HMM Rotterdam appears to be diverting to avoid congestion at Suez | Hacker News Reader

HMM Rotterdam appears to be diverting to avoid congestion at Suez

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39 pointsJyaif49 comments

Yes, 2-3 weeks longer around Africa. The price to pass through the Suez Canal is made to be slightly lower than the cost of going around to extract as much value from the canal as possible.

Exactly. If a second canal was made through Israel, the price to pass through would fall to just above the maintenance cost.

UAE and Israel are working together on an oil pipeline to bypass those high costs of the Suez Canal.

I recall it could reduce northbound oil tankers on the canal by something like 15%.

A canal through the narrowest part of Israel would have to be almost 3x longer than the Suez.

By the time that would be completed, Egypt could’ve (and should in my opinion) added another 1 or two lanes to the existing ones for redundancy.

They already added a second lane to the northern half of the Suez a couple years ago. Unfortunately, the ship is stuck in the southern half that has only one lane.

In addition, a quick look at a topographic map suggests that it would have to cut through terrain with an elevation of at least 500m, and that would be far from the shortest route. My guess is that only a sea-level route would be competitive, and a canal using locks would require pumped sea-water to operate them anyway.

Not to mention that a canal would threaten all the aquifers in the region, which already has a major fresh-water shortage.

Hell of a long way from Eilat to the med, and even further avoiding Gaza - about 240km.

I wonder what the political implications would be

A duopoly is not much better than a monopoly.

What makes you think it will go from maximum profit to approximately zero profit?

Competition as they fight for market share?

A duopoly today would largely fix the current situation of no transportation of cargo.

Even if it was only 50%, that’s better

That'd be quite the can of worms too? Access the the sea from South West Israel is via Gaza...

Why? There'd still be more than enough traffic to keep both full, there's no need to compete on price.

If (like me) you're not very familiar with the huge container ships of the world, here [1] is some data.

Basically it's a ship on the same scale as the Ever Given, at 400x61 meters and a gross tonnage of 235,500. "Big" would be a suitable word.

[1]: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:62...

In case, like me, you are confused by units, "23000 TEU" refers to the number of 20 foot containers they can carry.

The average value of a container is thought to be somewhere north of $50,000. Even allowing for a fair margin of "it's a bit more complicated than that", you're in the region of $100,000,000 cargo-value per ship.

And in practice they carry 40-foot containers. So 23,000 TEU is probably 11,500 containers.

In practice you can stack 40-footers as you wish, or stack 20-footers as you wish. But you can't mix them easily. See, two 20-footers are 'broken' in the middle, and will stress a 40-footer in the (unreinforced) center to the point of failure if stacked high enough. Which of course they do.

Well, if you can stack 40-footers on top of 20-footers I suppose that would be an option? That would of course make loading more complicated, but it's hardly an insurmountable obstacle, no?

Once, on the bottom layer, you can have 20-footer(s). Once you go to 40-footers you can never go back in the stack. They're stacked 10-high above the deck. So you can have <10% 20-footers. Or put them all on the bottom, and only switch to 40-ft once.

Quite, that's what I mean. Stack all the 20s first, then top it up with 40s.

Indeed, and so is Ever Greet (sister ship of Ever Given): https://www.fleetmon.com/maritime-news/2021/33141/mega-conta...

There will most likely be lots more that choose to take the long route.

In Belgium we were told yesterday on the news that we should expect all freight to be belated at least three weeks due to the knock-on effects of the Suez blockage. The secondary effects of the blockage at our harbours are massive due to all the rescheduling chaos.

well, if the problem is just rescheduling then it's not much. I mean, nobody's going to die.

now if instead of using boats, they use planes, then it's very bad (I live close to an airport)

Lot of shipping, by the looks of it: https://twitter.com/AriaCallaghan/status/1375154205233721348

The city of Cape Town was founded for much this reason - it's a good sheltered stopping point, half way around. Looks like it will benefit from this again, for a few weeks.

That's slightly misleading because most of those ships were going that direction before the suez got blocked. I'd like to see how many actually got diverted.

Ah yes the Cape of Good Hope (an euphemism for "Good luck crossing that")

It's the "Cape of Good Hope" in summer. In winter it's the "Cape of Storms".

In the original Portuguese: "Cabo da Boa Esperança", "Cabo das Tormentas". Thanks, Bartolomeu Dias.

The worst weather is actually slightly south-east of Cape Town & the Cape of Good Hope; around Cape Agulhas ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Agulhas ).

I wonder if all the modern-time pirates around the African coast are reading Twitter/news/social media, sees this as an opportunity and are preparing for more assaults than usual?

Not sure why I ask here, will just receive bunch of guesses in the end, a bit the wrong audience here maybe.

Edit: Am I being downvoted because I assume no pirates hang around on HN / people on HN don't know pirates in real life? Otherwise I find your downvoting outright weird.

I’m sorrry but your “Edit” makes you look pretentious. There’s a simple alternative: people just found your comment boring or irrelevant...

Thanks for sharing your opinion! Hopefully at least it contains something more than meta complaints :)

Not very practical to make your assault while there are tons of other ships nearby who can block you or report you by sight before you've had a chance to take off.

If anything, I think pirates will be pissed off that the situation will deprive them of chances to ambush prey undisturbed.

You should honestly always expected to get downvoted on HN. The community is pretty small, and the spirit of the site attracts contrarians and pessimists who will disagree with most things they see.

My point total on this site has been stuck at the same level for the past year (under 1000), while on Reddit I've nearly crossed 100k in 10 years. There's definitely something about the people here that contributes to this.

Actual pirate here! Good idea, we'll get right on it.

That's a long diversion! But probably quite picturesque. Must be annoying for the crew, I can imagine.

How long would it take to dig a bypass?

If all permits are waived and enough money is paid you could mobilize a few Cutter Suction Dredgers (like this on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBCfX-XRM1A) in say two weeks. Working from two sides you can probably dig the bypass in a month.

It would be much easier to just widen/deepen canal to get it unstuck. I'm surprised they haven't tried washing away the sand around the bow using the prop wash from a bit tug boat

there's already one of those dredgers working near the ship.

Deep enough, wide enough, and straight enough for those massive ships? That's a very expensive multi-year project.

Some back-of-the-napkin math: Suez canal is about 200km and was built in ~10 years, that's about 20km per year (ignoring start/stop time and everything else). It was built around ~1860 so let's say we're at least 20% more effective at this time (probably more), leaves us with 24km per year, or 2 kilometer per month.

Let's say we start digging around the ship (I did a very shitty sketch with Google Maps here: https://i.imgur.com/A6sdvBn.png) and it seems we're ending up with about 6km, so doable in ~3 months. Add in the panic of countless of countries to unblock the canal itself and we could probably do it in a month if we really try.

At least based on my estimates (I'm a nobody with no formal education and also zero experience in shipping/logistics/boats/canals/construction), it seems it wouldn't be a multi-year project, but I'm more than eager to hear why I'm wrong.

I feel like agreeing with you in the "under a year" estimate, but a month seems too short. IMHO, the real problem would be the slow start.

Based on the Wikipedia page, it looks like the construction itself took 10 years but the preparations took an additional 4. Given that "over 30,000 people were working on the canal at any given period", you would first have to build enough infrastructure for all the workers who would be doing the digging, then transport them there (plus the machines), pay them, feed them, and then clean it up once the work is done.

If that's the case, then waiting the 2-3 weeks it would take to dislodge the ship itself may make more economic sense.

I hear you, but I think the situation back in 1860 was a bit different than now. We could probably move 30000 people from Cairo to Suez in less than a day, while back then it would have been a huge undertaking (I could be wrong, I'm not a historian). Same with preparation and everything else. Add in the novelty of the canal at the time of construction, compared to now when we have lots of experience (we as in humanity, not me).

> If that's the case, then waiting the 2-3 weeks it would take to dislodge the ship itself may make more economic sense.

Is it actually established that it's even possible to dislodge the ship in it's current state? As far as I've read, we don't really know how to even get the ship unstuck at this point. Some people are pointing to the ship being too heavy, so would need unloading first, but that'll take months.

The canal was expanded in 2015 to support bigger ships. You can lookup how long that took and treat it is a lower bound because this would not have most of the work already done like when expanding the existing canal.

Dredging a 35-kilometers-long and 24-meters-deep shipping route in a year

https://www.magazine.boskalis.com/issue02/suez-canal-expansi...

Dredging is so much easier than digging, but it still works as a very conservative lower bound. That's 3km a month, so a diversion of 6km would take at least 2 months.

But earthworks of that size have to be planned and approved and the labor organized. It could never be done in that time frame.

But in what way would digging a bypass be faster than 'just' digging out the sides of the canal where the ship is now stuck? No matter how you put it, digging out the ship has to be less work than digging a bypass.

Secondly, considering that parts of the Suez canal were dug out by hand (when were the first mechanical diggers like we have now developed?), digging speed must be much more than 20% higher than in the 1800's.

Fascinating stuff. Apart from the stress and time pressure, it must be a great job to do engineering on something like this.

Probably easier to spend that investment on building a monster refloation device or mobile unloading system.

It's no so bad actually, 35km of the canal doubled just a few years ago for a 4.2 Billion in less than a year, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Area_Development_Pr...

And with this blockage costing that much per day I’m guessing someone regrets not funding a dual of the entire thing.

Just nuke a hole next to the stuck ship and push the remaining wreck into the newly formed laguna.

I am hoping that shipping costs skyrocket. Let's see how long they can cling to "third world people working in sweatshops earning miserable wages" still make it cheaper to produce everything in Asia instead of locally.

Controversial and presented rather flippantly but there is a valid point behind this remark in my view.

As you can see by the downvotes people don't actually care much about neither the people of colour that are used as cheap workforce and neither their own countrymen that lost their jobs or can't get a job because they were all transfered to other side of the world, based on a lie that it would economically advantageous to do so, aslong as they can afford their toys.

If it was something that involved POC in Europe or the USA, they would rush to their defence to earn their virtue points.

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