Located in the borough of Redcar and Cleveland in the ceremonial county of North Yorkshire, the bulk terminal is on the south bank of the River Tees.

[9][10] The company created the bulk import terminal to supply the adjacent Redcar Steelworks which had been opened in 1917 by Dorman Long and which became part of British Steel Corporation in 1967.

[13] An enlarged Redcar port with a 1,048-foot (319 m) quay[6] was opened by the British Steel Corporation (BSC) in 1973 after it had developed the dock area and had the River Tees deepened.

When the steelworks site was handed over to SSI in 2011, Tata retained a joint stake in the dock to allow them the flexibility to still use it to import coal and iron ore if necessary.

[24] The terminal has also been used to import Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag (GGBS) to Scunthorpe and also as a forwarding point for unused iron ore from when the adjacent steelworks was closed, both in 2009 and in 2015.

[26] Redcar is the preferred option for the export of metallurgical coal (for coking) from the Woodhouse Colliery site in West Cumbria.

[30][31] In July 2018, Sirius Minerals, the operators of Woodsmith Mine, signed an agreement to export up to 10,000,000 tonnes (11,000,000 tons) of polyhalite per year from Redcar.