The awards, which honour exceptional achievement in industry and individual enterprise, praised the business’ revival of the historic trade route and Victorian engineering masterpiece to build a sustainable platform for modern day growth in the North West. Previous winners include the Highways Agency for the Hindhead Tunnel project and The Mayor of London’s Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme.

While the awards reserved particular praise for the Manchester Ship Canal project, recognition was given to Peel Ports’ wider investment programme in the region, which includes the development of multimodal hubs at Port Salford, Port Cheshire and Port Warrington and the delivery of Liverpool2, a £300 million on-going investment in a new deep sea container terminal.

Each of the projects will contribute to a significant reduction in environmental impact and freight mileage by 2020, allowing the North West to balance the need for additional economic capacity with commitments to lower carbon emissions.

Mark Whitworth, Chief Executive of Peel Ports, welcomed the award, saying: “We are tremendously proud of this recognition of our long-term vision to drive economic growth in a sustainable manner, creating wealth and prosperity for the UK and the North West region.

“As the balance of UK logistics is changing as more and more users are trying to minimise the use of road networks, the UK’s only major freight waterway, the Manchester Ship Canal, is witnessing a resurgence in trade.

“Our projects will provide the infrastructure that will support efforts to rebalance the economy, providing a solid backbone to the newly emerging Northern Powerhouse. By eliminating unnecessary road journeys, reducing others and transforming how empty equipment is repositioned, our strategy also acts to cut our reliance on fuel, its cost and associated carbon emissions.”

In the last five years, the number of twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) handled on the Manchester Ship Canal has risen from 4,500 to 25,190 TEUs in 2015, with an estimated saving of more than 700,000 kgs of CO2 and 1.6 million road kilometres saved in 2015 alone.

These environmental benefits will be further driven by a series of interlinking projects, centred on the development of multimodal logistics hubs between Liverpool and Manchester that integrate warehousing with rail, road and waterborne transport.

Peel Ports was further recognised for the launch of its Cargo200 initiative in May 2015 which calls for importers and exporters whose goods began or ended their journey in the north of the UK to switch current delivery of ocean freight from south-east ports to the centrally-located Port of Liverpool. The initiative aims to cut freight mileage by 200 million miles over the next five years. In addition to achieving significant carbon reduction, the company also estimates that the move could save shippers up to £400 per container in transportation costs by delivering to the heartland of the UK. Goods could then be shipped along the Manchester Ship Canal closer to their destination.

The port operator received further praise this week – triumphing in the Innovation category at this year’s Mersey Maritime Awards, which support business growth in the region’s ports and maritime sector.

The awards recognised Peel Ports’ work in revitalising the Manchester Ship Canal and the operator’s delivery of strategic port locations and diverse commodity expertise – enabling the business to develop the best UK solution for importing and exporting goods and quickest routes to market for clients.

The facility is jointly owned by Hutchison (HPH) in Hong Kong, the Oman Government, C. Steinweg and other investors, and is operated by Oman International Container Terminal (OICT). In the summer of 2014, OICT shifted it operations to the new Terminal C at SOHAR in preparation for the relocation of all commercial traffic from Muscat’s Port Sultan Qaboos. Last year saw SOHAR handle nearly one million tons of cargo a week, a new record for the Port that only saw its first ship arrive in 2004.

The new cranes arrived by sea after a long journey from Shanghai, where world-leading quay crane specialists ZPMC manufactured them. The highly complex engineering challenge of offloading the cranes began on Monday and will take all week. First, temporary rail bridges were built from ship to shore in order to move the cranes to the quayside. Each crane weighs hundreds of tons, so the transport ship from ZPMC needed to be balanced by water ballast as the cranes were removed in order to keep its height constant above the water line and level with the quayside. With the unpredictability of tide movements and the weather this week, this was a huge challenge that demanded great skill and experience.

The new quay cranes will allow the container terminal to receive even bigger container vessels in future. The huge new cranes have an outreach to serve the very latest 10,000 TEU container ships that already serve SOHAR – and 20.000 TEU mega container ships in the future. The handling capacity for container traffic at OICT in SOHAR has more than doubled in the last two years. SOHAR Port CEO Andre Toet commented: “As more lines from Asia start to make more direct calls to SOHAR, and the size of those container vessels continues to increase, SOHAR Port Authority is actively working together with OICT and our other terminals to increase efficiency and help reduce costs.”

Andre Toet continued: “For example, OICT recently introduced an automated truck appointment system to further reduce turnaround times and our Port Management System (PMS) is a new online platform that allows agents to access and share real-time information on cargo movements. These technologies ultimately generate costs savings that we can pass on right the way along the supply chain and will help make Oman even more competitive as a regional logistics hub for the future.”

Soike has worked for the Port for nearly 36 years, beginning as a junior engineer and quickly advancing into positions in project management, maritime, and aviation. Most recently he led more than 375 employees in Aviation Facilities and Infrastructure, Aviation Maintenance, and the Aviation Building Department and Conference Center. Soike holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Washington State University and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Washington.

“Over his career, Dave has demonstrated a talent for building relationships with diverse audiences, a strong track record delivering effective large-scale and complex projects, and the ability to drive new strategic initiatives,” said Fick. “His extraordinary amount of knowledge and deep experience will help the Port meet our Century Agenda goals to support job creation and strategic initiatives such as long-range planning, continuous process improvement and environmental stewardship.”

Reporting to Soike will be the Centers of Expertise for Environment and Sustainability, Strategic Initiatives, and Capital Development, as well as Police and Emergency Management. He will serve as Acting CEO in Fick’s absence. In early 2016, Fick announced his intention to add a COO as part of a reorganization designed to enable him to focus more on regional collaboration, economic development, and internal talent development.