A deep-water port in east China's Jiangsu Province opened to ships and traffic on Tuesday.

The Yangkou Port is built on a man-made island on the Yellow Sea and is connected to the mainland by a 13-km vehicular bridge which is now open to traffic.

So far, only one berth at the port is operational for ships weighing 10,000 tons or less.

Once construction on the rest of the project is complete, the port is expected to help handle massive amounts of cargo flowing in the bustling Yangtze River Delta region which sees more than 40 percent of China's port transportation volume, according to statistics from the Ministry of Transportation.

Based on the port's construction plan, it will be able to dock ocean-going ships weighing 300,000 tons by 2013, said Yuan Xin'an, deputy head of the management board of the Yangkou Development Zone.

The port will be able to accommodate heavy cargo such as containers, crude oil, iron ore and LNG, according to the port's developer, the Yangkou Port Development and Investment Co. Ltd.

Before the Yangkou Port, there was no major port on the 1,000-km coastline between Shanghai and Lianyungang Port in Jiangsu.

PetroChina, China's largest oil producer, kicked off its liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving station project at the port in May, taking advantage of the port's prospective transportation capacity.

Yuan said that the 8 billion yuan (1.2 billion U.S. dollars) LNG project is scheduled to be completed by 2011. The station will have an annual handling capacity of 3.5 million tons of LNG, making it an important energy backup source for Shanghai and Nanjing, provincial capital of Jiangsu.

(Xinhua News Agency October 29, 2008)