Port of Auckland


Port of Auckland Limited, the successor to the Auckland Harbour Board, is the Auckland Council-owned company administering Auckland's commercial freight and cruise ship harbour facilities. As the company operates all of the associated facilities in the Greater Auckland area, this article is about both the current company and the ports of Auckland themselves.

Infrastructure

Port of Auckland Limited operates a seaport on the Waitematā Harbour, and four freight hubs, in South Auckland, Palmerston North, Mount Maunganui and the Waikato. The company employs the equivalent of 600 full-time staff and is in operation at all hours to allow for quick turnaround of cargo. It also operated a seaport at Onehunga on the Manukau Harbour until the 2010s.

Port of Auckland

The Port of Auckland is a large container and international trade port on the Waitematā Harbour, lying on the central and eastern Auckland waterfront. The of wharves and storage areas are almost exclusively situated on reclaimed land, mostly in the former Commercial Bay and Official Bay, and in Mechanics Bay.
Ports of Auckland officially changed its name to Port of Auckland in 2023. The removal of the "s" from "Ports" followed the 2018 sale of the Onehunga seaport to Auckland Council, and the organisation's transition to a single-seaport operation on the Waitematā Harbour.
Wharves are:
Three new large container cranes arrived in 2018 from Chinese firm Zhenhua Port Machinery Co. for NZ$20 million each, now installed at the north end of Fergusson Container Terminal. The cranes are the largest in New Zealand, weighing 2,100 tonnes each. Standing high with a boom length, they are capable of lifting four containers at once. They were bought to provide the necessary lifting capacity and reach for Post-Panamax ships. Each crane has enough solar panels on them to power an average New Zealand home.
Ports of Auckland Limited made a commitment to be Zero Emission by 2040. It bought the world's first full-size, fully electric port tug, a Damen RSD-E Tug 2513, from Dutch company Damen Shipyards. It has a 70 tonne bollard pull, the same as the port's strongest diesel tug Hauraki, also built by Damen. The tug arrived in 2022.

Port of Onehunga

There was a smaller second port at Onehunga on the Manukau Harbour, on the southern side of the Auckland isthmus. While it is much closer to the industrial areas of South Auckland, the access via the shallow entrance of Manukau Harbour, and the smaller facilities, made it much less significant than the main port. It was used mostly for coastal shipping within New Zealand. The port, despite being 100 nautical miles closer to Sydney and 200 nautical miles closer to Wellington, was never able to be developed to the same extent as the Waitematā Harbour ports, due to the extensive sand bars at the mouth of the Manukau Harbour. Shipping of cement to Onehunga from Westport ceased in mid-2016.
The port flourished in the 1850s and early 1860s as a link to the Manukau Harbour and Waikato regions, where Tāmaki Māori and Waikato tribes would sell and barter resources such as peaches, melons, fish and potatoes, to be on-sold for the settlement of Auckland. This trade was halted due to the invasion of the Waikato in 1863, and while the port continued to be used for passengers and cargo, it became disused over time due to the construction of more reliable road and rail links to Wellington.
Modern ships became too large to use the port, and negotiations were under way in 2015 by Auckland Council to sell it to the council entity Panuku Development Auckland, which wanted to turn it into a waterfront village, apartments and shops in a style similar to Wynyard Quarter. The sale did not go through and in 2016 it was announced that the port would be sold to NZ Transport Agency, which wanted to build an interchange for a $1.8 billion east–west motorway link on the land. It was claimed that NZTA had not yet finalised its plans for the interchange and any land remaining after it was built would be sold to Panuku. Ports of Auckland sold Onehunga Wharf to Panuku in 2018.

Chelsea Wharf

Chelsea Wharf, in Birkenhead on the North Shore, not part of the current POAL facilities, serves the Chelsea Sugar Refinery, which has operated since 1884. The of the land were leased from POAL, but purchased by Chelsea in 1997. Ships with unrefined sugar arrive at the wharf every six weeks, and as they generally exceed, the ships are legally required to use pilotage, managed by the Ports of Auckland's Harbour Control.

Inland ports

The four inland ports operated by Port of Auckland function as rail exchanges between the seaport and the national road and rail freight networks.

Turnover

Freight

Visited by around 1,600 commercial vessels a year, Auckland is New Zealand's largest commercial port, handling more than NZ$20 billion of goods per year. Ports of Auckland handles the movement of 60% of New Zealand's imports and 40% of its exports, respectively 50% of the North Island's container trade, and 37% of all New Zealand's container trade. It moves 4 million tonnes of 'breakbulk' cargo per year, as well as around 773,160 twenty-foot equivalent containers units per year.
Another major import are used cars, with approximately 250,000 landed per year. The cars are mainly relatively new Japanese models, due to the very strict technical requirements of the Japanese road authorities. Due to the country's very strict biosecurity regulations, formerly administered by the MAF and now by its successor agency MPI, cars have to pass through a decontamination facility, which strongly increases turnover times.

Cruise ships

In the 2005/2006 season, POAL catered for 48 cruise ship visits, with more than 100,000 passengers passing through the port, mostly disembarking for short stopover trips into Auckland or the surrounding region. Each of the ships is estimated to add about NZ$1 million to the regional economy. For 2007/2008, the total was forecast at 73 ship visits, another strong increase.
So far, the largest ship to visit was, 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 and were due in Auckland to exchange around 8,000 people at the terminal, the equivalent of 19 Boeing 747 jumbo jets.
In 2013, Auckland won a major cruise ship industry award, being named Best Turnaround Destination by Britain's Cruise Insight magazine based on a survey of industry leaders.

Economic impact

According to an economic impact assessment, 173,000 jobs in the Auckland Region rely on trade through the ports and the ports affect a third of the local economy. Ports of Auckland is 100% held by the Auckland Council. Annual dividends to Auckland Regional Holdings and its predecessors in the 15 years to 2006 totalled NZ$500 million.

History

Auckland's trade, by virtue of being the 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, the port became the largest of New Zealand.

19th century

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 Waitematā 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.
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 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.

20th century

By the early 20th century, commercial and passenger traffic was already very busy, with large passenger liners from Europe and the United States 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.
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.
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.