A private sector-led campaign to lobby Brazilian authorities to allow Santos harbor to be deepened to allow the handling of larger ships is gaining momentum.

The campaign, named Santos 17 because the goal is to deepen the harbor to 17 meters (55.7 feet) by 2017, has the backing of the all the main terminal operators, including the six container terminal facilities. The port, which currently has a harbor depth of 13.2 meters, handles roughly 28 percent of Brazil’s container volume.

“We are bringing together all terminal operators, general cargo, bulk and containers, together to ask the market and the authorities, ‘Where can we go with this?’” said Antonio Passaro, the CEO of Brasil Terminal Portuario, told JOC.com. “With Santos 17 we want to help the port authority and the port ministry to see what can be done, and they are having their own discussions, too.”

Angelino Caputo e Olivera, president of Codesp, the local port authority, is “very interested” in the effort, said Passaro, whose container terminal was closed for several days because an inferno engulfed the neighboring liquid bulk terminal of Ultracargo.

By 2017, container lines will replace the 13,000- to 14,000-TEU vessels on the major east-west trade lanes with ships with capacities of 20,000 20-foot-equivalent units. The smallers ships then will be cascaded down to north-south trades, including services connecting to the east coast of South America, Passaro said.

“Ships in the 13,000-TEU range have to go somewhere, and I want them to come here — if not all them at least some of them,” Passaro said. “They can never enter Montevideo, (Uruguay), and Buenos Aires, but (the ports) can be served via transshipment.”

Santos 17 and Passaro seem to have the full backing of Caputo, and also, tentatively, Edinho Araujo, the head of the Special Ports Ministry.

“Dredging is one of the most important subjects for Codesp, and we want to find a good solution for the problems we have here,” Caputo said. “Because we are located in an estuary we have heavy sedimentation, maybe 18 million cubic meters every year, so maybe the answer is more regular dredging.”

He said studies are needed to determine if the harbor can be dredged safely to 17 meters. Caputo he added that the granting of long-term contracts might speed up the work, a possibility also recently raised by Araujo. A small dredging company has been able to halt the port’s attempt to contract the dredging work via an injunction.

“Local interests can frequently delay the process, as in Manaus recently when the judge just accepted what he was told by the local company and stopped everything,” Claudio Loureiro, the executive vice president of Centronave, which represents the interests of foreign-flag shipowners in Brazil.

The physical and environmental feasibility of the planned dredging is also uncertain.

“Dredging down to 15 meters is fine, but beyond that Santos is very complex as there are environmental concerns. Plus, nearly all the quays would probably need reinforcing and that would be very expensive. Who would pay for that?” said a Brazilian official who has worked in the government port sector since the 1950s and asked to remain anonymous.