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Panama Canal is so congested that one ship owner paid $4M to skip the line
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoWonder if this will once again ignite talks about the Nicaragua canal. My understanding is that it has lots of potential negative environmental impacts but both the current value of the Panama Canal and its likelihood of getting even more congested almost seems to make another canal somewhere in the region inevitable.
- mc32 3y agoWhy couldn’t Panama trench another “parallel” canal? That way they have two canals for dedicated directionality.
- cobbal 3y agoIf the limiting factor is rainwater into the central lake, draining the lake in two different paths won't help anything.
- mc32 3y agoIs there an issue with using oceanic water other than not anticipating the need? They may have retrofit some of the pump systems but doable?
- hexator 3y agoI imagine that wouldn't be great for the ecosystem of the interior, which is a freshwater habitat...
- mc32 3y agoBut it’s an artificial lake that didn’t exist before?
- kimixa 3y agoAn artificial lake created over a hundred years ago now, with it's own ecosystem that has developed around it. And rivers still flow from that downstream, likely entering the water table of a much larger area than the lake itself. Despite it being "artificial", the water still passes through it to downstream ecosystems, as it did before any dam construction. While they may be lower volume due to the drought and limited releases from the lake, replacing that with "Salt water or nothing" would still be a massive change.
- fencepost 3y agoAn artificial lake created in part by damming a river system. If you don't think that would have much impact, start advocating to alleviate western US water concerns by pumping from the Great Lakes and reversing the course of the St Lawrence River to flow from the Atlantic into the lakes. I'm sure people will be very receptive.
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoIt's an artificial lake that provides much of Panama's fresh drinking water, apart from supporting the locks.
- thehappypm 3y agoIt would take a lot of energy to pump seawater uphill like that.
- whyenot 3y agoThe canal also supplies drinking water for Panama's second largest city (Colon), as well as several smaller municipalities. On top of that, replacing the freshwater would kill many of the plants and animals living in and around Gatun Lake. It would be a disaster.
- ta1243 3y agoHow much to pump the water back (either fresh water from the bottom lock or replace the whole flight with salt)? 200,000 tons of water per ship, 26 metres above sea level, about 200MWh, so call it 500MWh. With 20,000 ships a year that's 50 a day, or 25GWh. A 2GW solar plant A large solar farm would can reach that capacity (you don't need to run the pumps 24/7, so Solar is perfect)
- jodrellblank 3y agoA quick google shows 1GW ~= $1Bn. How much more to desalinate the water?
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- lostapathy 3y agoLots of replies to this comment, but they all miss a critical detail: the Panama Canal isn't just a "man made river" at sea level, it's a series of locks that raise and lower the ships between the oceans, with stops at a few lakes along the way. Ecology problems aside, you need water at the higher elevations to operate the locks, and the lacks have to retain enough water to remain navigable. It's not practical to pump that much water up hill, so we're at nature's mercy for the water supply. If there isn't enough water in the system to operating the existing locks, there's no point adding a parallel set to draw from the same limited water supply.
- supertrope 3y agoThousands of people died in the construction of the Panama Canal.
- hef19898 3y agoShouldn't be an issue as soon as the first longtermerism SV VC tech bro billionaire develops a taste for large, terrestrial infrastructure.
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- klyrs 3y agoI've long pictured a rail canal, wherein loaded boats enter a drydock carriage, which whisks them over land to the other side. In my head, this works like a ski lift with two parallel tracks running side by side. Alas, I am a lowly software engineer and the sheer scale of the ships involved is entirely out of my experience.
- gizajob 3y agoCheck out the movie “Fitzcarraldo” by Werner Hertzog!
- klyrs 3y agoYou've hit the nail on the head, that's about my expectation for how my large-scale civil engineering ideas would go in real life. Even making the movie was a shitshow.
- pests 3y agoModern super container ships can hold 24,000 containers each of which is 20ft long. If you were to line these up end to end it would be 96 miles long. The Panama Canal is only 50 miles long. You could do it but the entire length of the track would be completely full of containers twice over. I somehow feel it would not be cost effective in the long run.
- oh_sigh 3y agoOP is talking about loading the entire boat onto rails, not the containers themselves.
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- hef19898 3y agoContainer on rails is a viable alternative for goods shipped from and to China. Used pretty extensively, but more expensive than sea freight (which is basically unbeatable cost wise).
- foobarian 3y agoI wonder what the costs/issues would be with simply excavating a horizontal canal connecting the two oceans directly. It doesn't seem an impossible distance.
- wlll 3y agoContaminating of the two ecosystems would be a pretty big one. The panama canal has the advantage of being fed by rainwater from the middle flowing outwards, so keeps the two oceans /somewhat/ separate.
- xeromal 3y agoConnecting the two oceans would probably do a thing that could never be undid.
- virtue3 3y agoI don't think the article mentions this but this is directly related to the drought in Panama. Apparently they had a huge lake reservoir for storing freshwater that was then used to fill the locks in the canal. And then subsequently release into the ocean. They haven't gotten the usual rainfall and this is causing serious issues. > https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/03/panama-canal-drought-hits-new-crisis-level-amid-severe-el-nino.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/03/panama-canal-drought-hits-ne...
- TrapLord_Rhodo 3y agoHow does this make any sense? Why would you need freshwater to go through a canal that connects two bodies of water? This seems like very poor planning and infrastructure creation. why can't they pump sea water through the locks?
- ViewTrick1002 3y agoWhy pump millions of tons of sea water when the rain does it for free? Where will you store the sea water without poisoning the lake? The new locks have added mechanisms to decrease water loss, but they do require water.
- mlyle 3y agoBecause that's a whole lot of seawater to pump. Each ship has to be lifted 85 feet in several stages, and the ships are big. Not to mention that there are lakes in the interior part of the canal.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoSpeculation: You probably don't need it, but it could be a lot easier if the lake has some elevation (so you don't need to spend so much energy pumping), and being freshwater means less corrosion to contend with. And whatever the reasons, it was probably built like that way back when and retrofitting it now is, again, possible but hard/expensive.
- carl_dr 3y ago
- aeturnum 3y ago> A queue of ships waiting to use the canal has been growing in recent months amid a deep drought. A key point of a lot of climate change projections have been that we will be encountering changes that are very hard to predict and plan for.
- mysterydip 3y agoRising sea levels and deep drought seem at odds with each other, but I'm not a climate scientist. Maybe they go hand in hand?
- 4death4 3y agoWhy do they seem at odds with each other?
- thepasswordis 3y agoBecause at least intuitively the panama canal seems to rely on seawater, which would seem like it is unaffected by drought, and only positively effected by sea level rise.
- klyrs 3y ago> Canal locks at each end lift ships up to Gatun Lake, an artificial freshwater lake 26 meters (85 ft) above sea level, created by damming up the Chagres River and Lake Alajuela to reduce the amount of excavation work required for the canal, and then lower the ships at the other end. An average of 200,000,000 L (52,000,000 US gal) of fresh water are used in a single passing of a ship. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal
- mongol 3y agoNo the Panama canal passes through freshwater, and you cannot let seawater enter for ecological reasons.
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- fred_is_fred 3y agoWhy not just go around Cape Horn? It takes longer clearly but is it better than waiting? My guess is fuel costs for one and maybe weather issues? Are there other reasons?
- oh_sigh 3y agoTheir shipping contracts may contain immense penalties for the shipments being late. Going around adds about 30 days to the trip.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoNot to mention that there are fairly steep piloting fees for the Magellan strait. I wonder if USN carriers take on pilots when they navigate it or if they have a political exemption.
- francisofascii 3y agoHa. Like the people who take the long way to avoid sitting in traffic. Even if it takes longer, it "feels" better.
- bearjaws 3y agoThe article does a terrible job of explaining it, but this was a LNG ship. As the gas heats, it will expand, boil off and be vented out. Meaning every additional day is more lost product. This could be helpful for other ships though.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoTypical losses with LNG are about 0.1-0.15% per day depending on the type of carrier. A round trip around the cape would add probably 20-25 days or so for a typical ship. More for slower ones. So, the price of that is 2-3% losses. The value of LNG fluctuates wildly in recent years. But it's not cheap. At the peak, a single ship could be carrying hundreds of millions $ worth of LNG. So, a few percent losses is quite significant.
- 3y ago
- alentred 3y agoWhat kind of cargo may be worth paying $4M to skip the line? I assume it should either be something that perishes if not delivered on time, or something extremely critical overall.
- jahnu 3y ago400,000 bananas, Michael.
- bombcar 3y agoIf a ship is carrying 20,000 containers $4m is only $200 a container.
- expertentipp 3y agoSmartphone cases and drugs.
- Trias11 3y ago[flagged]
- theultdev 3y ago> Eneos’ shipping division transports various commodities, including crude oil, liquefied petroleum gas, chemicals and bulk cargo.
- mdeeks 3y agoThe Flexport CEO said it was an LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) carrier. https://x.com/typesfast/status/1724150162531201571?s=20 https://x.com/typesfast/status/1724150162531201571?s=20 Keep an eye on whats going on at the Panama Canal. An LNG carrier just paid $4 million to jump the line. This will likely be more common for LNG carriers as their cargo will literally boil off sitting in the hot tropical sun, but it will be interesting to see if container ships end up having to resort to similar measures as transits continue to be restricted due to the ongoing severe drought.
- londons_explore 3y agoPresumably LNG ships have recondensors so they can burn some small proportion of the gas to power engines to run chillers to keep the rest cold?
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- joewhale 3y agoThose of you who are interested in this stuff, checkout https://www.marinetraffic.com https://www.marinetraffic.com
- madduci 3y agoWow amazing, that's traffic everywhere!
- reginaldo 3y agoThe Panama canal saves about 8000 miles, which about 2 weeks time at 20 knots, plus fuel and crew, insurance, etc. That comes to $285k per day. Depending on the wait time (I've seen 20 days wait time in the past), that might be a rational decision even without considering late penalties.
- mistrial9 3y agothe full journey around the southern Cape.. fierce weather down there
- toomuchtodo 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Forties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Forties https://escales.ponant.com/en/roaring-40s-furious-50s/ https://escales.ponant.com/en/roaring-40s-furious-50s/
- m2fkxy 3y agoand you won't find many cargo vessels doing 20 knots, that's more a fast ferry's territory.
- happytiger 3y agoSo why doesn’t Panama just pump the water used in the locks back into the lake so that it isn’t lost into the sea on every transit? It doesn’t seem that such a solution would be profoundly technically difficult and it could definitely be done with sustainable power in the tropics. Occam’s razor. I know the new one has one that recovers something like 60 percent from the article in the bottom of this comment, but they didn’t retrofit the old one? I’ve never seen anyone give a straight answer on this one, so I’m genuinely curious if this is entirely a natural disaster or foreseeable but not economically viable or what? They also could use salt water for the downward leg to the sea as it won’t flow back to the lake, couldn’t they? I saw nothing about this anywhere. But it makes complete sense and would cut lake usage in half in both directions. I’m sure that a surcharge for such a system would be welcomed by ship owners at this point, because the economic impact is considerable. That wouldn’t have a negative environmental impact as you’d just be introducing brackish water to brackish or salt seas at the bottom. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/03/panama-canal-drought-hits-new-crisis-level-amid-severe-el-nino.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/03/panama-canal-drought-hits-ne...
- slashdev 3y agoIt’s even simpler than that. Currently there are hydroelectric dams using the same water to generate electricity. All you have to do is not do that. The U.S. used a nuclear generator on a ship for that purpose back when they controlled the Canal Zone. Today I don’t see why they don’t just install a bunch of solar and use the hydroelectric as energy storage to smooth out the production.
- pietjepuk88 3y agoSee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255225 for a back-of-the-envelope calculation of why it's intractable to pump the water back. And see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38256185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38256185 for why the water saving basins are not as great as you would think (at least for the new locks). For the old locks, adding them would probably just add too much too the leveling time. And the construction would take those locks out of operation for at least a couple months, and they just cannot afford that. In the Netherlands there are locks with pumps for directly leveling, reducing/preventing salt intrusion, or "evening out" the loss of water with a separate pumping station (look up Krammersluizen and Kreekraksluizen). But we're talking a meter or 2 water level difference, not a whopping 26 meters. And those locks are generally not as big, and even then we tend to get rid of those systems where we can (Krammersluizen) as it's just too expensive to operate and maintain.
- throwitaway222 3y ago4M? how expensive is it to go around? Would the crew appreciate a raise to go around?
- smm11 3y agoJust open all the locks and let 'er rip.
- FredPret 3y agoNot a lot of money compared to the burden of carrying a ship-lod of valuable cargo for the extra period. Cargo insurance, carrying cost of the capital tied up in the cargo, running cost for the ship, opportunity cost of doing another cargo run in that time…
- mrlonglong 3y agoMaybe it's time to build a new transit further up?
- pietjepuk88 3y agoI thought that idea finally died a few years ago, but never say never I guess (I assume you're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_Canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_Canal )
- 1letterunixname 3y agoIt's dead. There is no possibility of continuing because it would do far more than wreck Lake Nicaragua.
- grecy 3y agoI highly recommend a visit to the Canal Museum in Panama City if you get a chance. It has the original engineering drawings of many of the places the canal was proposed and surveyed and was going to be built before Panama was finalized for practicality and political reasons. To quote my own blog from when I was there: > The number one attraction in town is obviously The Canal and before visiting I make a stop at the museum in Casco Viejo which is amazing considering the tiny $2 admission price. My engineering background means I’m fascinated by the surveying work that was undertaken before construction began. One map in particular shows proposed routes through Tehuantepec in Mexico, through lake Nicaragua, through a couple of different places in Panama and finally one using a river mostly in modern-day Colombia. The decision didn’t actually come down to the “shortest” distance to dig as you might think, but primarily on how the mountain range through Central America would be dealt with. The final location chosen meant it was possible to create a huge in-land lake and use locks to elevate the ships 28 meters to that level. Really, really fascinating. I went back for a second day.
- sgjohnson 3y agoOut of curiosity, what would happen if they decided to get rid of the locks altogether and just let the water directly flow between the Atlantic and the Pacific through it? I assume that there would be a current that would erode the surrounding environment, but how bad would it really be?
- cdchn 3y agoI thought part of the reason they have the locks in general is there is a lot of elevation change, digging a "straight line" through would have been enormously more work.
- iancmceachern 3y agoIt would not work. The locks are like a ship elevator. If they weren't there the inland waterway would drain and there wouldn't be water to float on anymore.
- simple10 3y agoThe canal is significantly higher than the ocean. The French tried and failed to dig a canal straight through and the eventual solution was to use locks to raise the ships on each side and then lower on the other side. I'm not sure why they can't just pump ocean water up into the canal. Perhaps it's just too much water to be feasible.
- baud147258 3y ago> The French tried and failed to dig a canal straight through The French did change their plans to use locks after a few years of work
- Affric 3y agoCowards. But more seriously interesting to see that the New Jersey Style wins again.
- anfilt 3y agoThat was in 1880 though. Excavation equipment was not as capable as it is today. Today I bet it would be possible to get rid of the locks, but it would not be cheap. like digging down 25 meters has been done numerous times all over the world. But having to do that for I think like 70 to 80Km distance wise from would not be cheap.
- anovikov 3y agoWhat will be the cost or sailing around South America, alternatively?
- Neil44 3y agoI guess the contract on the LNG comes in to play, is it selling at an already agreed price or the price on delivery, what is happening to that price in the next 30 days, are there penalties etc.
- jedberg 3y agoDo cruise ships get to skip the line? I know people who have taken Panama Canal cruises, and they don't wait in line more than an hour or so.
- amenhotep 3y agoNot an expert but your question intrigued me - I found a document (https://pancanal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/N07-2021.pdf https://pancanal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/N07-2021.pdf) which has a lot of info about how transits work. It does look like commercial passenger vessels get special treatment: they're exempt from a requirement to arrive the day before their booking, and they're allowed to book transits up to 730 days in advance, and on the other hand required to book no less than 366 days in advance. Other vessels wanting to transit the Panamax locks in the normal fashion have booking available on various schedules between as much as a year in advance and as little as 2 days notice, so queuing is inevitable. Essentially the uniquely predictable schedules of cruise ships mean they can be handled separately from the often ad hoc trampiness of cargo arrivals!
- eggy 3y agoThe Arctic shipping routes will become competitive relatively soon. The US is behind in this area. Russian and China are investing heavily. The traffic at the Panama Canal will accelerate alternatives. Interesting to see where this goes in the next decade.