Seine-North Europe Canal to drive modal shift from road to river/inland waterway?

It is an ambitious multibillion euro mega-project designed to shift freight off the road and onto the canal.

Rivers and inland waterways’ modal share of France’s goods transport market currently stands at a modest 2%. However, thanks to a multibillion-euro mega infrastructure project to build a new canal in the north of the country, 100%-funded through public investment, this could be raised to 10% in just over a decade or so.

With a discontinuous history going back almost 50 years, the Seine-North Europe Canal (SNEC) will comprise a 107 kilometer-long (66.5 miles) and 54 meter-wide (177 feet) ‘missing link’, connecting the Seine and Scheldt rivers. Its completion will lead to the forging of a cohesive network of waterways for the transport of freight between Paris, Belgium and beyond to the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg, take more than two million trucks off the European Union’s congested roads and reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly.

At least this is what its backers are hoping.

The new canal’s path will cut through land that once constituted the First World War Western Front’s battlefields – the scene of dreadful carnage. There will be the sensitive task of unearthing soldiers’ remains during excavation works. In anticipation of such operations, the public agency managing the project, the Société du Canal Seine-Nord Europe (SCSNE), has entered into a partnership with the British Commonwealth War Graves Commission and its French and German counterparts.

Global Investment of €10 Billion

Scheduled to open in 2030, the SNEC will be able to accommodate barges which are 185 meters (606 feet) long and 11.40 meters (37 feet) wide and that can carry up to 4,400 tonnes of freight per journey (the equivalent of 220 trucks). This amounts to a seven-fold increase on the loading capacity of vessels currently plying the existing Canal du Nord.

The latest estimates put construction costs at €5.1 billion - which has raised more than a few eyebrows - funded by the European Union (EU), the French state and regional and local public authorities.

This sum does not include the re-development of infrastructure on the Seine and Oise rivers, in France and also on rivers in Belgium, which will take global investment in the project to around €10 billion.

“This represents unprecedented financial support for an inland waterway project. The SNEC is viewed as one of the flagship projects in the EU’s ‘Green Deal’ program to decarbonize freight transport,” Pierre-Yves Biet, the SCSNE’s director, Partnerships and Territories, told AJOT in an interview.

“We are targeting the transfer of long-distance road haulage to barge and have had some very positive feedback from the potential users of the canal – shippers from the agricultural sector, such as cereals and the food processing, construction/aggregates, chemical, metal and recycling industries who consider its development as helping them transition to a greener logistics model. We are also focused on the high-volume container market for consumer goods for which the canal can be competitive compared to road,” Biet noted.

“Road’s modal share of freight transport in this part of Europe has not ceased to increase but with the canal in service we can make a contribution, admittedly a relatively small one, to reversing the trend and promote multi-modality,” he added.

Technological Challenge

Work is already well underway to divert a four-kilometer-long stretch of the Oise River to make way for the canal.

“In 2025, the project will gather momentum in the Oise Valley and by end-2026-early 2027, major construction will have begun everywhere on the 107-kilometre route of the new canal, employing as many as 6,000 people,” Biet revealed.

Equipped with six locks – including two with a rise of more than 25 meters – three canal bridges and some 62 road and rail bridges and a reservoir to support the canal in the event of a drop in water levels in the Oise River – the SNEC’s supply chain and logistics needs are likely to be complex with the expertise of project cargo players tested to the full.

Projections are that five to 10 years after its commissioning, the new canal could be handling around 17 million tonnes of freight annually and contribute to the reduction of 1 million trucks on French roads on a yearly basis and as many as 2.3 million on a European scale – diminishing CO2 emissions considerably.

Hinterland Role

Given that road traffic bottlenecks around major ports such as Le Havre, Rouen, Dunkirk, Antwerp and Rotterdam, have become commonplace, there is scope for inland ports dotted along the new canal to emerge as hinterland hubs, Biet observed.

“Containers arriving at seaports would be loaded directly on to barges and head for these inland hubs. Once there, they would be unpacked and the goods prepared for on-forwarding either by river/canal, road or rail.”

Limiting Impact on Natural Ecosystem

As for the environmental aspects of the project, Biet underlined that large efforts have been made to limit the impact of the new canal’s construction on existing wetland zones and the sensitive biodiverse areas situated along its path and that new wetlands and forests are being created to offset any damage to the natural ecosystem.

A prime example of the steps the SCSNE is taking to protect the environment is a 1.3-kilometer navigable bridge which will raise the canal 30 meters above a wetland in the river Somme, thus avoiding major works at the bottom of the valley. The cost of this sub-project has been estimated at around €400 million and construction is scheduled to begin in 2026.

“We have very strong support from the regional and local public authorities who see the new canal’s strategic importance in terms of driving economic development and re-generation, job creation and in enhancing the mobility of the region as a whole. They also recognize the care we are taking and the transparency we are showing in preserving the environment,” Biet concluded.

Opposition

However, unsurprisingly, not everyone is convinced. One local protest group claimed that areas that are being developed to supposedly mitigate the canal’s environmental impact “are already natural” and “will not compensate for what is going to be destroyed.”

The group said it did not believe the SNEC will significantly reduce CO2 emissions but rather free-up capacity on highways for more trucks, adding: “Unfortunately, we may be building infrastructure that will not be used as expected.”

Also, one local mayor has joined the protest of the canal, arguing that it is “not road transport that will face competition from the canal but rail transport which is less polluting than river transport.”

He claimed that the canal would reduce the number of trucks on the region’s main highway by barely 3%, while casting doubt too on the SNEC’s economic and employment benefits. “There is uncertainty as to whether this project will live up to its promises in terms of jobs whereas comparable projects have not.”

He intends to convince people of the “absurdity” of the new canal and play his part in the “epic” legal battle that lies ahead.