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FIRST PORT CALL IN FRANCE BY THE CMA CGM “CHAMPS ELYSÉES” TO DUNKERQUE-PORT

On the night of December 4 to 5, the CMA CGM “Champs Elysées”, powered by LNG (liquefied natural gas), arrived in Dunkerque-Port for its first call to a French port.

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This 23,000 TEU vessel, built in the Jiangnan shipyards in China, measures nearly 400 m long and 61 m wide. Like the one bearing the name of the group’s founder (CMA CGM “Jacques Saadé”), its livery is a special green.

The new container ship has been allocated to the French Asia Line (FAL) service, which connects Asia to Europe and which calls at Dunkerque every week. Seven other vessels of identical size and capacity powered by LNG will follow. According to the CMA CGM group, “they will all take the name of emblematic monuments and places in Paris”.

In the long term, we shall see container ships designated Palais Royal, Louvre, Rivoli, Montmartre, Concorde, Trocadéro and Sorbonne. Nine ships which remain “a concentrate of innovation, the result of long years of cooperation between the research and development teams of CMA CGM and its industrial partners”, states the shipping company.

I am particularly honoured and proud that this first port call in France for a CMA CGM ship powered by LNG, an eco-compatible fuel that significantly reduces emissions of fine particles, sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides and C02, should take place in Dunkerque. I should like to thank the CMA CGM group, a long-standing partner, for this show of their renewed confidence. The choice of Dunkerque, a sustainable port, is emblematic in more than one way. For more than 10 years, Dunkerque-Port has pursued a genuinely proactive policy in favour of sustainable development of the port community. Implemented in 2014 by the roll-out of the Structural and Sustainable Development Plan (PA2D) which defines and oversees more than 150 initiatives in that respect, that policy has resulted in the use of good environmental practices. The strategy which is now mature recently developed into an environmental management system, which obtained PERS certification first in 2018 and then in 2020 as part of the ECOPORT network. Dunkerque-Port has also joined forces with the Environmental Ship Index initiative (ESI) initiated by the International Association of Ports and Harbours (IAPH), the principle of which is to allocate a score to ships based on their atmospheric emissions. The higher the ship’s rating, the cleaner its air quality.

It should be recalled that on January 8, the APL SINGAPURA, another ship of the CMA CGM fleet, inaugurated the electrical connection facilities on the quayside of the Terminal des Flandres, in the presence of various VIP customers. This innovative system eliminates the emissions from the auxiliary engines of ships at dock, thereby improving air quality and reducing noise pollution.

Finally, Dunkerque-Port has joined the “Getting to Zero” Coalition, in order to support the decarbonisation of the shipping industry by working in conjunction with companies from the shipping, energy, infrastructure and finance sectors.

I therefore renew my thanksto CMA CGM executives and hail their strategic vision.
Daniel DESCHODT
Interim Chairman of the Executive Board of Dunkerque-Port