Ports of Auckland Limited (POAL), the successor to the Auckland Harbour Board, is the company administering Auckland's commercial freight and cruise ship harbour facilities. As the company owns and / or operates 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.
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Auckland has two commercial harbours (not counting ferry terminals), with an international container port in Auckland and a regional port in Onehunga. There is also an associated 'inland port' (reshipment terminals without direct maritime access) serving the national reshipment trade, located in Wiri, South Auckland. In its facilities, the company employs the equivalent of 550 full time staff and is in operation at all hours to allow for quick turnaround of cargo.[1]
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,[2] mostly in the former Commercial Bay, Official Bay and in Mechanics Bay.
Wharves (from west to east) are:
POAL bought three new large container cranes in 2006 from Chinese firm Zhenhua Port Machinery Co. 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 (6.1 m) 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 generators can provide emergency power to refrigerated containers in case of power failure.[4][5] The port has also upgraded most of the straddle carrier fleet to the most modern version Noell Straddles, with diesel-electric power.
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,[2] such as for bringing in cement from Westport.
Chelsea Wharf, in Birkenhead, North Shore City, not part of the current POAL facilities, 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.[6] Ships with unrefined sugar (mostly from Australia) arrive at the wharf every six weeks,[7] and as they generally exceed 500 gross register tons (GRT), the ships are legally required to use pilotage, managed by the Ports of Auckland's Harbour Control.[8]
An inland port in South Auckland which functions as a rail exchange between the sea port and the national rail network.
Visited by around 1,600 commercial vessels a year,[8] Auckland is New Zealand's largest commercial port, its turnover of more than NZ$20 billion per year[9] substantially exceeding that of major rival Port of Tauranga. Ports of Auckland handles the movement of 60% of New Zealand's imports and 40% of its exports (both by value, 2006),[10] respectively 50% of the North Island's container trade, and 37% of all New Zealand's container trade (2007).[11] It moves 4 million tonnes of 'breakbulk' cargo per year (2006),[10] as well as around 773,160 twenty-foot equivalent containers units per year (2007).[11]
Another major import are used cars, with approximately 166,000 landed per year.[12] 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.[9]
In the 2005/2006 season, POAL 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.[13] Each of the ships is estimated to add about NZ$1 million to the regional economy.[9] For 2007/2008, the total was forecast at 73 ship visits, another strong increase.[3]
So far, the largest ship to visit was the Queen Mary 2, 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.[14]
According to an economic impact assessment, 173,000 jobs in the Auckland Region rely on trade through the ports and the ports have an impact on a third of the local economy.[15] 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.[9]
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).[9]
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.[16]
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.[16]
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.[16]
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.[16][17]
In 1985, the Harbour Board's computer system was broken into by a teenaged hacker. Although it was not the first hacking incident to be reported in New Zealand, it was one of the first to feature in a major TV news story.[18][19][20]
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.[16] 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.[2]
Now being the third largest container terminal in Australasia, as well as New Zealand's busiest port,[16] little remains in terms of the original facilities. Even so, Ports of Auckland is still expanding and changing at a 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.
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 did not come to pass.[11] 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).[11]
In its 2008 plan, POAL proposed to extend the Fergusson and Bledisloe terminals into one large area mainly intended for container handling. The change is to increase the port's capacity by 250%, and allow ships with up to 7,000 containers to use its facilities, where the current limit is about 4,000. The extension would include the purchase of even larger cranes, topping out at 94m, while containers on the wharf may be stacked as high as six-storey buildings.[21]
In 2009, POAL noted that while container business in the past year had increased and profits in that sector had grown due to productivity gains and more consolidation of the industry towards larger ports like Auckland, there was a significant reduction in car import business due to the recession, which reduced the company's profits by 26% to $12.6m for the last half year to 31 December 2008.[22]
From early 2010, Ports of Auckland has operated a new inland port / rail siding in Wiri to connect road freight to the port facilities via freight trains. The new facility allows Ports of Auckland to reduce the amount of trucks that have to travel through the Auckland Central area by up to 100,000 trips a year.[23]