The Seine Nord Europe Canal is a project of a high capacity canal in France, which according to officials, will decrease congestion on the European waterway and reduce logistics costs.
French Navigable waterways authority, Voies navigables de France has sign a 12-year contract with the engineering and consulting firms Setec and Royal HaskoningDHV for the construction of the Seine-Nord Europe Canal.
Image: siene-nord-europe
The completion of this outstanding project will be afterwards a source of sustainable economic development for the region.
The new canal will link two major economic centres through the Belgian and Dutch inland waterways and will be a chain of 7 maritime ports between Le Havre and Rotterdam.
The Seine-Nord Europe Canal will be 107 kilometers long, 54 meters wide and 4.5 meters deep. It will include six locks and three channel bridges.
The main purpose of the project is to roll out a multimodal transport network by creating logistics hubs alongside the canal, providing connections with road and rail networks.
Image: Flanderstoday
Canal authorities believe that the traffic will be between 13.3 and 15 million tonnes of goods, transported along the Seine-Scheldt link by 2020, which is triple in comparison to total traffic of the present used routes. Also the it will have the ability to handle vessels up to 4,400 dwt tons.
Faced with the saturated roads of Benelux and northern Europe, the canal will provide an opportunity to transfer 4.5 billion tonne-kilometres from road to waterway by 2020 (representing between 250,000 and 300,000 tonnes less CO2 per year).
The works on Seine-Nord Europe Canal began earlier this month. The new waterway is expected to open in 2025 and be fully operational by 2027.