FUTURE SUPER SHIPS
The biggest container vessels have become so large that ports and shipping routes cannot accommodate them. Amd as land facilities expand, engineers develop even bigger vessels.
Next-generation cargo haulers will be bigger than ever. So big, they might not even fit in our ports. What do we do?
In 1956, a modified oil tanker, the SS Ideal X, carried 58 containers from New Jersey to Texas. Until then, coffee and bananas had been laboriously loaded and unloaded bag by bag. Now, they could be placed in large containers and lifted directly from truck to vessel. Ever since, ships have grown tremendously.
Since the days of the SS Ideal X, container vessel capacity has grown by a factor of 300+. The world’s largest container vessel is the MSC Oscar, which is 395 m long and carries 19,224 containers – corresponding to 1,150,000 washing machines or 38,448 cars.
Container vessel growth has reduced the average freight charges from 15 to 1 % of the price of the product. And the economies of scale of huge vessels is not only a thing of the shipping industry. The world’s biggest cruise ship, the 362-m-long Harmony of the Seas, which was launched in 2016, is a floating city with 6,780 passengers and 2,300 crew members.
However, the growth comes at a price: the world’s largest container vessels can no longer berth in North America.
LARGER SHIPS REDUCE POLLUTION
The development of larger ships is not just a matter of economy. For many years, the shipping industry has been among the worst polluters in the world, and so, authorities have been pushing to reduce the ships’ emissions. As from 2021, ships sailing in the North and Baltic Seas must reduce their emissions of harmful nitric oxides (NOx), by 75 %. More containers in one single ship cause less pollution per container, so larger vessels are an efficient way of making the shipping trade greener.
Whereas vessels longer than four soccer fields benefit economy and environment, they are a huge challenge to ports. Docks must be longer, wider, and deeper, and cranes must be higher to be able to reach across
ships as tall as 20 storey buildings. Moreover, the handling of the staggering number of containers is not an easy task.
The average industrial port can load and unload 115-120 containers per hour from one single container vessel. At this speed, it would take 160 hours, or about one week, to load and unload all the containers of the MSC Oscar. To prevent bottlenecks and avoid costly wasted time, the ships should not be in the port for any more than 24 hours, and so, industrial ports throughout the world are investing in robotic technology. The port of Los Angeles, which handles about nine million containers a year, is a good example of the automation of the ports. When a vessel berths in Los Angeles, it is still a crane controlled by a human being which moves the containers from ship to pier, but subsequently, robots take over. On the pier, the containers are picked up by driverless cranes, known as straddle carriers, which take them to the central storage site, placing them on top of each other. GPS control and laser sensors in the asphalt make sure that the fourwheeled robots do not collide.
Subsequently, automatic
cranes on rails set out to sort the huge quantities of containers according to when they will be picked up. When a truck arrives to collect its goods, the port computer system tells the automatic cranes to find the right container. The truck is parked in a marked area, and once the robotic crane has placed the container on it, the driver can leave right away.
The introduction of robots in ports is still a relatively new phenomenon, but the initial comparisons of manual and automated industrial ports indicate that the new technology can handle about 80 % more containers during the same period of time.
Although the port of Los Angeles is one of the biggest in the US and central to trade with Asia, it is too small to handle vessels like the MSC Oscar. The ports which do not follow suit, when ships grow bigger, lose traffic, and so, Los Angeles is carrying out a costly modification project, which will enable the port to handle the biggest of container vessels in 2020.
EXTREME DETOURS
Not only ports have come under pressure, as container and cruise ships have grown to be as long as skyscrapers are high. For 100+ years, the Panama Canal has been a commercial shipping hub, but in 2007, the
company, which operates the canal, had to invest $7 billion in a nine year construction project to add an extra lane of traffic and expand the locks. The expanded canal opened in 2016, but the biggest container vessels, MSC Oscar and Maersk’s Triple E class, are still too large to pass. The world’s biggest cruise ship, Harmony of the Seas, would be able to use the canal, but it is too tall to pass under the Bridge of the Americas, which links North and South America.
During the past 10 years, the Panama Canal has lost much of the valuable container vessel traffic to the larger Suez Canal. In 2013, Maersk began to carry its goods from North America to Asia the other way around the world through the Suez Canal, though the route is about 1,000 km longer. The Suez Canal has also been expanded to keep pace with developments, and in 2016, an extra lane of traffic was added, which cost the Egyptian authorities DKK 59 billion. The canal can now accommodate all existing container vessels, but it could be a short respite. The MSC Oscar can barely pass, and new container vessels, which will be even bigger, have been ordered by several shipping companies for delivery in 2017.
PORTS CANNOT GROW BIGGER
The new container vessels will be able to carry 21,000 containers, making sea transport even cheaper and more ecofriendly. However, this seems to be the upper limit, according to several leading shipping companies. Infrastructure cannot keep pace.
Globally, only 20 ports have the capacity to handle vessels carrying more than 19,000 containers, and although quite a few ports are expanding, not by far all of them have the space required. The ports of major cities are often located close to other built-up areas and cannot just expand. Moreover, it does not make sense to build ports further away from the cities, as in that case, the goods would need to be transported by truck.
Even so, the shipping industry is talking about an ultimate new class of vessels, which can carry 35,000 containers.
If vessels which are considerably larger than the MSC Oscar will one day be a fact of life, they might be able to take a new short cut between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. In Nicaragua, the government has made an agreement with a Chinese consortium to build a 278-km-long canal, which is to compete with the Panama Canal. In order to realise the ambitious project, 4.5 billion m3 of soil will have to be removed – enough to bury all of Manhattan up to the 21st floor. The link will be built via the San Juan river, and if it is finished some day, it will be able to accommodate ships which are larger than the MSC Oscar and reduce the time of sailing between New York City and California by one day.