Abu Dhabi-based National Marine Dredging Company (NMDC) deployed 26 dredgers and 40 additional equipment for the completion of the new Suez Canal, thus playing a key role in the development, the company’s CEO said.

"We had more than 70 per cent of all dredging capacity in the world," Yasser Zaghloul was quoted as saying by WAM, the official Emirates news agency, which cited The National newspaper.

"Without this, there would have been little chance of completing the project on time,” he added.

The construction of the new stretch of waterway - which effectively doubles the canal’s capacity, allowing for two-way traffic - initially had a three-year timeline. However, the consortium appointed to carry out the $1.5 billion project, led by NMDC, completed it in nine-and-a-half months, Zaghloul pointed out.

"We signed the contract on October 15, 2014 and construction was completed by August 1, 2015," Zaghloul told the newspaper.

The work involved the creation of a 35-km-long parallel canal, which required the dredging of 200 million cu m of earth.

It achieved this by bringing together four of the world’s largest dredging contractors - NMDC, Belgium’s Jan De Nul and the Dutch companies Van Oord and Royal Boskalis Westminster.

The first dredgers began operations within two weeks of the contract being signed, and contractors also faced the major challenges of securing approval and clearances to use the machines and transporting them to Egypt from all over the world, he said.

"Mobilising all the dredgers and staff was a challenge, but we had a really strong logistics team to manage this," he explained. "The difficult thing was to get all the necessary permits. But the [Suez Canal] authority was very proactive."

At the project’s peak, the consortium was dredging 1.5 million cu m of earth a month. In one month, it dredged a total of 40 million sq m of material, beating the previous record of 8 million sq m, Zaghloul told the paper.