Fremantle Port expansion funded as container trade surges

The federal and Western Australian governments have jointly committed $800 million to expand Fremantle Port's container handling capacity, responding to the sustained growth in WA's container trade that has seen the port approach its design capacity and creating the additional throughput infrastructure that the next decade of WA economic growth will require.

The expansion will add a second container terminal on the north quay of the inner harbour, increasing the port's annual container capacity from approximately 900,000 TEUs to 1.8 million TEUs, and will include the deepening of the approach channels and the inner harbour to accommodate the larger container vessels that are now the standard for Asia-Australia trade routes.

Infrastructure Minister Catherine King said the Fremantle expansion was "critical infrastructure for Western Australia's trade competitiveness," noting that the export capacity for WA's agricultural, resource, and manufactured exports underpinned the state's economic performance and that infrastructure constraints at the port created costs and bottlenecks that flowed through to the competitiveness of every WA exporter.

Fremantle Ports authority chair Tim Ryan said the investment provided the certainty that shipping lines needed to commit vessels and services to Perth, noting that the global container shipping market's slot allocation decisions were influenced by port infrastructure reliability and that capacity constraints at Fremantle had been noted in the vessel deployment discussions that the authority had been conducting with major carriers.

Construction will be staged over six years, with the first additional berths operational by 2030 and full capacity available by 2032.

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