The president of the Colombian port of Barranquilla, Rene´ Puche, says that the aim for 2017 is to increase the port’s overall dry bulk operation. This will be achieved through the increase in warehousing capacity, with construction of four new silos, which will cost around $4 million. These will house so-called ‘clean’ dry bulks.
“We are going to put forward this project at the next meeting of the management board, and if it is approved, the silos should be available to operate in mid-2017,” he said.
The handling of dry bulk is one of the port of Barranquilla’s strong points, said Puche. “This has traditionally been a dry bulk port and, before we starting handling other cargo, we were handling bulk,” he observed.
By the end of 2017, the specialist terminals at Barranquilla were expected to have handled two million tonnes of clean dry bulk, which is defined as being bulk for human rather than animal consumption. In 2015, clean bulks amounted to 1.6 million tonnes, so 2016 saw an effective rise of 25%.
One of the reasons Barranquilla continues to do well in this sector is its ability to use multimodal transport, given extensive use in the region of the Magdalena River. Investment in support of this during 2017 has been budgeted at $16 million.