Ever Given Container Ship Fan Fiction

There is the "it costs X more fuel to ship around the long route" but there's also "ships waiting for their turn to go through the canal don't turn off their engines."

For the first point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/why-a-canal-b...

> Without Suez, a supertanker carrying Mideast crude oil to Europe would have to travel an extra 6,000 miles around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, adding some $300,000 in fuel costs (although there would be savings from avoiding the Suez passage tolls, which can run hundreds of thousands of dollars.)

That is a lot of fuel.

For the fuel burn rate - https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportat...

It is hard to find the fuel use in port because when ships are in port they use shore side power ( https://grist.org/article/shipping-industry-destroying-clima... )

> Once docked, the ship can plug into shore-side electrical power and turn off its oil-burning engines, a process known as “cold ironing” that reduces local air pollution.

That jargon brings us to:

https://safety4sea.com/cm-cold-ironing-the-role-of-ports-in-...

> As a study reports, in 10 hours of stop of a cruise ship, its emissions decrease from 72.2 to 50.1 tonnes of CO2, from 1.47 to 0.04 tonnes of nitrogen oxide, and from 1.23 to 0.04 tonnes of sulphur oxide.

So, because the ships that are sitting there waiting aren't in port, they're just burning fuel and still have emissions on the order of tons of CO2/day.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_ironing

> For every 1 kWh (3.6 MJ) of electricity, about 200 g of bunker fuel is consumed. Each 1 kg of bunker oil generates 3.1 kg of carbon dioxide.

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So, we've got ships that are spending an extra $300k on fuel to go the long way and ships that are putting out tons of CO2/day to wait idle. Neither of these are good for the environment and both increase the carbon cost of the goods that they transport.

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Additionally, there are indirect costs like shippers concerned about piracy off the coast of West Africa are asking navies to patrol those waters.

This also means that ships going that way aren't going to do a 'most efficient fuel burn rate' but rather the "move me out of these waters as fast as the ship can go"... which again, tends to be less efficient for fuel use and thus more polluting.