Gov't Approves Master Plan for Van Phong Bay

Gov't Approves Master Plan for Van Phong Bay

The Government of Vietnam has approved the master plan to develop the Van Phong Bay Economic Zone in central the coast province of Khanh Hoa into an important economic hub with a major petroleum and container depot by 2020.

Accordingly, the Van Phong Bay Economic Zone will be a general economic zone, covering 80,000 hectares of water surface and 70,000 hectares of land surface and belonging to Van Ninh and Ninh Hoa districts, some 80 kilometers north of Nha Trang city.

The zone will be home to a large swathe of industries, including tourism, the service sector, manufacturing, and fish farming. However, the international container transshipment port will be the key activity of the zone.

Between 7,000 and 8,000 hectares in the zone will be reserved for construction.

Vietnam will need an initial investment capital of US$1.5 billion to kick off the project, of which US$104 million will be used for the first phase to be completed by 2010. This will include a feasibility study for the economic zone, the building of a 600-meter-long pier for vessels to dock, and warehouses, according to a source from Khanh Hoa province.

In the first stage, key infrastructure facilities in the zone will include the international transshipment port with an annual throughput capacity of 500,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units (TEUs), a road linking National Highway 1A and Dam Mon and a railway link, three water reservoirs, and power supply facilities.

Other construction works in the first stage will include an oil transshipment port with an annual capacity of 1.5 to 2 million tons, the My Giang General Oil Warehouse, the Dam Mon Passenger Seaport, and other telecommunications, tourism and commercial facilities.

The zone will be turned into a fully-fledged economic zone rather than a tourism-oriented area.

Working on the blueprint in Khanh Hoa province yesterday, Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dzung asked the local authorities together with the Ministry of Planning an Investment to contact international shipping giants to seek investment into the area.

Van Phong Bay, endowed with many beautiful beaches, is a deep-water area, with the navigation passage some 32 meters deep. It is Vietnam’s only bay that will qualify for a major international transit port.

The bay has already become a major oil depot of Vietnam after it received the first oil containers in 2002.

Saigon Times Daily