China's costliest water transport project, a shipping channel dredging program to boost trade in the Yangtze River Delta area, is due to be completed in the middle of this month, a senior official with the Ministry of Transport said Tuesday.

The 12-year program, with a total cost of 15 billion yuan (US$2.42 billion), involved a 92.2-km-long, 300-meter-wide shipping channel. The channel starts at Waigaoqiao, in Shanghai, and ends where the Yangtze River enters the East China Sea.

The program has proceeded in three phases since 1998, increasing the depth of the estuary shipping channel from 7 meters to 12.5 meters.

In comparison, a shipping channel dredging project on the Mississippi took 100 years to increase its depth from 6 meters to 10 meters.

The program was the most expensive ever water transport project in China.

The shallowness of the shipping channel at the estuary of the Yangtze River had long been a transport bottleneck and a hindrance to the local economies on the Yangtze River Delta, said Fan Yaxiang, party chief of the Yangtze River channel administration under the Ministry of Transport.

Thanks to the dredging program, the channel at the estuary is able to accommodate, at any time, container vessels each with a capacity of 2,000 to 4,000 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) and 50,000-dwt ships.

It will be also capable of accommodating 6,000 to 11,000-TEU container ships and 100,000-dwt vessels at high tide.

The program has begun to bring huge economic benefits to the Yangtze River Delta (Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang), which is a major economic engine in China.

The Delta boasts 40 percent of China's total steel and pharmaceutical enterprises.

The program helped increase Shanghai's annual cargo turnover by 200 million tonnes in 2005, from the 204-million-tonne level in 2000, and helped rank the city first among international ports in terms of annual cargo turnover around the world.

From 2002 to 2006, the dredging program helped save 33.369 billion yuan in economic costs for the local economies on the Yangtze River Delta.

(Xinhua News Agency March 9, 2010)