Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced yesterday that work will begin this year “on the new deep-sea port in Puerto Progreso ,” without giving further details about the project.
This Sunday, the president was present at the Yucatan port, previously considered a deep-sea port , where she announced various social supports for the population, together with local authorities, in addition to the infrastructure work for the port.
“We are finally going to make the Puerto Progreso deep-sea port a reality. We started this year. It will take three years of work, because the ground in this area is very hard and special machines are required to make it a deep-sea port, but we are going to start. It is a joint project between the state government and the Government of Mexico,” according to Sheinbaum.
For his part, the Secretary of the Navy , Raymundo Pedro Morales Ángeles, present at the event and also without offering further details, indicated that an 80-hectare platform will be installed to make Puerto Progreso a deep-sea port, “since it is one of the most important points of tourist and commercial connectivity for the country, with the largest remote terminal in the world.”
“The environmental impact studies and soil mechanics studies began today, and in the next few days you will see dredgers from the Navy,” he announced.
The current draft of Puerto Progreso in its navigation channel and terminals is around 11 meters , which prevents it from receiving larger vessels seeking economies of scale. According to the brief document “Port Expansion and Modernization Project” that appears on the website of the National Port System Administration (Asipona) Progreso , the projection is to increase the draft to 14.40 meters deep.
The idea of the current federal government is to build an extension of the Maya Train to Puerto Progreso , with which companies can develop railway operations that connect with the port.
In the first eight months of this year, Puerto Progreso had handled just over 4.8 million tons of goods in deep-sea maritime services (import and export), which has meant an increase of 20.1%, according to official statistics. This includes general loose and containerized cargo; agricultural and mineral bulk; petroleum and derivatives; and other fluids.
The current concessionaires of Puerto Progreso are APM Terminals , which operates the container terminal; Multisur of Grupo Logra , which operates the agricultural bulk terminal; Pemex Refinación with a hydrocarbon terminal; Hidrosur , also with a hydrocarbon terminal; Industria Salinera de Yucatán (ISYSA) , with a salt terminal; Dipensa , with a shipyard for repairing floating vessels; as well as SSA Marine México , with a cruise terminal.
At the end of Mauricio Vila’s governorship, he highlighted that the local government itself had maneuvered together with the local congress, so that a company created specifically for this purpose could operate a terminal that would be built in Puerto Progreso , bypassing the requirements dictated by the Port Law in Mexico.
The Navy put a stop to it at that time. Now, with the changes in government, both Claudia Sheinbaum and the new governor of Yucatán, Joaquín Díaz Mena, are not letting go of the idea of starting a new infrastructure project in this deep-sea port.
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