The Rival to the Panama Canal That Was Never Built

bbc.com

24 points·rmason··7 comments

In the early 1900s, the United States had two options: build a canal across Nicaragua, or, through Panama. The US Senate voted for the Panama option.

Estimates of how much it would cost to build a Nicaraguan Canal ...upwards of $40bn

I looked it up, the Nicaraguan Canal would have been about 170 miles, so $40bn for 170 miles. From a modern day engineering standpoint, putting aside lawyers, environmentalists, government, etc. how hard is it to build 170 miles of canal?

Mexico's plan to offload containers onto rail cars and then reload them back into ships waiting on the Atlantic side might make more sense financially. Anything heading to US East coast ports could be railed directly saving reloading.

Egypt recently completed an extension to the Suez canal

Turkey is also building a canal from the black sea.

you can look up the costs. both of these countries are very regulation-light...

See also: the rival to the Suez Canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Gurion_Canal_Project

The last time this idea was re-floated in the 2010s was in reponse to Panama increasing their transit fees. The fees decreased, making the project financially infeasible again.

It's interesting that its an unnamed Chinese company who seem so keen to keep this concept alive and possibly influence the transit fees still.

It's probably worth it to Nicaragua to play along, any dollar spent in the country is a big deal.

I thought it would be the Isthmus of Tehuantepec https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_Tehuantepec

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