Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land bridge for Oceania cargo

[keiferski]

This is also why Mexico is building a rail-based alternative to the Panama Canal:

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.

[quickthrower2]

It means you need to time a ship to be on the receiving end. It sort of requires symmetric regular 2-way traffic to work.

[geraldhh]

can someone more caffeinated than me, do the math here plz? i suspect there will be some lengthy trains involved.

<containers on average ship> * <lenght of railway carriage>

[helsinkiandrew]

I wonder how effective this is though? An average container ship has 10,000 6.1 meter long containers. That a lot of carriages and trains.

[chucke1992]

I wonder if cartels will try to rob it eventually.

[Erratic6576]

That’s nuts. Carrying cargo ships by rail is going to require huge locomotives

[ed_balls]

Does it make sense to connect west and east coast via inland waterway e.g. Snake <-> Missouri river. Would it be too expensive? I assume nukes are out of the question.

[jncfhnb]

Factorio vibes

[ornornor]

“Climate anomalies” is a very mild sounding way of calling what’s happening globally. Well done.

[throwup238]

“Anomaly” is a technical term of art in climate science: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/global-temperatu...

[dudeinjapan]

Climate change is predicted to cause both more rainfall and more droughts—in the wrong places, of course.

[sschueller]

The issue was clearly predicted. Even ignoring climate change it would have been a problem but they went ahead with the changes and now don't want to admit that the experts warned them.

[porkbeer]

Has more to do with their local geography, but any excuse right?

[andrewaylett]

Falkirk, Scotland, has a very fun alternative to canal locks, which doesn't entail losing nearly so much water: the Falkirk Wheel.

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.

[ProllyInfamous]

Tom Scott did a video on this [1].

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).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHO9gARac-w

[Tistron]

It's a strangely edited article.

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. "

[krisoft]

> without saying anything about which one is used how and where

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

[Projectiboga]

There was a scheme to do a pair of canals through Nicaragua. A Chinese mogul signed a 50 year deal, but his firm is defunct. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230825-the-rival-to-the...

[Jabbles]

> According to the PCA, it takes around 50 million gallons of fresh water to move a vessel through one of the locks.

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...

[defrost]

I'm still a little astounded no one has yet built seawater pipelines from coast to coast (65 km) to recharge the canal buffer dams with seawater rather than fresh water.

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.

[Jabbles]

I misread my source, I am off by 2 orders of magnitude. Please disregard.

[mytailorisrich]

For the locks to work they need water. It does not matter if fresh or salty. The canal takes advantage of the natural store of fresh water on higher grounds.

If needed, it would obviously be easier to pump sea water than to desalinise sea water, then to pump it anyway.

[Veserv]

That is only around 80 K$ per crossing using modern desalination plants. The internet says there are ~40 crossings per day resulting in ~14K crossings per year deriving ~3 G$ in fees for the Panama Canal Authority. At ~80 K$ per crossing that is ~1 G$ in drinkable water which is expensive, but not too onerous to be obviously economically non-viable.

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/

[cm2187]

But when a ship goes down in a lock, can't you push the water back in the lake instead of releasing it downstream? (ie you would pump fresh water, not seawater)

[paganel]

The Panama Canal was (and still is) an environmental disaster in itself, maybe this will be a good sign that using tropical marshlands in order to "help" with bringing even more plastic from China faster is not the way to go.

[FrustratedMonky]

Environmental Disaster. Wait until someone says, lets just pump in sea water.

[ornornor]

> We will continue to support Maersk’s operations. ... We are focused on delivering both short- and long-term solutions for our customers, for when climate anomalies affect our operations

Very nice corporate speak understatement for what’s happening globally. Well done Panama Canal Authority.

[heratyian]

There have also been major protests in Panama City recently that have disrupted rails operations. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/11/30/panama-celebrat...

[gonesilent]

LNG ships are paying the big bucks in the auctions.

[acrooks]

It’s because LNG ships are cannibals.

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)

[Scoundreller]

Too bad nobody can figure out a way to move fluids efficiently across land or seafloor. Impossible problem to solve.

[mise_en_place]

It's mind boggling to wrap your head around the sheer scale of modern shipping and logistics. I've seen visualizations before, but does anyone recommend any tools to visualize these shipping routes? Makes me want to fire up Factorio again.

[sen]

I work in container shipping (in IT for a company), we obviously have internal mapping tools we can’t share but whenever anyone is interested in this stuff I just like to point them to:

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.

[brlcad]

Plague Inc.

[anovikov]

I still don't get what prevents just pumping the seawater up the lake in sufficient quantities. Maybe using solar to power the pumps - intermittency won't be a problem. Lake will become brackish, but whatever.

[Xophmeister]

That’s the spirit! The environment’s not going to destroy itself, dammit!

[m4rtink]

Why seawater ? Just pump the released water back up. If the issue is contamination with brackish water from the lower part, I'm sure that could be handled by some clever valve management - eq. release water to a freshwater pond when lowering a ship, so you loose only the water in the lowered chamber & can pump the water in the pond back up. Given the ships going up might import some of the brackish water when rising up, I don't think contamination can be fully prevented anyway.

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).

[mindesc]

I have understood that the bronze age collapse was a climate fluke that resulted into famine, which did lead to military power balance change which did lead into trade route collapse.

[inglor_cz]

The Bronze Age Collapse is a very dark moment in history, both figuratively and literally.

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.

[hutzlibu]

I have understood, that this is the current most plausible theory, but not much is actually "understood" about that time and cultures. In most cases, we don't even know the name of the culture and they are named by the places where the first stuff has been found.

[lostmsu]

Time for self-driving amphibious containers.

[MrEd]

Don't forget this drought happens because of global warming. Or whatever the current accepted term for fuzzing people is.

[geraldhh]

seems like a distraction from the fact that it's not yet profitable to deepen the canal.

[FrustratedMonky]

I'm bit confused, wonder why they don't just charge more. It seems like unloading/rail shipping, would be so expensive and they will do it. So during normal operating, there is enough 'profit' on the shippers side, that the canal could charge more.

[seb1204]

Capitalism, climate change and externalised costs, no surprises here.

[skrebbel]

Whereas communism is great for the environment! Aral Sea anyone?

[workingdog]

I'm waiting for the socialist-built canals