Dredging and excavation work on a QR16-billion ($4.3 billion) deep-water port at Mesaieed in Qatar will begin next year, according to press reports.

Craig Holland, vice-president of Aecom, the programme and construction manager for the New Doha Port Project, said that a great deal of construction activity would be seen in 2011.
“We are working towards completing the first phase of the new Mesaieed port by 2014,” he told the Gulf Times newspaper.
The port would have a container capacity of 2 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalant units) a year in the first phase. On completion of the third phase, expected by 2030, the port will have a container capacity of 6 million TEUs, he said.
Spread over 20 sq km, the port will be equipped to handle the world’s largest ships, each laden with up to 12,000 containers.
Container capacity at Doha’s existing port is only 400,000 TEUs. In 2007, the port terminal handled 340,000 TEUs, an 8 per cent increase on the previous year. Since cargo activity is expected to rise in the coming years, the port is likely to find itself increasingly stretched. However, the facility will be decommissioned once the new commercial port becomes operational, according to the report.