Salt curbs Gent-Terneuzen shipping

The Gent-Terneuzen canal is still open, but the water has changed. In a dry summer, the 32-kilometre link between Belgium and the Netherlands has become brackish and shallow enough to make life difficult for the bulk carriers that normally bring ore, steel inputs and other heavy cargoes into Ghent's steelworks and chemical plants.

North Sea Port, the cross-border authority that manages the waterway, has restricted how deeply vessels can sit in the canal and partly closed the locks at Terneuzen. That does not amount to a shutdown. For industry, it can still be enough to hurt.

Less depth, higher bills

A ship's draft is the depth of hull below the waterline. If the available depth falls, a vessel has two choices: carry less or wait for better conditions. Either way, the arithmetic is unforgiving. Fuel, crew and port charges do not fall just because the hold is lighter, so the cost per tonne rises.

Germany has already lived through this on the Rhine. Low water regularly forces barges and vessels to load less cargo, pushing low-water surcharges above 20% (Tagesschau). The 2018 Rhine drought was bad enough to knock roughly 0.4 percentage points off German GDP estimates (FAZ). On the Danube, Romanian barge operators have reported loading at only 40–60% of normal capacity during low water, with one operator putting losses at about €6 million in a single year (Știrile ProTV).

The mechanism is not complicated. Less water means lighter ships. Lighter ships mean dearer freight. For heavy, low-margin cargo, that matters quickly.

Salt turns restriction into a double bind

Gent-Terneuzen has a problem the Rhine does not: salt. A lock is a gated chamber that lifts or lowers ships between water levels. Each time it operates, it can move seawater inland. If salinity rises too far, it threatens irrigation water and drinking supplies.

That leaves water managers with a choice they would rather not have. Keep the locks moving and salt pushes further towards farms and taps. Limit lock use and freight slows. Hoogheemraadschap Delfland, the Dutch water authority for the region, has warned that drought and evaporation are increasing the risk of saltwater intrusion (Hoogheemraadschap Delfland). In Flanders, the VMM water agency said June rainfall had brought only "limited recovery", with half of monitored groundwater sites low or very low for the time of year (VMM).

Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch public works agency, puts the trade-off plainly in its climate assessment: water kept for drinking supply, flood control or ecology is water not available for shipping (Rijkswaterstaat). The European Environment Agency has identified the same clash of demands across the continent (EEA).

Who pays

The first bill lands with shipowners and the factories they serve. Bulk carriers move raw materials, steel inputs, fertiliser and construction aggregates. These are heavy cargoes with low value per tonne, which is exactly why water transport matters. Moving them by road is expensive and, at scale, awkward.

Rail and trucks can absorb some of the pressure, but only some. Rail accounts for about 10% of freight around North Sea Port, and a Belgian-Dutch project to expand rail capacity is still at an early stage (The Traveler, Logistiek.be). Road haulage costs more and runs into congestion of its own.

There is still no public data showing how many vessels were delayed at Terneuzen, how many tonnes were rerouted, or whether any factory cut output. So far, this is a warning rather than a proven economic shock. But the warning is clear enough. The capacity-loss mechanism has already been tested on the Rhine and the Danube, and the climate pressure behind it is not going away.