What 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.
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.probably about $4MM/(anticipated duration of long wait) =)
https://www.econnectenergy.com/articles/how-does-an-lng-plan...
LNG is almost all methane which is the lightest hydrocarbon. Methane is so light a gas that it does not liquefy even under thousands of PSI of compression. And at room temperature it only practically exists in a gas form, pressurized or not, so in that case it needs to be handled like oxygen or nitrogen, other light gases where the heavy-walled steel storage cylinders weigh more than the contents even at maximum pressure.
You just can't get that many kilos of such light molecules into a certain space as a compressed gas compared to how dense a liquid gets.
So they liquefy the gas instead before transport and that requires cryogenics rather than pressure. The chilled liquid can then be stored or transported in tanks of much thinner-walled steel since gas pressure is not a major issue. These low-pressure tanks are thickly insulated with lightweight materials to keep in the cold as much as possible.
And unlike the heavy-walled things like the welders use for their pressurized oxygen, cryogenics are handled like the tanks of liquid oxygen, where you can't completely close the cryogenic storage tanks or pressure would build up beyond the bursting point of their relatively thin-walled construction. The cryogenic tanks are constantly hissing as they release excess gas for this reason.
Since no insulation is perfect, the cargo does pick up heat gradually and this causes a certain amount of steady boiloff. Rather than physically becoming warmer, the cargo self-refrigerates by evaporation.
Basically they are loading metric shiploads of really cold LNG and it just slowly evaporates as they go. The cargo temperature is kept constant by self-refrigeration where the condenser is the plant on shore and the evaporator is the ship on its way at sea.
> The prospects of a growing wait reportedly prompted one company to bid a record $4 million for one of the open slots bringing their anticipated total transit costs to $4.5 million and still they have to wait another week to get their empty gas carrier on its way.
https://maritime-executive.com/article/panama-canal-auction-...
Later in the article, it says that they might give up their bid, which sounds to me like they had contracts that needed fulfillment with expensive penalties. Probably made the bid to hedge their bets, and are working right now to renegotiate penalties to account for unforeseen circumstances.
In case of tankers, even more so. The spot market prices, and corresponding delivery contracts, make 4 million peanuts basically.
Sort of like how failures to the ATC system very rapidly expand until the whole system grinds to a halt.
No redundancy, no buffers, no fallbacks.
The issues are manifold:
- the Panama Canal has already been built at the shortest site possible, dito for the Suez Canal
- constructing a new canal is (virtually) impossible due to the enormous amounts of rock you'd have to move on the Panama side - there's a reason why the existing canal is raised so much above sea level
- both Egypt and Panama lack the financial resources to construct a new canal or meaningfully expand the existing ones, and public funding from the Rest of World isn't really there either
- the impact to nature is just as massive, which makes that a no-go for environmental reasons - why destroy so much of nature just for even more cheap trinkets from China?
- climate change is looming to kill off polar ice, which would enable ships to use polar transit routes without icebreakers and significantly impede the business of the canals