Mexico building rail rival as water shortages drain Panama Canal
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
Given that the containers may be distributed in a variety of modes when they are unloaded at a land port (e.g. different trains, trucks, etc), it's probably reasonable to think about fractional mode switches. I.e. what's the average number of switches across all containers on the ship. Using a rail portage to get to from the Pacific to the Atlantic will add 2 to that number for every container, whereas going to a west coast port might add one or maybe zero (I.e. switch to a truck that drives cross country, vs rail->truck)
Is the increased cost of transcontinental land transport in the US so high as to make this scheme worthwhile for US East coast?
> But projects like CIIT may still struggle to entice cargo away from the Panama Canal. The largest vessels that go through it can carry 14,000 containers. Mexico’s government accurately reckons that the coast-to-coast rail journey will be quicker than passing through the canal. But it neglects to mention that the trains’ capacity and the speed at which they can be loaded and unloaded mean that the overall rate of goods’ transit between the two oceans will be much slower than the canal.
> Moreover, Niels Rasmussen, chief shipping analyst at Bimco, an industry association, says that carrying cargo by train or road has big snags. Most shippers would prefer to rack up extra miles on other maritime routes than to deal with the hassle of unloading and reloading. And if push comes to shove, many would probably prefer existing routes across the United States to untested road alternatives in Latin America.
The Panama Canal has two paths. Only one can be used for container ships. Even that has been at capacity for quite some time. A more integrated shipping supply chain is needed to get goods from A to Z. Rail, truck, boat, and plane.
I believe both Panamax and Neopanamax lanes can be used by most container ships. The Neopanamax lane can accommodate the biggest new container ships in addition to that.
Elaborate? There are major ports north of 55° and the US, Russia, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the UK etc.
Is it worth it? Hard to say. Sea transport is cheap, but not free. There is a lot of opportunity to reduce the costs of move switches by automation. However thee biggest advantage to this really only an come if they can sort containers to different destinations.
but naively, what if we built say ten parallel railways 10 ft apart and moved cargo ships over the rails?
Or this guy only needs to be scaled up 10X to do the job. Not outside the realm of imagination? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter
I know the ships are huge and it shouldn’t be feasible but it would be interesting to run the numbers.
Edit. Actually if my math is right just four of these guys could transport a fully loaded Panamax ship: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honghai_Crane
I’d imagine you could weld hooks all around the hull.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Solvency#38992883
Anyone?
Interesting concept. Never thought of it before.
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) has a similar issue. Containers will be offloaded in UAE, then travel via rail through Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then reloaded on to ships in the Mediterranean for a short trip to Greece.
Your idea is much more interesting.
Also transporting ships with their huge tanks of heavy oil is a huge health and safety hazard.
This exchange has been a revelation in systems-design for me. The value one gets from adding another brain with a differing viewpoint.
And a longer land route?
Rail figures are harder to find, but a reasonable guess based on what I can find seems to be 400 containers per train if the loading gauge permits double stacking containers. Speeds over 100km/h are easily achievable on railways without at-grade crossings.
So one ship could easily require ten trains to move all its cargo in the same time, plus the time taken to offload at each end, which I guess is why this hasn't taken off. Though if it's all just transhipped to trains this could be faster than at most ports where containers have to be sorted to different destinations.
Though interestingly with a dedicated right-of-way the trains don't actually need to be manned, remote control freight trains exist.
Hand counting how wide a panamax gets, they seem to max out at about 19 or 20 containers wide and 15 containers deep. It also looks like shipping containers already can be top latched with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZQPxl9zssk
So if you could automate this system at 30m per transfer of 10, a port with 15 cranes could do 300 containers an hour and clear a boat in about 15 hours. You could expand the system further into a full panamax width and do it in about 8 hours per panamax boat with 4500 TEUs.
There is a large dam, with generating station, downstream the valley is narrow, walls are steep. Differential to top of dam is large/high. Water locks impractical.
So they've built something like a dock for the ships to enter, dock closes with ship inside, and is moved on cog rails up/downhill for a few miles, including a turntable!
By electromotors, powered by > 100.000V three-phase delivered via catenary from the sides!
At the time this made the rounds trough the net (possibly +20 years) it all looked rather insane/gigantic/impressive.
Wasted 5 minutes trying to find it, seems to be gone. shrug
But there was more on sites like rbth, onlyinrussia, or some such. Much more detailed pictures.
Can you remember how it did sound when in motion?
There's also the possibility that you get 100 km inland and then the bathtub springs a leak. Not a good situation if the ship's structural integrity depends on the water in the tub.
Not while fully loaded with thousands of containers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_Tehuantepec#Tehuant...
With tunnels you can also go 3D, you could go 100 tunnels deep - stacked - increasing capacity on the same line as needed; something Elon points out as part of the traffic congestion problem is that cities went 3D (skyscrapers) but traffic did not.
It's such a complex issue that a fully "complete" overview is necessary, that can be then dove into over weeks or months of time to first study its thoroughness to then be able to decide how accurate or credible it is, and add to or correct it if an incongruence or error or incomplete aspect found.
Why lift ships? Containers are designed to be easily loaded, unloaded, and carried on various vehicles.
except as a cargo ship^H^H cargo ekranoplan which could cross land as well as ocean?
Like the imaginary giant cargo hovercraft from one of Arthur C Clarke’s stories.
I'm sure smarter people than me have worked this out but it seems like this would take a lot longer than the canal (which only takes 8-10 hours vs 7 hours for this train plus load and unload). Granted ships without reservations have to wait 2-20 days to transit the canal right now, but I suspect wait times for cranes at each end of this rail would be about the same as canal wait times if not longer.
Maybe a shipping expert can chime in here?
Eeeenteresting.
Plus if they're already offloading to land in the Americas, don't just put 'em onto another ship and sail up to LAX, a rail route up through Mexico itself could mean the containers arrive directly into the US without going through LAX, which has interesting implications for labor.
> The Panama Canal has become so backlogged that the world’s largest operator of chemical tankers has decided to reroute its fleet to the Suez Canal.
> London-based Stolt-Nielsen, which has a tanker division with 166 ships, is charging customers additional costs for the longer route, it said in an email. A bottleneck at the Panama Canal due to low water levels has prompted shippers to divert to Suez, the Cape of Good Hope, or even through the Strait of Magellan off the tip of South America.
And so, presumably, they're assuming that irrespective of resolution of these immediate issues, the Panama Canal won't be able to keep up with demand.
[1] https://fortune.com/2023/11/27/panama-canal-backed-up-water-...
This is the wrong way to think about it. Wait times would naturally start at zero days, and then increase from there until there is no more demand or the comparative advantage runs out.
Note that the ships do not all need to be owned by the same company, the important part is the containers get where they need to be. Sometimes they are, but container logistics is often separate and even when not the shipping companies will use each other when needed to get their containers where the customer needs them.
Wondering how plausible that is, the numbers match very closely to the Dinorwig pumped-storage hydroelectric power plant in the UK[3], which stores ~9.2GWh of energy by pumping 9.2 million cubic metres of water, 9.2 billion litres, up 536 metres to Marchlyn Mawr reservoir. And it takes 7 hours to do that[4].
If the same amount of water has to be lifted only ~5% of the height, assume 5% of the energy, that would be ~450MWh/day for the Panama Canal.
I see it wouldn't be good to dump ocean water into Gatun Lake, but could the lowest locks of freshwater be pumped back up, instead of released into the ocean?
[1] https://ctmirror.org/2023/08/27/the-panama-canal-is-running-...
[2] https://www.marineinsight.com/guidelines/10-important-panama...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station#
[4] https://www.thegreenage.co.uk/cos/dinorwig-hydroelectric-pla...
> Well There‘s Your Problem > This is a podcast about engineering disasters and systemic failures, from a leftist perspective, with jokes
https://wtyppod.podbean.com/e/episode-143-corredor-interocea...
Locks work by controlling the release of water from a high point to a low point. The water needs to already be at the high point, by tapping a river or something that's fed by rain; locks do not have pumps to supply their own water.
To raise a ship, you pull it into the lock, close the doors on the low side, and open a valve that lets water from the high side flow into the lock and float the ship up. Then you open the doors on the high side.
To lower a ship, you pull it into the lock from the high side, close the doors on the high side, and open a valve that lets water from the lock flow to the low side. Then open the doors on the low side and pull the ship out.
The low side of one lock is the high side of the next one, so that water basically follows the ship and gets lowered with it as it descends the ladder. But the water has to get to the high middle somehow.
First, at either end of the system there's a chunk of river at sea-level-ish but flowing towards the sea, so the water up at the upstream end where the lower locks are is probably not salty at all. Second, if each lock had its own pumps, doing it in 3 short lifts rather than 1 big lift to the top, then even if the one or two closest to sea-level ended up somewhat brackish, there'd be a dilution effect going up hill, and there would still be fresh water entering the system from the lakes which would tend to flush it downward. I don't think Gatun is at risk.
But what would it cost?
Okay, bullshit math time. In mixed units just to annoy metric purists:
A quick search says each lock cycle is around 50 million gallons, or 153-acre-feet. It takes 3 steps to raise them 85 feet above sea level, in energy terms let's just model it as one big step. It takes almost exactly 1kWh of energy to raise one acre-foot of water by 1 foot, so 153 acre-feet raised by 85 feet is about 13MWh per cycle. Apparently the canal manages about 40 transits per day, which I'm interpreting as each lock cycles once, so that's 521MWh of energy being provided by the rain delivering the water to the upper lakes.
Let's say we want to double that to 80 cycles a day. Oh, also, pumps are only about 70% efficient, so we actually need to provide 745MWh of power. Divide that by 24 hours and we end up with a 31MW power plant.
That's..... tiny.
Nah. Let's do it with solar. Roughly 6 hours peak sun equivalent per day (data for bocas del toro), we need 124MW of panels. The lakes have plenty of storage so there's no need for batteries, just run the pumps only when the sun is shining. Utility-scale solar runs around $1/watt installed. Labor is cheaper in Panama but conditions may be more challenging, I don't have good estimates for either of those so I'll assume they cancel out. Hey, it's napkin math!
$124M for the panels, figure the pumps and plumbing aren't cheap either but even if that's 10x the cost, we're probably still in the single-digit billions.
If they've been charging ships to use the canal like Egypt charges for the Suez, they should have quite the rainy-day, er, not-rainy-enough-day, fund for such projects. Especially if they raise prices auction-style during times of high demand, and let the high bidder through.
That seems like a no-brainer. What am I missing?
> "Nah. Let's do it with solar."
Why not with hydroelectric? Store power by pumping water up to Gatun Lake, generate power while filling the locks as the water falls down...
Nice! And Dinorwig runs around 72% round-trip efficiency, which is higher than I expect to see here simply on account of scale, but also in the ballpark.
> generate power while filling the locks as the water falls down...
Now that's an interesting one.
There are already lock systems where there's two parallel chains, and the ascending and descending locks operate in lock-step, with the two locks first equalizing water with each other, before the ascending takes water from above and the descending releases water to below. So that doubles the amount of traffic that can be handled by the same amount of water.
Presumably building twice the infrastructure would be cost-prohibitive or they would've done it over the preceding decade, but storing the water's energy could be quite a bit cheaper and smaller.
Edit: Much simpler, takes more space, saves almost as much water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_project...
It ends up being a lot like linking the shafts of all the pumps, with extra steps for control, eh?
Edit: Oh. Yeah. Okay, at each lock, you've got three pumps on a common shaft, with clutches:
(fill turbine)--[clutch]--(lift pump)--[clutch]--(drain turbine)
Whether you're filling or draining, you clutch that turbine to the lift pump, and lift some water upward as the working water flows downward. No electricity needed.
Hmm. Alright, who wants to go pitch a project?
> Gatun Lake, which forms a key stretch of the canal system and provides fresh water for its locks, saw little rain this year, as El Niño triggered a withering drought.
https://fortune.com/2023/12/04/panama-canal-dry-backed-up-br...
Gatun lake was an artificial construction of the project.