Engineers are starting work on a massive project to drain four kilometres of the Julianakanaal between Berg aan de Maas and Born in Limburg on Monday.

The 36 kilometre canal, which is part of the busy Maas route to ports in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, is being made deeper and wider to accommodate bigger ships. This section has to be drained after an earlier attempt to do the work with shipping still in progress failed.

Emptying the canal will involve catching all the fish and releasing them elsewhere, officials say. The water, some 1.9 trillion litres in total, will be released through the sluice system in phases. A road will then be built on the canal floor to allow diggers and materials to be brought in.

The project will take until spring 2025 to finish. Until then the barges that supply companies at the Geleen industrial complex will be forced to take much longer and slower routes.

The companies at the complex fear they will be millions of euros extra out of pocket. They may opt for transport by road, which will be detrimental to shipping companies, inland shipping company umbrella organisation Koninklijke Binnenvaart Nederland has said.

The draining of the canal will add €179 million to the cost of the entire project, taking the total to nearly €1 billion, infrastructure minister Barry Madlener told MPs in an update last week.

Work started on digging the canal, named after the former Dutch queen in 1926 and it was completed and opened to shipping in 1935.