A multibillion-euro infrastructure project to build a new canal in the north of France, 100%-funded through public investment, could mean not only a significant shift in freight from trucks to barges but also from rail. Rivers and inland waterways’ share of France’s goods transport market is currently extremely modest, standing at a little over 2%. However, thanks to the construction of the Seine-North Europe Canal (SNEC) this could be raised to 10% in just over a decade or so.
With a discontinuous history going back almost 50 years, the project comprises a 107 kilometer-long and 54 meter-wide ‘missing link’, connecting the Seine and Scheldt rivers. It will be scaled to accommodate barges that carry up to 4,400 tonnes of freight per journe, the equivalent of 220 trucks.
Scheduled to (partially) open from 2032, its backers claim the SNEC’s construction 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 considerably.
Estimates from 2024, put the canal’s development costs at 5.1 billion euros, 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 euros.
EU’s ‘Green Deal’ and decarbonisation
“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,” according to the public agency managing the project, the Société du Canal Seine-Nord Europe (SCSNE).
“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,” it noted.
On the basis of such comments, one could argue that the canal is not only positioning itself as an alternative to road freight but also to rail.
Costs spiralling out of control
Earlier this year, France’s Office of Public Accounts sounded a wake-up call over the project’s finances, which it viewed as spiralling out of control, while casting doubts on its traffic forecasts. The latest estimate dates back to 2021 with annual traffic projected to reach 17 million tonnes in 2035. It went on to warn that the canal’s construction posed a “significant risk to the State” in terms of its cost overrun.
The Office has also noted the project’s “substantial” impact on the environment, notably, the effects on the water cycle at a regional level while also having consequences for biodiversity, wooded areas and wetlands, “with a considerable volume of excavated earth and a significant carbon footprint”.
Project a ‘gamble’ and contradictory
France’s Environmental Agency has been just as sharp in its criticism of the project, describing it as “a gamble on a supply shock”. It argued that the mere construction of the canal will be enough to trigger a modal shift, underling that evidence to support such an outcome was lacking.
The Office also highlighted a contradiction in the Seine-North Europe Canal project which has rarely come to light and that puts it at odds with France’s rail freight policy. According to traffic modeling by France’s rivers and inland waterways authority (VNF), 3.3 million tonnes of the canal’s annual traffic would be generated by a modal shift from rail, rather than from road.