The port of Piombino is centrally located on Italy’s Tuscan coast. In 2012 more than three million passengers and over 900,000 vehicles passed through the port. In the same period, around 6mt (million tonnes) of goods were handled, of which 75% was made up of solid bulk cargoes from more than 500 bulk vessels.
Historically the port is linked to commercial and industrial traffic, characterized, although not solely, by solid bulk cargo and half-worked and other products from the steel industries.
Piombino is, in fact, an important industrial production area where the principal companies present belong to some of the most important multinational groups in the world.
Amongst these are:
- Lucchini spa: the largest steelworks producing long products (bars, rods, billets, rails), and the second largest in Italy after Taranto;
- La Magona d’Italia spa: Arcelor/Mittal group, the leading steel producer in the world. The factory produces flat galvanized and painted laminates;
- Tenaris Dalmine:Techint group, the factory specializes in producing pipes for thermo-sanitary plant; and
- in the hinterland of Piombino there are chemical factories of great importance, such as Sol Industrie, Nuova Solmine and Tioxide.
The port is engaged in industrial and commercial traffic with all the countries of the Mediterranean, Equatorial Africa, the Middle East and China, and North and South America, along with specialized ro-ro to and from Sardinia and passenger traffic with Elba and Sardinia.
The port has all the equipment necessary for handling all types of solid bulk cargo, notably: v 2 × 25 ton overhead cranes;
- 5 × self-propelled cranes of 150-, 70-, 60-, 50- and 30-tonne capacity;
- 3 × derricks with 16- to 30-tonne capacity;
- 1 × 8-tonne swinging jib crane; and
- 1 × solid bulk cargo loader/unloader with 45-tonne capacity
along with numerous other machinery.
There is a variety of covered warehousing available in the port suitable for the storage of bulk goods. Also, some one and a half kilometres from the wharves, there is a dry port area of a total of 300,000 square metres connected to the road network, which remains to be equipped.
The new Port Regulatory Plan allows for development of the port, and this plan has recently been approved. This will result in a significant increase of available infrastructure.
The plan also covers access to the port, with adequate rail services and fundamental work to prolong the SS 398 dual carriageway into the port.
Opportunities exist for transport, logistics and terminal companies interested in developing their own terminal to be used for their activities, along with the possibility of setting up industrial and handling activities in the port and dry port areas.
There are also opportunities for companies working in the steel sector that are interested — either alone or in partnership with other companies in the area — in integrating or acquiring market share at European level, seeing Piombino as a hub for finished product and semi-worked product. It is also an ideal hub for others that intend to transform imported semi-worked product into finished articles, making use of the professional skills of working people with a long industrial tradition behind them.
Long-term concession/availability of the newly-constructed port structures will be offered, by way of administrative and financial evaluation, to those business operators (terminal operators, transport and logistics companies, steelworking and general industrial firms) who have undertaken entrepreneurial projects or participated in the project financing of the port structures as an integration to the available public finance.