The end of coal

Just imagine it - over 4 million tonnes of coal, between 30 and 40 ships measuring 300 metres in length by almost 50 metres wide. That’s like a single ship containing three football pitches full of coal. And 180,000 lorry journeys a year.

This non-stop activity has been the dynamic of my life for a decade at the Endesa terminal in Ferrol's outer port. The terminal opened in 2009 and I became its manager, practically the only woman among more than 200 men.

These facilities were built because the inner port, where I'd been working for two years, was getting too small. Large volumes of coal needed to be imported after the closure of the As Pontes lignite mine.

The daily bustle was incredible, with crane operators sitting 45 metres in the air operating buckets with 35 tonnes of coal. The transfers were amazing, with 150 lorries going backwards and forwards between the terminal and the As Pontes power station, making about 1,000 trips a day. 

But this has all changed radically over the last three years: now we unload a couple of ships a year while we wait for closure of the plant to be completed. We are leaving the era of coal behind and studying ways to reinvent ourselves, to start a new stage for this immense bulk terminal. This is one of the largest terminals in Spain, with fabulous facilities, a magnificently deep harbour, and a strategic location among the sea routes from northern Europe to the Americas, the Mediterranean and Africa.

At the moment, we are balancing the need to provide services for the two generators still operating at the power station with bidding in tenders for the loading, unloading and storage of other traffic for new customers. By the end of the year, we will have loaded and unloaded 20 ships - around 1.4 million tonnes of coal - in 2022. But we know we have to get ready for the future, to respond to the changes in the energy model.

We should never be intimidated by challenges or difficulties, of course. That's something I've learned over the past 15 years. 

For example, I remember when a Russian captain told me, in the middle of a raging storm, that I looked like a hen looking after her chicks. He claimed that one of our cranes had hit his ship. But my people assured me that the events had been quite the opposite: because of the storm, his ship had hit the crane. I trust my team entirely, so I wasn't going anywhere until everything was sorted out. And that's how it worked out. The captain didn't get his way. And that has always been how it is in similar, theoretically intimidating, situations.

There have been some difficult scenarios, such as when I've had to negotiate and deal with ships from Arab countries whose crews wouldn't even look at me or greet me because I'm a woman. Or when there were confrontations, and I had no choice but to get serious and say they couldn't unload the ship until they'd adopted all the necessary safety measures.