Panama Canal draught restrictions spark liner surcharges

https://gcaptain.com/panama-canal-draught-restrictions-spark-liner-surcharges/

by Stratoscope • 3 years ago

99 104 3 years ago

Wikipedia says this about the northwest passage:

  Therefore, the Canadian commercial marine transport industry does not anticipate the route as a viable alternative to the Panama Canal within the next 10 to 20 years (as of 2004).

Curious if there is an update. Seems a no brainier for Canadian sovereignty to invest in this, so I expect we won't.

sp3322• 3 years ago

There are some extremely sensitive habitats up north. A spill could be a disaster for some endangered species.

version_five4• 3 years ago

That's really a throw away answer. Is there something concrete you want to share? As written it just sounds like a lazy excuse for not engaging with something, which could have been done by not commenting. I don't understand what the point of even writing it was.

labster2• 3 years ago

Don’t ship oil through it then, ship food and consumer goods. Demand for oil is going to drop a lot in 20 years anyway.

justrealist4• 3 years ago

This might be true in an absolute sense, but I'm really skeptical that it's true in a meaningful relative sense, because nobody has ever listed (to my knowledge) environmental habitats or biomes which are not sensitive.

Like, if someone said "the Aleutians are extremely sensitive, but the Marianas are an OK place to have an oil spill all things equal" I'd grant the former more weight.

And if the the counter is "all environments are sensitive" well OK, great, but that doesn't really help us make decisions in the real world.

grecy3• 3 years ago

A friend is sailing it right now. There is still a good deal of ice. It's almost a certainty to open every year now, but only for 1-8 weeks, then it's blocked by ice again.

20 years ago there was no guarantee it would open at all during the summer.

augusto-moura3• 3 years ago

Is this personal cruising/yatching? Do they keep a vlog or blog? Looks like something I would be interested in watching

dylan6042• 3 years ago

So when it's open, you sail through it. When it's solid, you drive over it. They just need to build a couple of ports on either coast. It's a good thing we have an abundance of truck drivers...ooops.

icegreentea2• 3 years ago

What type of investment did you have to mind? Investments to boost commercial viability? Or improvements to boost Canadian sovereignty claims?

slashdev7• 3 years ago

A fleet of ice breaker escorts?

I don’t see how that could be cost effective.

Gravityloss• 3 years ago

And a ship transited in 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Nordic_Orion

I think both passages might have shallow parts.

daveslash• 3 years ago

Glad I read the article. At first I (naively) thought "why? just pump more seawater?" But according to the article "it takes around 50 million gallons of fresh water to move a ship through a lock. The panamax locks lose more fresh water than the neo-panamax locks, which have a recovery system that can reclaim 60% of the water" -- A spot check on the maps shows Gatun Lake (freshwater) in the center of the isthmus. Wikipedia says it is fresh, but human made.

Is anyone aware of the reason for creating the interior of the canal as a freshwater passage, as opposed to just mixing ocean water willy-nilly? Such mixing of water would probably not pass current environmental concerns (with good reason), but curious what the reasoning was from a 1913 perspective?

lokar• 3 years ago

Much of the route is pre-existing river and lake, the whole thing is an extension of a watershed.

dragonwriter2• 3 years ago

FTA: “...the canal and the lakes and rivers that make up its watershed, which also provides fresh water to three cities, including the capital.”

Presumably, “people actually need to live in the area, and cannot drink salt water” was a factor.

iancmceachern4• 3 years ago

It's because the Panama canal was constructed by connecting several previously naturally existing (fresh) waterways and a big lake, to the ocean on both side. The whole point of the locks is to raise and lower the ships to the higher elevation at which the lake sits. Water runs downhill, it starts as rain, then to rivers and lakes, then the ocean. So in this case rain and natural watershed basins drain into the lake and then the locks release it slowly down to progressively fill each lock, until the water is at the ocean, at which point it can't efficiently be separated from the seawater, so it just becomes part of the ocean.

The people there drink the fresh water and chose to settle in that area originally because ot was there. We then built a canal after. It wasn't like we built the Panama canal as a water source for the local folks.

ahnick• 3 years ago

It seems like you could build a separate salt water basin that would hold the pumped sea water, so as to avoid having to pump it into Gatun lake. Then the salt water could be pumped into the locks to supplement the fresh water, when fresh water levels are running low. The pumps could be powered through solar or hydropower.

michael1999• 3 years ago

From the article: "This was to reduce salination of the freshwater in the canal and the lakes and rivers that make up its watershed, which also provides fresh water to three cities, including the capital."

Panama City is pretty thirsty.

jrvarela56• 3 years ago

This is how they made the lake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatun_Dam

I'm assuming flooding the other way around was more expensive than creating a fresh water reservoir by building a dam.

kgermino• 3 years ago

Salinity issues aside, in my understanding locks generally don’t pump water at all: they work entirely on gravity. In effect this means that a burst of water flows downstream every time the lock is cycled.

pseingatl2• 3 years ago

Correct.

iancmceachern4• 3 years ago

Exactly, they basically harness the natural water cycle (rain to watersheds to waterways to ocean).

The one exception is with these new locks, I bet they pump a bunch of the water back now instead of releasing it, that's how I expect they get the 60%.

pseingatl2• 3 years ago

One of the reasons was to control the Chagres River. The creation of Gatun Lake created a freshwater reservoir higher than sea level. Vessels enter the Canal, climb up to the level of the Lake and are dropped back down to sea level. I have to wonder if the third set of locks (what I think they're calling Neo-Panamax locks) uses more water than the original 110 x 1000 locks. There must be a way to recycle water for use in Panama City and Colon. It's not practicable to re-use the water for canal operations because the water would have to be raised back up to the level of Gatun Lake and it would take an enormous amount of energy to do so. As I recall, spillage from canal operations was never used to generate electricity, but that might no longer be the case.

cykotic6• 3 years ago

Zonian here. There was zero chance of ever creating a lock free canal. The amount of digging required for that was not possible in the early 1900s. I think pumping water in those days was far too impractical. Ships need to get raised 85 ft and then lowered 85 ft for the passage. Using gravity to fill the lock chambers was an ingenious solution and minimized the amount of digging. Thousands of people died building the canal and digging from Gamboa to Gatun just wasn’t going to work.

In the rainy season there aren’t any water issues. It’s the dry season that is the problem.

slashdev7• 3 years ago

It’s three months into the rainy season and they expect to keep restrictions until September next year.

The problem is some years the rain isn’t enough to cover the demand.

bombcar• 3 years ago

Just dig a tunnel woooooooo

Sorry, things got a bit musky there for a moment.

dmurray• 3 years ago

85 feet is actually way less than I expected, I thought they were going over a small mountain.

Are there any serious plans to dig it a bit deeper? Even taking 1 metre off the highest part seems like it would be significant.

Arn_Thor• 3 years ago

That was a surprise for me too.

How strange to look it up on Google Maps and see container ships on a lake

stickfigure• 3 years ago

For anyone interested in how the new (bigger) locks use less water than the old locks (reclaiming 60% of the water - without pumps!), this old Practical Engineering video explains with diagrams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBvclVcesEE

They store the water in a series of basins at different levels, and use those basins to fill the portion of the lock below. It's more obvious with diagrams.

interroboink• 3 years ago

timestamp, for the impatient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBvclVcesEE&t=353s

dyeje• 3 years ago

Carriers are always looking for new fees to tack on, the more obscure and inscrutable the better.

_ph_2• 3 years ago

People often seem to think that climate change eventually will lead to a catastrophic event, but before that they can live as always and are not concerned. And with some luck, that event would be in some indetermined future. But that is not how climate change is going to impact us. It is more like death by a thousand cuts. It already is started. We are experiencing a multitude of climate caused changes, most of them detrimental. Especially for those, who argue against moving to more green technologies, because that could endanger "their prosperity". It is exactly the other way around. We are globally losing prosperity because of the changes that are already happening. Like with this example. Humanity would certainly survive, if the Panama canal had to close for good. But it would be a large economic impact. And that is only one item on a very long list.

ivan_gammel• 3 years ago

As long as there’s a thousand of highly motivated surgeons, thousand cuts will not cause death. The balance between doing something and business as usual is already gradually shifting: demand for climate adaptation solutions is growing and investment is going in that direction, meaning more surgeons. We will not stop climate change and will see +2-+3° eventually. Mass extinction is going to happen, sea level will rise, huge areas of land will become uninhabitable, but we will adapt and survive. Scars will be ugly though.

adrianN3• 3 years ago

„We“ will most likely not include all eight billion of us in that scenario.

WinstonSmith842• 3 years ago

Just to be clear - climate change has an impact, but what's not said in this article nor here is that El Niño is the real culprit for this unusual drought in that region (and flooding in others). El Niño is totally natural, albeit it's likely to be stronger than usual due to climate change.

They expect these restrictions to remain in place until next September as it's also until then that El Niño shall be active.

lm28469• 3 years ago

If anything it's just a preview of what's to come, El Niño always existed it's just that now, the problem is that the current baseline make it even worse than in the past

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3c/20...

londons_explore4• 3 years ago

I think it is fairly clear to most people that moving to carbon-free technologies is usually bad for their future profit/utility/quality of life. Thats because the individual person/city/state/country won't have much impact on climate change alone, so they'll have the downside/cost of moving to green tech, without the climate benefits.

For it to have benefits, everyone has to do it. And getting everyone to do something costly worldwide for the benefit of others is hard. Basically the only way it's going to happen is if the west decides it's a good idea, and puts sanctions (backed with military threats) on any country that doesn't comply. So far, there is no appetite for such an approach, and therefore climate change won't be solved.

silverpepsi• 3 years ago

So basically the West giving up any and all claims it has or ever had had (given morally questionable behaviors in the history books) to moral legitimacy for the sake of climate programs?

I already strongly question the legitimacy of the US and anything it claims to be based on how they claim a permanent parasitical right to my life (e.g. worldwide taxation of nonresident US persons)

Your comment seems to imply such a world order could be stable enough to accomplish your goals, I counter that with: it wouldn't be more than a few months before we(poster exclusive) would turn to any level of force necessary to put them down.

None of the social engineering projects of the 20th century turned out, a wholesale violation of our most basic rights to try variations on the theme now really isn't negotiable. I almost hope it is tried while the memory of Covid is fresh enough that the number of people we need to be awake still are.

Gabriel_Martin• 3 years ago

That seemingly isn't as clear to the many companies and households who move to carbon-free technologies with the goal of decreasing energy costs, thus increasing profit/utility/quality of life by simply investing in energy efficiency.

londons_explore4• 3 years ago

bad for their future profit/utility/quality of life.

Even EV's suffer this - it's a bore to have to plan your whole life around your EV's battery - detouring to charge up, remembering to precondition and charge up to 100% before you leave, telling the kids not to open the windows because it drains the battery like crazy, if you're travelling with another car, you can't stop in the same place because different cars need different chargers and charge at different rates, etc.

Heat pumps seem to suffer the same - arrive home from work at an unusual time, and a gas boiler will bring the whole house up to temp in 45 mins. Whereas a heat pump will take 6 hours to do the same. Worse quality of life.

joncrocks• 3 years ago

Drought - A drought is a period of drier-than-normal conditions. Draught - A current of cool air in a room or other confined space

Symbiote• 3 years ago

Draught means the depth of water needed to float a vessel (from the waterline to the bottom of the hull).

Americans spell the word "draft".

tialaramex2• 3 years ago

Draught is correctly used in this article to mean the depth of water required to make a ship float. In American English this word would be spelled as it sounds, "draft" but not everybody is an American.

That's why the article uses both Draught and Drought, because these are Draught regulations (heaviest ships can't use the system) caused by a Drought (unusual dry period). Since you chose an unrelated meaning of Draught I can't tell if you actually knew this and are joking.

top_sigrid• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/2023.08.09-112942/https://gcaptain.com/pa...

Panama Canal draught restrictions spark liner surcharges

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