Santarém, Alcochete and Vendas Novas options for new Lisbon airport

Alcochete and Vendas Novas are the two preferred options for the new Lisbon international airport but the Independent Technical Commission has added Santarém as a possible option.

The Independent Technical Commission (CTI), set up to study increasing airport capacity in the Lisbon region, has completed its final report and handed it in to the government, and as in he preliminary report has again concluded that Alcochete and Vendas Novas are the best solutions for the construction of the new airport.
However, unlike the preliminary report that ruled out Santarém as a suitable site, the town north of Lisbon is now considered an alternative solution reports the newspaper Público.
In its final report the commission recommended an urgent revision of the concession contract with ANA. Faced with the probable rejection of the Montijo option on environmental grounds, the airport concession company owned by VINCI Airports will have to agree to an alternative to its preferred site. Alcochete is the option that can be developed in the shortest period of time and at less cost.
The final Strategic Environmental Evaluation report has made 10 recommendations to government decision makers, most of which were not in the preliminary report.
One of them advises giving priority to revising the concession contract established with ANA in the context of the company’s privatisation when it became part of the VINCI Group.
The ANA contract gives ANA the right of preference for the new Lisbon airport to be within a 75 km radius from the existing Humberto Delgado airport.
The CTI also suggests that the new government could introduce “airport activity competition.”
The Humberto Delgado + Santarém option has, says the report, the advantage of enabling conditioning factors created by the concession contract to be overcome in the short term, and has the advantage that it has private funding. However, on the negative side it says Santarém is too far from the centre of Lisbon, and it could never operate as Lisbon’s sole airport because of existing military aeronautical limitations.
The CTI says that Montijo is an unviable option because the Environmental Impact Statement was not renewed and so the prior advantage of speed in getting it up and running has been lost.
Alcochete, however, is the cheapest viable option with the cost of construction for one runway being less than €3,231 million, less than the cost at Vendas Novas (€3,244 million) or Santarém (€3,485 million).