110 YEARS OLD AND PORT OF IMMINGHAM IS STILL GOING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH

Super-passionate - Tom Jeynes enthralled visitors who heard his presentation at the open day held at the port of Immingham 

WHAT is the secret of success for the port of Immingham?

"It has always responded in an agile way to the country's ever-changing trading needs."

So said sustainable development manager Tom Jeynes during one of today’s coach tours of the port estate to mark 110 years since it first began life as a deeper-water sister to the  much older port of Grimsby.

It was originally established to export the coal that arrived by rail from the pits in the East Midlands.

But since then it has developed to facilitate the export and import of a huge range of different cargoes, including cars.

Mr Jeynes, who has been with the company since leaving college some 23 years ago, said that the port's nimbleness had enabled it to adapt to the ever-fluctuating peaks and troughs of demand for different cargoes.

Despite a recent increase in imports to meet the short-term energy crisis, coal is declining in importance while there has been huge increase in volumes of wood pellets, imported from the United States to meet the biomass needs of the power station at Drax near Selby.

Because pellets deteriorate in rain (unlike coal), it has to be stored in huge dockside silos.

Measured by tonnage - 55 million tonnes per year - it is the largest port in the UK,  accounting for a phenomenal 10 per cent of the country's trade.

In his fascinating presentation, delivered on the coach, Mr Jeynes understandably beamed with pride and passion as he reeled off the port's record of achivements and its aspiration for the future.

Increasingly in the coming years will the rooves on its warehouses be fitted with solar panels (as at the port of Hull on the other side of the River Humber).

In addition, plans are advanced for construction by 2025 of three new  ro-ro terminals in partnership with Swedish company Stena Line, one of its long-standing customers and partners.

ABP also takes its environmental responsibilities extremely seriously, determined to safeguard habitat for wading birds, some in global decline, such as bar-tailed godwit, curlew and oystercatcher.

In recent years, the roof of one of its silos has provided a nesting site for a pair of peregrines which have an abundance of food in the form of feral pigeons and starlings.

                                                               

Peregrine's eye view of the port where work could start next year on three additional terminals