Of course, the only answer when a big customer moves on is to pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and look for new opportunities. North East England’s Blyth is one of the best examples of a port that has successfully done just that – reinventing itself many times in the past few decades.
This Northumberland port was once the biggest coal export port in Europe, until the local pits it served were closed. In the 1990s, it developed a huge Finnish paper import business, but lost out when a number of key customers decided to centralise through Hull in 2000.
Until last year, the Alcan smelter nearby was a major customer, generating half a million tonnes of alumina and petcoke imports and around 150,000 tonnes of aluminium back out.
The decision to mothball the smelter was an obvious blow but, as Port of Blyth chief executive Martin Lawlor said: “Five years ago that would have been huge, perhaps cutting our workforce by a half. But because we have diversified so well over the years, this was not the blow people might have expected.
“Our strategy has been to continually reinvent ourselves and add new customers to the port. When we lost the paper volumes to Hull, we took a huge hit in 2000. Then we decided we are not going to have all our eggs in one basket and there was an absolute obsession with diversifying over the following decade.”
The port, now handling up to 2m tonnes of cargo a year, handles forest products, metals, bulks, project cargoes and unitised trade. It is particularly strong in the energy sector, where it has built up quite a portfolio of projects. It has a notable reputation for handling components for inland wind farms and also has the benefit of the National Renewable Energy Centre (NaREC) based on the port.
Alnmaritec, the aluminium boatbuilder with a focus on the offshore wind sector, is based at the port, as is MTL, which uses the port as its base for supplying secondary steelwork for wind turbine foundations, including access ladders, transition decks and boat landings.
Earlier this year, Blyth announced that RES had received planning permission for the construction of a £250m ($403m) biomass power station; the 100 MW scheme will produce enough low carbon electricity to power over 170,000 homes and will receive up to 500,000 tonnes a year of sustainably sourced wood-based fuel through the port’s Battleship Wharf terminal. The two-and-a-half-year project is expected to start early next year – creating hundreds of jobs during the construction phase and having a long term positive impact on the port and wider regional economy.
This month, it was announced that the Geos Group is to build a new fuel storage facility at the port’s Bates Terminal. The initial phase of development will see the construction of three storage tanks by mid-2014, providing a capacity of over 15 million litres, with further expansion planned.
This will be the first development within the Enterprise Zone linked to the port. An initial 20 jobs could lead to many more as a large modern marine fuel bunkering facility is attractive to both the oil and gas and renewable energy sectors, said Lawlor.
“This is excellent news and reaffirms our position as a growing offshore energy hub. Given our excellent deepwater facilities and prime location, we believe others will follow to join the significant cluster of organisations within the sector already established around the estuary.”
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