russian navy has always had a ‘Shtandart’ in its fleet ever since, and the fact that the new terminal will be named similarly is to underline the century long relationship between both countries.

There is another reason why the Port of Rotterdam can call themselves lucky with this project, namely because of the success of the tender and charter system that Top Executive Hans Smits introduced for the scarcely available big top locations. Its predecessor, the deceased port king Willem Scholten, indeed travelled around the world in search of new customers, but he lacked a systematic approach. When one finally tapped a promising ‘prospect’, the foreign investor was given a red carpet treatment, and could then participate for nearly nothing.

With the marketing of Maasvlakte 2, the tracks radically changed. The Port of Rotterdam tried to no longer sell territory by square meters and quay by linear meter, but offered complete sites for the construction of container terminals to a group of carefully selected relevant candidates. Because it concerned international top locations - only few places in the world offer the combination of unlimited navy access and a densely populated hinterland network - the interested ousted each other and were seduced to bid for the available concessions. Of course, the port master has not published any financial details about this, but he repeatedly expressed his enthusiasm concerning the conditions in the charter contracts with Rotterdam World Gateway and APM Terminals, that are now constructing the new terminals.

The same procedure is followed by the location, where the Shtandart terminal is to arise starting in 2013. The 55 hectares, in the port industry known as ‘Kop van de Beer’, was left fallow since the construction of the Europoort area in the sixties, although countless plans had been developed for it, under which the recent construction of a LNG terminal by Petroplus. After this project was called off due to a decreased demand for LNG, the port master decided to offer ‘Kop van de Beer’ to the ‘booming’ oil sector as location for the construction of a tank terminal.

According to the press release of the Port of Rotterdam, no less than fifteen candidates jumped at the location, among which well-known Dutch titles such as Vopak and Argos, but also a lot of candidates from the rest of the world. The tender determined that parties who would supply Rotterdam with extra cargo had the advantage. Important to the port master, because every hundred thousand Euros provides extra port dues. There is no explanation necessary that Shtandart, with its tens of millions of tons, more than complied with this condition.

Another positive aspect is that the Shtandart terminal will not cannibalize the existing storage capacity in Rotterdam after occupation in 2015, which is mainly used for oil from the Middle East and the North Sea. The Russians also want to market their Urals crude in Western Europe and want to develop Rotterdam as turntable and trade centre for that. Starting from 2015, the oil is to be supplied by means of a ‘floating pipeline’ from Primorsk (nearby St. Petersburg) to Rotterdam that is to be constructed still.

It is also convenient that the Russian / Dutch joint venture has committed itself for fifty years, as VTTI Top Executive Rob Nijst confirmed in Nieuwsblad Transport, so the port is ensured of a stable source of income for a long time to come. Apart from that, the until now still unknown Summa, which is in the hands of a Russian tycoon called Ziyavudin Magomedov, is also on the ball. According to an insider of the international tank storage industry, one barrel of oil from the Urals ‘ex Rotterdam’ brings in five dollars or more per barrel extra than ‘ex Primorsk’ oil. A simple sum shows that by towing the thirty million tons of crude a year from the Baltic Sea to the North Sea brings in a bonus of about one billion dollars a year. When considering it this way, the investment of one billion euro in the new terminal is only a five-finger exercise.