23 July (Lloyd's List) - TÜRKİYE plans to build a new container port in Adana on the Mediterranean coast to handle 9m teu per year, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan greenlighted the allocation of the port area.

The port in Adana will connect the Basra Gulf via Iraq and Türkiye with the Mediterranean, and its container handling capacity will be nearly as high as the country’s total of 12m teu, said ruling Ak Party spokesperson Ömer Çelik.

The new port will be in Adana’s Yumurtalık district near Ceyhan, where state-owned oil and gas firm Botas operates an crude oil loading terminal that delivers Azeri crude via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.

Türkiye had been planning two major southern coast container ports in Adana and Mersin. But the greenlighting of the Adana project will likely mean no other ports will be built on the same coast, according to local media.

Mersin already has the biggest boxship port on the southern coast — the Mersin International Port handled 1.9m teu in 2023.

Turkish ports handled 12.6m teu in 2023, up from 12.4m teu in 2022, according to data from the Transport Ministry.

Ports near the most densely populated Marmara region including Ambarlı, Kocaeli and Tekirdağ made up more than half of the container throughput in 2023, the same data shows.