Ports in Granite City, Ill., and Wuhan, China, pledge to work together.
The Tri-City Regional Port District, Granite City, Ill., has signed a cooperation agreement with Wuhan Newport, a Chinese port complex, to jointly develop cooperative prospects for the future. The Tri-City Regional Port District operates a multi-modal port district under the name America’s Central Port.
According to a news release summarizing the deal signed by representatives from both parties, the cooperative agreement includes the following plans:
- carry out exchanges on subjects of multimodal transport and arrange visits between the planning and construction organizations for both ports;
- share experiences in the management of free trading zones within inland river ports and actively promote the investment of foreign trade enterprises from the other part to settle in one’s own administrative region;
- organize investments and investigations by the enterprises within each port districts, promote project cooperation between both parties on the construction of logistics parks and ports; and provide convenience for enterprises of the other party to invest in one’s own region to expand bilateral economic exchanges;
- join together to promote “green” port construction and share information on environmentally-friendly port planning and energy;
- carry out information exchanges on a regular basis;
- carry out exchanges on shipping transport service, explore inland shipping import and export service, warehousing logistics service, process and value-added service and transferring transport service, among other projects; and
- improve shipping transport services for both parties.
America’s Central Port covers around 77 square miles in western Illinois across the Mississippi River from St. Louis and includes a 1,200-acre multimodal transport business park, a 200-acre Northern Port River transfer facility and a warehouse district of more than 1.5 million square feet (140,000 square meters).
Wuhan Newport, located on the Yangtze River in China, has a planned area of around 4,750 square miles (12,300 square kilometers) and a berthing capacity of 10,000 tons. The port consists of 26 ports in Wuhan, Ezhou, Huanggang and Xianning, China.
“The Chinese are extremely interested in ‘green’ development or development that will have less of an impact on the environment,” comments Frank Miles, business development manager for America’s Port. “We intend to share our ‘Green Port’ practices with Wuhan New Port.”
Miles lists “sharing with them programs like office recycling, energy efficiencies in lighting and electrical usage, renewables such as solar power and wind power, setting up ‘no idle’ zones” as practices to be included. “We also will share our interest in developing plug-in electric vehicle stations and low impact development practices, like bio swales, rain gardens and other ways to lessen the impact of run off,” adds Miles.
“We are both already fast at work at developing approaches to share FDI opportunities,” Miles continues. “We are providing them with costs of land, warehouse leases, office space availability and costs of shipping products via rail, road and river. We are very excited at their interest and are working at least a small part of each day toward these efforts.”