Ports of Auckland (POAL), the successor to the Auckland Harbour Board, is the company administering Auckland's commercial freight and cruise ship harbour facilities. As the company controls all of the associated facilities in the Greater Auckland area (excluding the ferry terminals and local marinas for recreational yachting), this article is about both the current company and the ports of Auckland themselves.

Infrastructure

Auckland has two commercial harbours (not counting ferry terminals). There are also two associated 'inland ports' (reshipment terminals without direct maritime access) serving the national reshipment trade. In its facilities, the company employs the equivalent of 568 full time staff and is in operation at all hours to allow for quick turnover.

Port of Auckland

The Port of Auckland is large container and international trade port on the Waitemata Harbour, lying on the central and eastern Auckland waterfront (north of Auckland CBD). The 55ha of wharves and storage areas (mostly for containers, cars and other large cargos) are almost exclusively situated on reclaimed land, mostly in the former Commercial Bay, Official Bay and in Mechanics Bay.

Wharves (from west to east) are:

• Wynyard Wharf (also known as 'Tank Farm' or 'Western Reclamation', west of Viaduct Basin and mostly used for chemicals and liquids storage. It is to be turned into a mixed-use development and a park within the next decade)
• Princes Wharf (residential development and cruise ship terminal)
• Queens Wharf (proposed additional cruise ship terminal)
• Captain Cook Wharf
• Marsden Wharf
• Bledisloe Wharf (on which Stadium New Zealand was once supposed to be built)
• Jellicoe Wharf
• Freyburg Wharf
• Fergusson Wharf (a very large container trade reclamation from the 1960s)

POAL recently (2006) bought three large new container cranes from Zhenhua Port Machinery Company, China for NZ$ 27 million, now installed at the Axis Intermodal Terminal at Fergusson wharf, where they join two older cranes bought in 2001. The new cranes are the largest in New Zealand, weighing 1,250 tonnes each. Standing 103 m high with a 56 m boom length, they are capable of lifting two 20-foot containers at once, with speeds of up to 150 m per minute. They were bought to provide the necessary lifting capacity and reach for Post-Panamax ships. Their diesel-electric generators are also configured to provide emergency power to refrigeration containers in case of power failure.

Port of Onehunga

This second harbour is a smaller facility near Onehunga on the Manukau Harbour, south of Auckland City. While it is much closer to the industrialized parts of southern Auckland and Manukau City, the access via the shallow entrance of Manukau Harbour, and the generally less extensive facilities mean that it is of much less significance than the main port, and is used mostly for coastal reshipment within New Zealand, such as for bringing in cement from Westport.

Chelsea Wharf

Not part of the current POAL facilities, Chelsea Wharf, in Birkenhead, North Shore City, serves the Chelsea Sugar Refinery, which has operated since 1884. The nine hectares of the land were leased from POAL, but purchased by Chelsea in 1997. Ships with unrefined sugar (mostly from Australia) arrive at the wharf every six weeks, and as they generally exceed , the ships are legally required to use pilotage, managed by the Ports of Auckland's Harbour Control.

Turnover

Freight

Visited by around 1,600 commercial vessels per year, Auckland is New Zealand's largest commercial port, its turnover of more than NZ$ 20 billion per year exceeding even that of large rivals like Port of Tauranga substantially. Ports of Auckland handles the movement of 60% of New Zealand's imports and 40% of New Zealand's exports (both by value, 2006), respectively 50% of the North Island's container trade, and 37% of all New Zealand's container trade (2007). It moves 4 million tonnes of 'breakbulk' cargo per year (2006), as well as around 773,160 TEUs (Twenty-foot equivalent containers units) oer year (2007).

Another major import are used cars, with approximately 166,000 landed per year. The cars are mainly relatively new Japanese models, due to the very strict technical requirements of the Japanese road authorities. Due to the very strict biosecurity regulations administered by the MAF, cars (and many other goods) have to pass through a decontamination facility, which strongly increases turnover times.

Cruise ships

In the 2005/2006 season, POAL also catered for 48 cruise ship visits (at the Overseas Passenger Terminal, Princes Wharf), with more than 100,000 passengers passing through the port, mostly disembarking for short stopover trips into Auckland or the surrounding region. Each of the ships is estimated to add about NZ$ 1 million to the regional economy. For 2007/2008, the total is forecast at 73 ship visits, another strong increase.

So far, the largest ship to visit was the Queen Mary 2 in early 2007, which had to be diverted to Jellicoe Wharf in the freight part of the port due to its size. However, the largest one-day turnover came in February 2007, when the Statendam and the Sapphire Princess were due in Auckland to exchange around 8,000 people at the terminal, the equivalent of 19 Boeing 747 jumbo jets.

Economic impact

According to an economic impact assessment, a third of the local economy and 173,000 jobs in the Auckland Region are dependent on the port. Ports of Auckland is 100% held by Auckland Regional Holdings, an Auckland Regional Council (ARC) investment entity. Annual dividends to the ratepayers within the last 15 years (as of 2006) have totalled NZ$ 500 million.

History

Auckland's trade, by virtue of being the (now) largest city of an island colony nation, has to a large degree always depended on its harbours. Starting from the original wharves in Commercial Bay in the 1840s, and expanding via the land reclamation schemes that transformed the whole of the Auckland waterfront throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (and still continue today, especially at Fergusson Wharf), the port became the largest of New Zealand (and has been since at least 1924, incidentally the same year the Port of Onehunga was opened).

19th Century

The initial establishment of the harbour facilities in Commercial Bay and Official Bay suffered from the tidal mudflats that made establishing good wharves difficult. After control of the Waitemata Harbour passed to the Auckland Provincial Council in 1853, the Council did much work on improving the facilities, which included constructing the first Queen Street Wharf, building a quay along Customs Street and a breakwater at Point Britomart.

After the Auckland Harbour Board was established in 1871 by the Council, further wharves were added and massive reclamation works were undertaken, eventually making Freemans Bay and Mechanics Bay lose their natural shoreline, while Commercial Bay (today the site of much of the Auckland CBD and the Auckland waterfront) was totally lost to history. The newly reclaimed land allowed the construction of a railway wharf and new dockyard facilities. New facilities were also built on the other side of the harbour, at Devonport, with the 'Calliope Dock' being the largest drydock in the southern hemisphere in 1888.

20th Century

By the early 20th Century, commercial and passenger traffic was already very busy, with large passenger liners from Europe and the USA arriving regularly. Though the Second World War collapsed the nascent tourist trade, the US entering the war in 1941 led to it basing a part of its fleet operations in Auckland, necessitating further expansion of the harbour facilities. In 1943 alone, 104 warships and 284 transports visited Auckland. During this time, 24/7 operations began.

After the war, the expansion continued, with the Import and Freyberg Wharves opening in 1961, as well as the creation of the Overseas Passenger Terminal on Princess Wharf. During the late 1960s, the massive, deep-draught Fergusson Wharf was established to serve the beginning container trade. While finished in 1971, it took until 1973 for the first container vessel to arrive, though the general container trend was not to avoid the port.

In 1988 the Auckland Harbour Board and operations of the port were corporatised handed over to a newly formed company, Ports of Auckland, by Act of Parliament. The change in management increased productivity, but also led to substantial cuts in the directly employed workforce. Around 20% of the shares were initially floated to the public when Environment Waikato sold its stake, but Auckland Regional Holdings later repurchased all those shares from minority interests and in 2005 gained full ownership for the Auckland Regional Council.

21st Century

Now being the third largest container terminal in Australasia, as well as New Zealand's busiest port, little remains in terms of the original facilities. Even so, Ports of Auckland is still expanding and changing at a relatively quick pace, with further reclamation worked planned to shift harbour operations further east, in connection with future needs as well as the plans for a more accessible Auckland waterfront (see linked article).

In 2007, with a big increase in shipping traffic being projected (due to the Maersk shipping line choosing Auckland as a hub for the Fonterra export traffic), POAL considered a merger with Port of Tauranga, which however did not come to pass. In the same year, volumes at the port rose 12.6% while profits, after deducting one-time items and property investments unrelated to the port operation, remained similar to 2006 (then NZ$ 55.9 million).

References

External links

• Ports of Auckland (official port website)
• Ports of Auckland (timelapse movie showing port operations)