Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land bridge for Oceania cargo
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
It comprises a 300-kilometer railway line from the Pacific port of Salina Cruz to Coatzacoalcos on the other side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec…
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2023/11/16/mexico-rail...
Theoretically, the standardized nature of containers should make switching from ships to trains relatively efficient.
<containers on average ship> * <lenght of railway carriage>
I am not sure how much the railway helps. There is already a railway across North America and it's still cheaper to go via Panama at this scale.
Or are you saying they wouldn't be limited by panamax, so could theoretically lower costs on the shipping portion?
Rarely do all containers go in one large batch from just one port to another single one.
It also says they eventually plan to increase the capacity to 1.4 million TEU per year, equivalent to 54 New Panamax container ships in each direction.
given 2-10k TEU per ship, that does not sound nearly enough
> That works out to 11.5 New Panamax ships per year in each direction
It seems like that it's enough, for 11.5 new panamax ships per year in each direction.
The project goal of 1.4 million containers is 16% as much traffic as the canal. For comparison the existing Panama Canal railway has a capacity of 2 million TEU/year.
[0] (yes these are annual not monthly) https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/panama/container-port-...
" The Australian BHP Iron Ore is the longest train ever recorded in history at approximately 4.6 miles (7.353 km). In the Pilbara region of Western Australia, BHP owns and runs the Mount Newman railway. This is a private rail network designed to transport iron ore "
"Invented in the United States in 1984, it is now being used for nearly seventy percent of United States intermodal shipments. Using double stack technology, a freight train of a given length can carry roughly twice as many containers, sharply reducing transport costs per container."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-stack_rail_transport
But generally going around the southern tip of South America could well be cheaper--although it may take longer.
But if a shipping container is delayed a little waiting for a ship it's no big deal.
That tends to imply that what you want in shipping is a bunch of reliable legs, not one point-to-point transport?
That transloading often happens anyway eventually.
And injecting some straight into the local railway network.
And running larger than Panamax ships on either side.
But for the Jones act. Ask Puerto Rico, Alaska and Hawaii why everything is so expensive!
https://www.cato.org/blog/jones-acts-role-encouraging-puerto...
60% of all canal traffic is US containers.
Look at some place North Carolina... 1000 calls a year. There is rail, truck and warehouse infrastructure to support that. It is highly optimized because of domestic transit by rail and truck, of imports and exports.
If you optimize your profit, by dropping imports closer to the point of consumption any extra profit you make will be consumed by rail and trucks getting exports to you in a non optimal way.
The smart choice is to sail to the port where the exports are. But because you can't take that domestic cargo you going in a non optimal state... that empty transit time just cost you money because you have a 2nd captain, crew, ship, insurance and moving an empty vessel is waste!
Basicity the limits the jones act imposes means that you can't fully optimize against the cost and structure of domestic transit.
Iceland Airlines kinda does the same shuffle for transatlantic flights and self-loading freight ;)
But running the numbers on it, you really can't compete on throughput, what with the truly massive capacity of cargo ships. Like, even if it had only 3000 conatiners, it only has to go at 1/1500th of the rail speed (assuming you can stack them two-high) to beat it. This page[1] says panamaxes have traditionally held 5000, with "New Panamax"es carrying 13,000.
(Edit: ChatGPT tells me that transit of the canal takes 10 hours on the high side, and it's 82 km long, so that's an effective ship speed of 8.2 km per hour, meaning the rail would have to go 20,000 km/h to compete on throughput.)
But yeah, the other advantages you mention would apply.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax?useskin=vector#Cargo_c...
What's perhaps more reasonable is to replace it with maybe 20 trains. You could maybe run such trains on a 10-minute headway, so 6 trains an hour, so 3 1/3 hours.
That's to replace one ship.
But it's also if you only have a single track rail line. You could build N parallel tracks along the same route. (This is far more reasonable than trying to build something where you can stack the containers 10 high or something, and then wide enough that it would be stable, and then you have to worry about the load-bearing ability of the track.)
But even if you build all those tracks, then you have the problem of unloading the ship at one end, and reloading a different ship at the other end. You can build enough tracks to get any rate you need, but can you get the load/unload speed?
We're talking about Mexico right?
Those containers don't have to be loaded directly onto a train, they would likely get unloaded into a yard.
This sort of transport is used to complicated logistics, it wont' take long to get ironed out
Joke aside... RoRo has much quicker transfer but ship capacities are much smaller.
'Just dig a trench and fill it with seawater'. Starts to sound an awful lot like a canal to me ... and ... why do you need a train to pull this?
1000 axles sounds doable, but maybe not very practical.
Rail based mobile fortresses with hundreds of powered axles are a totally normal thing in this setting.
All it took was a new ice age & railway comapnies taking over what remained from human kind and banning all non-rail based vehicles.
End result - no cars, tanks, airplanes, ships (well, nowhere to use those anyway), with everything on rails. :-)
Apparently some Australian ore trains are 43,000 tonnes (24000 tonnes of ore), according to Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_trains) so we are within an order of magnitude
Union Pacific (main freight carrier in Southern California) gives 286,000 lbs, ~ 140 tons https://www.up.com/aboutup/reference/maps/allowable_gross_we...
In all likelihood, the terrain is the bottleneck here.
Assuming 190 trains per direction, on a 24h/day schedule, that's 8 trains per hour, per direction. Or a 7.5 min block between trains 24 hours a day. That doesn't seem very realistic..
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27463198
It does seem like it would make sense for solving water issues in the southwest, at the very least.
With apologies to those with real estate interests in large swathes of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, at some point you must understand the inherent absurdity of living in an increasingly-inhospitable desert climate, and that no amount of nuclear bombs with which to blast a saltwater canal through Mexico will change the fact that you should move to the Great Lakes if you want access to freshwater.
As opposed to where, exactly?
The entire northern half of the United States can’t grow for shit because its summer growing season is a barely a few months long and the winters are inhospitable to everything except a winter squash or two. The center is a giant dust bowl because they tried to grow more than they could support. The East barely has any arable land without catastrophically deforesting the area.
That leaves the South which is either desert on the Western half or even more inhospitable swamp on the Eastern half. If the desert were really so bad, it wouldn’t be able to produce half the produce in the country plus extra for international export.
Gonna need a source for this claim
> The Golden State’s agricultural abundance includes 400 different commodities. The state produces about half of U.S.-grown fruits, nuts and vegetables. With less than four percent of the nation’s farms and ranches, California produces over 13 % percent of the nation’s agricultural production value. [1]
Most of the rest of the agricultural production in the country is animals and animal feed (and ethanol and biofuels), not produce people want to actually eat directly.
[1] https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Internet/FSA_File/10cafacts_v3.pdf
[1] https://nypost.com/2023/09/12/americas-biggest-trading-partn...
[2] https://nypost.com/2023/08/08/china-exports-plummet-as-us-fi...
[3] https://www.marketplace.org/2023/11/21/with-mexico-the-top-u...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFTA_superhighway
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_69
[6] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...
[7] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2019_en...
If this was simply and only 'local geography', then why doesn't this happen all the time? Since local geography doesn't change.
For example, SE Asia is settling into El Niño patterns — which cause it to be drier than its long term average.
https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/asia-and-pacific-el...
2. Buy The Weather Company
3. Make Boring Weather Products
4. ???
5. Profit
https://www.scottishcanals.co.uk/visit/canals/visit-the-fort...
Amusingly, the height the wheel lifts to is actually larger than the height the Panama Canal locks need to lift to. It's not got quite as much carrying capacity though.
I'm only roughly approximating here, but that could probably lift just a dozen 40ft shipping containers each swing-up (perhaps, this is a wild estimate based visually only).
If you do try, remember that the Panama canal allows boats with a ~15m draft and just short of 60m height above the waterline, you're probably going to want more of a see-saw than a full wheel.
(Also: correcting my comment above, the wheel only lifts to 24m: there are locks to get the rest of the way up (another 11m), avoiding needing to demolish a section of the antonine wall. So the wheel itself lifts slightly less height than the 26m on the Panama canal)
Like, this paragraph at the end, without any context starts comparing two different systems without saying anything about which one is used how and where. Or adding anything to give some clue about how much water that is compared to the lake size and replenishing rates.
> "According to the PCA, it takes around 50 million gallons of fresh water to move a vessel through one of the locks. The Panamax locks lose more water compared to the Neo-Panamax lock. The Neo-Panamax locks have a water recovery system which can reclaim 60% of the water used during a vessel’s transit through the locks. The Panamax lanes do not have the water-recapturing ability of the Neo-Panamax locks. "
I agree that it is strangely edited. But to help you out with the info: both are used on the Panama canal. There are two paralel sets of locks, the older ones and a more modern ones. The more modern ones can fit a bit bigger ships and they are more efficient with water.
This is a wikipedia page about the expansion project (the one which also constructed these more modern locks): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_proje...
And here is a video on how one can construct a “water saving lock” from Practical Engineering: https://youtu.be/SBvclVcesEE?si=-sedFyErNPcSJ24X
That's ~2e5 tons of fresh* water per ship.
To add some perspective, the largest nuclear desalination plant in the world produces ~1e6 tons of fresh* water per year - enough for 5 ships.
*The standards for "fresh" may be different in each case, but the magnitude of the problem is clear.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...
IIRC there was a major refurb to make the Panama system more water efficient with better recovery, some look ahead should have forseen fresh water supply becoming a a limiting factor.
That seems low, so I must be missing something?
Obviously there'd be extreme capital costs and engineering/environmental challenges, but far less than an equivalent train.
After all, the canal moves more tonnage daily than the proposed train could in a year.
A Tesla Powerwall is 13.5 kWh.
So you either need 4,500 tons by 1m, or 1 ton to be raised 4.5km, or 67 tons by 67m. To match a single home's battery backup.
Doing that for cheaper than $2,000. Which is what a battery that size costs in large quantities.
That sounds pretty unlikely.
Moving billions of tons of concrete vertically is a lot harder.
(Most dams also supply their own water. Hydro storage is trickier, and needs you to build pumping systems, and sometimes to hollow out mountains)
> Also pumping up that much water would require an absolutely enormous amount of energy, and dozens of pumping stations.
Similar to other water pumping projects about the globe that cover distances further than 65km across rises of a similar magnitude?
The canal system already has dozens of pumping stations, abd there's a regenerative energy recovery factor to the operation that makes the total energy required somewhat less than just a straight lift x tonnage.
Gatun Lake is where Panama City, the capital of Panama and the home of two million people, gets its drinking water.
That is one and the same, you are arguing for killing off the entire ecosphere near the canals. And not of just the canal but also of the lakes it's connected to.
Using sea water is not an option.
It's basically recycling.
If needed, it would obviously be easier to pump sea water than to desalinise sea water, then to pump it anyway.
Also, that is nowhere near the largest desalination plant. The really big ones like the Sorek plant [1] do ~6e5 per day which would support 3 ships per day. Still only 1/10 of what is needed to support the full container capacity, but quite doable if the economics work out to support fully scaling out.
[1] https://ide-tech.com/en/project/sorek-desalination-plant/
Very nice corporate speak understatement for what’s happening globally. Well done Panama Canal Authority.
Presumably its when it says "for when". But this is another way of saying 'not now, perhaps in the future'. The words relate to the future, but you are applying them to the present.
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/12/any-fossil-fuel-phase-out-...
As for subsea pipelines: it's hard enough to lay these alongside the same continent, i.e. in geologically stable and relatively flat areas such as the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico... but no one has even attempted to run anything larger than a fiber cable across the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean.
Due to the nature of LNG storage, a small amount of the gas “boils off” every day (fraction of a %). The longer a voyage, the more cargo is lost. So LNG carriers are incentivised to deliver cargo as quickly as possible so they can maximise the delivered value of the goods.
(Fortunately because these ships themselves are LNG powered, they are designed to recapture this boiled off fuel to operate the vessel)
https://www.marinetraffic.com/
Then imagine how many containers fit on a typical vessel.
Obviously not all the icons there are carrying containers but I still find it awe inspiring seeing the sheer amount of traffic moving at any one time.
given your domain knowledge, could you clarify that aspect pls?
One very interesting aspect of ship operations is the art of stowage of containers. The complexity associated with it is substantial. 3D large scale Tetris. This is a good introductory article https://www.shippingandfreightresource.com/container-stowage...
The average container ship can carry anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 TEU, with the newer VLCS and ULCS ships carrying up to 25,000 TEU.
That’s 5-25,000 containers on a single ship, and there’s estimated to be around 20,000 container ships currently operating.
Global container trade is somewhere near 1 Billion TEU per year currently.
All of that is ignoring Bulk Cargo such as oil/liquid tankers, dry goods (grains and ores, etc), and other non-containerised goods.
Every single number in this industry is mind boggling.
Just for clarity the standard shipping container we’re all familiar with visually is 40 feet long, and is two TEU’s.
Now that I think of it, maybe 1 billion TEU is not that much. Single person does not even use full container...
And river that feeds the lake is of course, not artificial - Chagres river - but nothing is gonna happen to it.
Sure, there will be power demand for all the pumping, but given how important this is I would think it would be economicaly sustainable- possibly with similar technology Japan uses for floodwater pumping in the GCANS project (gas turbine driven pumps).
We don't know much about what happened back then. Excavations can show you that palaces were abandoned, but there is an enormous dearth of written records which would help with understanding what happened.
In absence of such records, people of today will project their most favorite contemporary theory onto the ruins. On the right, I have certainly heard the idea that both the Bronze Age Collapse and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire were caused by too much immigration. On the left, climate is the word of the decade.
(From a slightly more serious angle: the Nika Rebellion in 6th century Constantinople is a fascinating piece of history, chariot racing intertwined with politics etc. Imagine if baseball or hockey teams had their political parties or vice versa.)
Didn't realize the 'right' had even managed to co-opt something like Bronze Age Collapse to promote anti-immigration. Since isn't a lot of studying history, about tracking 'immigration', the movement of peoples. People move around. It isn't bad, it is what actually happens.
What would the world look like if during all of history, there was never any immigration? Wouldn't humans have died out.
"If only they had built a wall to keep out those 'sea peoples', then today we would be living as good and just Hattusas".
If it hadn't happened, would there even be a Jesus? or Christianity?
How these arguments go is, I find a quote, then you say "not that person", or "that isn't what they meant", or "the law is wrong, it should be illegal".
If 'valid immigration' is a-ok, then why produce so much false information re-casting it as 'illegal' in order to advocate stopping immigration?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/jan/11/ron-desant...
What is the goal of drumming up hate using false data, to rile up his followers? Is it really to promote 'valid' immigration? Wouldn't it be better to discuss 'valid' immigration, if that was in fact the goal?
I think you have swallowed their dog whistle.
If today, Republicans are against the number and type of immigrants that are allowed in under the current law, then they can change the law. They do not agree with current law, and feel that there are situations that should be illegal. So they want to change the law, thus changing what is legal now, to become illegal. So, 'calling todays legal immigration, illegal'.
I hate falling back on tropes, but this is the type of 'legal' maneuvering that was done in Germany. A lot of persecution was 'legal', once the laws were changed to make some 'people' illegal.
https://theconversation.com/republicans-are-pushing-for-dras...
""The Republicans’ plan is similar to both a similar rule that the Department of Homeland Security adopted in 2019 and a policy that President Joe Biden is trying to push through.
I am an immigration professor and teach asylum law. I believe it’s important to understand what sets Republicans’ proposed law apart from previous iterations.
The president cannot change the law, but Congress can. If these lawmakers succeed in changing federal asylum law, the law would override the court decisions striking down previous versions. Because Congress has broad power over immigration, the new laws would likely be upheld if challenged in court. ""
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/12/whats-...
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-05-republicans-immigra...
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/13/1218935981/republican-candida...
Dream up crazy situations, be intolerant, get everyone riled up and ready to riot and burn the constitution.
Then turn around and be "well, indubitably, my dear chap, lets discuss the matter". Then dance around in circles because they don't actually want anything solved, because then they wont have any issues to get their base angry.
Then anybody that tries to engage with them starts looking just as crazy. Seriously, these tactics are strait verbatim out of mein kampf.
I fell for it again, getting pulled into a seemingly innocent exchange, and it really is just trolling. You haven't provided any argument either way, just questions, to make me run around.
Now I’m left to wonder why you made the claim in the first place, given you have no proof. Were you simply repeating what some liberal media narrative said the “big bad right” was plotting, without having attempted to find any proof of it until now?
You: ""My argument is that there does not exist a public official pushing for any sort of “zero-tolerance” of any legal immigration.""
I never said anything like that. I had to go back and re-read to figure out what argument you were talking about.
You kind of fantasized something I said, and all subsequent arguments didn't really make sense since I was never trying to prove that. I made a comment about 'sea peoples' in the bronze age. To then try and infer some stance on very specific legal standing today seems a stretch.
So to me, it seemed kind of crazy that someone is claiming the 'right' doesn't have some pretty radical views on immigration.
But yes, I do agree, the right is pretty awful. I don't need any media to tell me that, when I have my own eyes.
Get out of the bubble, I flip channels to conservative media now and then to see what they are being told, and it is full of lies. Like really blatant lies someone could debunk just by looking up the truth if they wanted to.
> [America is a country] where so many of these absolutely rotten-brained zero tolerance takes on immigration become popular.
Can you explain what you mean by that? Because it sounds to me like you believe there’s some sort of zero tolerance immigration policy that is popular in America, but you haven’t been able to produce evidence of it so far.
As for the left leaning and right leaning media, they both lie. And I was right there with you believing the left’s over the right’s up until 2020. Since then I don’t lean one way or the other, but I do demand every claim be accompanied with concrete evidence. This is the only way to find truth.
I didn't say that. It was someone else that replied first, and then you and I started replying to that reply. But I hadn't been directly arguing that persons post.
So guess we got off-track at the beginning.
Though, given that the Governor of Texas, someone that is significant in the republican party, has advocated shooting immigrants. I'm not sure the sentiment is wrong.
I also agree Left and Right Media, both 'skew' what they say. I find the left has less outright blatant lies. They certainly 'frame' what they say. The Left will be very careful in what words they choose. The right will actually just say 2+2=5, and trust nobody checks.
And you’re back to conflating illegal and legal immigration. I’ve never argued nobody is against illegal immigration, far from it.
To your point about media lies, the Left’s are less obvious yes, but that makes them much tricker to deal with. The Left will first convince you 3 and 4 are effectively the same, tell you 2+2 is pretty much 3, then have you laugh at the Right for being so far off base from reality when they say it’s 5. You can show someone on the Right a calculator and they’ll see they were mistaken, you show someone on the Left the calculator and they’ll tell you you’re in the wrong for thinking the difference between the answers matters. See: legal vs illegal immigration, “The Science” of COVID, approaches to crime, etc.
There was no legal/illegal basis for settling the Americas. There was no world court where Columbus could be charged with illegal immigration.
I do strongly disagree with your take on left/right reactions to media.
Typically those on the right subscribe to a more 'religious fundamentalism', and thus notions of right/wrong, true/false, are not based on any scientific findings. It is based on faith, a moral right granted by God to his chosen. So there is no arguing. No room for truth.
Hence, the truth can be spelled out clearly, and they will still not accept it. They will argue the sky isn't blue, if their leaders tell them it isn't. Religion has morphed the brain to the extent that reason is not allowed.
See: legal vs illegal immigration, “The Science” of COVID, approaches to crime, etc. Vaccinations, life, etc...
This isn’t the place to keep going on the topic, but feel free to reach out “my username at outlook dot com” if you’d like to discuss further.
But also, morality shouldn't over-rule science. If there is a hypothesis, and it can be tested, so you know what is true, then a religious belief shouldn't make you ignore it. The 'right' these days is anti-science to the extent that they are rejecting things that can be tested and shown to be true. Rejecting things that can be proven.
Agree, probably enough on this thread.
Later, bye, best of luck.
Probably wont e-mail, because I'm paranoid about anonymity.
“The only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border—because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder,” the Republican governor told former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch on her radio show last week. (Check it out at the 11:45 mark.)
“I can’t believe I have to say ‘murdering people is unacceptable,'” wrote Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) in a post on X. “It’s language like yours that left 23 people dead and 22 others injured in El Paso,” she added, referring to the 2019 mass shooting in a Texas Walmart by an anti-immigrant killer.
I feel you cannot separate the two concepts. It is possible to support legal immigration but not illegal immigration, and remarks made against illegal immigrants cannot be used as evidence of any feelings towards legal immigrants. The two are, in every sense of the term, entirely disjoint sets.
So this makes plausible that the abandoning was not something voluntary.
You’re happy with the SN part. I’m concerned about the AFU part.
Edit: there are economic models that are neither capitalist nor communist, to boot
The first sentence of your link:
"First opened in 1933, the White Sea-Baltic Canal was built on the backs of gulag prisoners. By the time it was done, more than 25,000 laborers had lost their lives."
What a triumph!