Last Friday saw the arrival on her maiden voyage in Cape Town of one of the latest additions to Maersk’s West Africa service – the Maersk Cairo. One of 22 new container ships introduced between 2011 and 2013 into the West Africa service in response to growing trade, she is deployed on the FEW3 service linking South Africa via Cape Town to the West African ports of Tema (Ghana) and Point Noire (Congo). These geared WAFMAX vessels have been designed specifically to accommodate the lower draughts in West African ports, a line spokesman told FTW. “They are the biggest to serve this region with a nominal capacity of 4500 TEUs,” the spokesman said. Environmental design interventions will enable the vessel to trade at 30% lower CO2 footprint per container moved compared to the industry average on this trade. “Another element that was addressed through the vessel design was the sulphur emissions. As a result, in the port of Tema, these will be reduced by 13% and in Apapa (Nigeria) by 20% from 2013 as a result of these vessels calling.”
