Seems expensive to take a massive detour south of Africa too 😂
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Suez Canal Currently Blocked By Large Cargo Ship(Update: The Ever Given is freed)
- Thread starter EvilChameleon
- Start date
Absolutely. But if they ever want to make the Suez wider, it will need to come with a rule no ships longer than 400m so this can't happen anymore.
Fun fact: The US had a plan in the 60s to blast separate "Israel canal" using nukes.
The canal is not thin, it's the ship that's super big, they always make the ship to the absolute size limit possible.
Well, it's not like we're all gonna buy less stuff that needs to be shipped. Wouldn't it be more futureproof to expand the canals?
Bigger canals will just mean bigger ships being built.
There is a reason some ship categories are names about canals (as they are the maximum size allowed to pass through them).
The ship will be bigger and then again run the same risk. You see the same issues with ports.
Another angle of the incident.
Lol amazing! Really hope someone clever can photo shop in the empire state building next to it :)
I wonder if longterm they reduce the max size of ships that can use the canal. Like, this one is wedged by ~10 feet on each size, right?
How much would they have to reduce max size to ensure that if it were to happen again, the ship could free rotate?
How much would they have to reduce max size to ensure that if it were to happen again, the ship could free rotate?
It's way early for me, so I'm unclear if you're joking or not. Is it actually 20 feet in length that got it stuck? I assumed that even though it's trapped by 10 feet each side currently, it could still be stuck at other angles if it continues to rotate.
That's not too bad. I wonder how many ships will decide to stay and wait or travel all the way around.
It does raise fees considerably as you need a lot more fuel etc.
Hiring a ship like that costs $60.000 per day IIRC. So that is almost a million extra.
Yup:
Suez Canal steps up efforts to free stuck vessel, U.S. watches energy market impact
By Nadine Awadalla, Jessica Jaganathan, Roslan Khasawneh and Julia Payne
www.reuters.com
+ the ships are gonna be tied up longer each trip so there's gonna less volume shipped in total.
And the containers, which were already in short supply due to Covid as China kept producing while the world bought less.
That rule already exists (which is why these ships max out at 400m).
There's quite a few posts saying that if they made the canal wider, ships would just get bigger, but the SCA sets the rules on what's allowed into the canal. If they widened the canal they absolutely could keep the current restrictions. The problem with widening the canal isn't that ships would get bigger, the problem is that widening the canal would be extremely expensive and difficult in both the short and long term, and widening it and keeping the existing restrictions would mean that the only benefit would be avoiding this specific incident.
If they reduce the size of ships that can use the canal then they restrict the canal to all the ships that were built specifically to Suezmax specs. That's not a small amount.
About 20 knots (~37kph) but this varies by things like ocean currents and how fuel efficient the ship owner wants to be. If fuel costs rise, shipping slows down a bit to make more efficient use of the fuel, for example.
The difference between journey times would depend heavily on where the ship was when the Suez closed, and where it's going. The SCA website has some nice little animations showing the distance for some sample journeys that will give some idea of the savings and how they vary.
For a cargo ship waiting outside the Suez right now with a destination somewhere in the Mediterranean, diverting around the Cape would mean circumnavigating essentially the entire continent of Africa (like the example in the Jeddah to Pireus animation on the SCA site where taking the Suez saves nearly ten thousand nautical miles). For a ship just now setting out from somewhere in Asia and going to Rotterdam, there's still a difference, but it's not as dramatic - Suez is "only" saving them ~3.3K nautical miles.
So the question of how much longer it would take a ship to go around Africa instead of using the Suez has lots of answers, but you can generally think of it as being between three and ten thousand additional nautical miles, at 20 knots (nautical miles) per hour, giving additional times ranging from 150 additional hours (nearly a week) to 500 additional hours (almost exactly three weeks). That's not including any additional stops that might be necessary for refueling.
Nice animations.
Stupid question as someone that knows nothing about naval travels: why do the routes take a very wide breath around capetown, but hug the north west africa coast tightly? Seems to add a couple hundred NN for no reason at all...
Lol, just as I thought.
(I want to speak to the artist then though, it looks worse than if the line was following the coast /s)
It's not turned 90° as you can see in some of those top down images.
I can't find the number for the width of the canal in this part but it looks like you'd have to shrink it by about half to make it fit sideways. Keep in mind that the canal doesn't have a rectangular cross section, it's deeper in the center than the sides so the ship can't move in the entirety of the water covered area.
The major shipping lanes follow the ocean currents & trade winds
Here's an example : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawaymax . That's the biggest you can use if your goal is to go from the Atlantic to the midwest ports (Chicago, Cleveland et al). Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suezmax
Thanks for the links :)
I was at work so I couldnt really easily look for info. Panamax is also fun because they buidl a new size Panama in the last decades which ended up ust creating a new bigger tier of ships.
And they only really build an expansion because it was starting to become financially intelligent to sail around South America in bigger ships than using smaller ships through Panama.
They just called it New Panamax. Not very original, I would have gone with Panamax Pro, Panamax 360s or my favorite "Max Panamax Series Max".
Sorry I'm sure this has been answered, tried reading through a few pages, but how did it get stuck like that? Did they try to turn around or something? Did it drift too far to one side and the front got stuck and the momentum swung the backside around and jammed it?
Huge gust of wind and over correction. These ships are massive and offer a huge area to take the wind. Sure they are 200k tons but they offer a near perfect flat side acting as a sail...
LOL! How ever did you manage? I eat Kashi and it's a nice healthy cereal but not exactly super enticing. There's no way I'd just plow through a whole box without adding extra sugar somehow...
as mentioned, wind + overcorrection. And the canal does not have a uniform depth so it ran aground
Yes sorry - was being silly - i think proper, reasonable, people have answered it properly now - it's a long way off fitting sideways.
The talk about the canal sizes got me looking up how the limitations affect war ships. Modern supercarriers can't fit through the canals - it's easier to go around thanks to being nuclear powered. WWII-era carriers could fit once they removed or folded up some of their exterior elements. The Iowa class battleship was 108 feet and 6 inches wide, compared to the Panama canal's width at the time being 110 feet, so it juuuuuuust squeezed through with less than 2 feet to spare.
