Turkmenistan is ready to put an automobile ferry on the line of Turkmenbashi-Makhachkala
The issues of launch of an automobile sea ferry between the Caspian ports of Makhachkala, RF, and Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan, is being discussed in Dagestan. As the director general of Makhachkala Commercial Sea Port, Murad Khidirov, told the TASS agency, the Turkmen side is ready to put a modern automobile ferry on the line of Makhachkala-Turkmenbashi, and now this issue is being discussed. According to him, the experts gave a conclusion on the compatibility of the Makhachkala berth with the Turkmen automobile ferry, and the main thing is that there were loads. Murad Khidirov also noted that Turkmenistan expresses interest in the restoration of the railway ferry communication with the port of Makhachkala. Makhachkala Commercial Sea Port is Russia’s only non-freezing deepwater port in the Caspian Sea able to accommodate vessels with length of up to 150 meters and draft of up to 4.5 meters. The port’s infrastructure comprises a dry cargo harbor with a transshipment facility capable of handling 3 million tons of cargo per year, berths for general cargo, dry bulk cargo and containers with annual capacity of 1.2 million tonnes, a Ro-Ro terminal with annual capacity of 1.3 million tons and a grain terminal with annual capacity of 0.5 million tons. The ferry connection between Dagestan and Turkmenistan was launched in 2002 and functioned for about a year. The merchant marine of Turkmenistan has two modern automobile ferries RO-PAX class – “Berkarar” and “Bakhtiyar”, intended for transportation of passengers, trucks and other vehicles. The vessels are built at the shipyard in Pula, Croatia, on order of the State Marine and River Transport Service of Turkmenistan. The intensification of sea transportation through the port in the Caspian Sea is the result of the new transport policy of Turkmenistan, within which a number of initiatives to create new transport and transit corridors were put forward. In May of this year, a new International Sea Port in the Caspian Sea was commissioned, the projected annual total throughput capacity of which is 17 million tons of cargo, and oil products are excluded. The modern port infrastructure allows servicing 300,000 passengers, 75,000 trailer trucks, and 400,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit containers a year. Experts believe that the new sea gate of Turkmenistan in the Caspian Sea will affect the entire picture of passenger and freight traffic in the Caspian basin upwards.
