The secret world of cargo ships

http://theweek.com/article/index/252438/the-secret-world-of-cargo-ships

by danso • 13 years ago

138 102 13 years ago

"Before containers, transport costs ate up to 25 percent of the value of whatever was being shipped."

And lost you a portion of the cargo if you were shipping something the dockyard workers had a fancy for (Barrels of whiskey "accidentally broken" during loading was a common one.)

There is a fantastic BBC documentary called "The Box that changed Britain" which charts the rise of containerization and the massive affect it had on maritime trade, the ports and workers.

eru• 13 years ago

There are also two good books I know of about the topic of containers: "The Box" and "Ninety Percent of Everything".

derekp7• 13 years ago

This article is an excerpt of "Ninety Percent of Everything".

ojbyrne• 13 years ago

I'd hazard a guess that that was a large proportion of the 25%.

megablast• 13 years ago

I doubt it. It would take days, even weeks to unload a ship, using lots of people, as opposed to hours and a few people.

the_watcher2• 13 years ago

The second season of The Wire is also an interesting look at dock workers in the modern world.

danso• 13 years ago

There's a great book about the shipping container:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller/dp/...

It is hard to imagine a company like Amazon being successful without the humble shipping container...before its time, a ship could spend as much time loading and unloading as it would to cross the entire Atlantic.

I also think the value of the shipping container is a great analogy for any kind of logistics...such as he importance of structured data when building any kind of web app...non devs have. A hard time grasping how something as simple as a spreadsheet is so vital to collecting and organizing info for an interactive app.

nkurz• 13 years ago

It's only mentioned at the end, but this article is an excerpt from a book as well: http://www.amazon.com/Ninety-Percent-Everything-Shipping-Inv...

Doctor_Fegg• 13 years ago

Great book, too - I've almost finished it. (It's titled "Deep Sea and Foreign Going" here in the UK.)

Zigurd3• 13 years ago

Sorry about the lengthy quote, but this is an incredible collection of non-sequitors and random free-association alarmism:

IN 2004, Al QAIDA reportedly recruited a maritime expert. U.S. security sources revealed in 2010 that the organization had been working out how best to blow up oil tankers. Though why bother with intercontinental missiles or explosives, the urban planning academic Stephen Cohen writes, when you can just ship everything you need in parts and assemble it at the required destination? "Containers...are the poor man's missiles: you no longer have to be a big powerful government to create catastrophe." In 2003, ABC News shipped depleted uranium from Jakarta to Los Angeles in an attempt to expose the weaknesses in port barriers. The stunt didn't go down well at the Department of Homeland Security, whose declared mission is to "stop dangerous things and dangerous people from entering the country," even if those dangerous things are sent by people from a national news channel. In fact, shipping uranium is legal, as long as you declare it. ABC didn't, and no one checked.

Connecting the sea to terrorism has become popular in security studies. Al Qaida certainly understands ships: not only because it rammed the USS Cole with a boat, but because it is thought to own or charter a small fleet. North Korea has its own flag, a fleet of 242 vessels, and the ability to make maritime mischief. Lloyd's List reported in 2012 that 120 vessels had reported GPS malfunctions in seas near North Korea, in an article that suspected the work of a North Korean signals jammer.

A senior government official was asked in 2002 about the threat of maritime terrorism. "This industry is a shadowy underworld," he said. "After 9/11 we suddenly realized how little we understood about commercial shipping." In 2010, Nigerian security forces discovered 240 tons of rockets, mortar shells, and small arms ammunition in 13 containers that had been shipped on the German-owned, French-operated, Marshall Islands–flagged Everest from Bandar Abbas in Iran, despite U.N. sanctions that prohibit Iran from selling arms. The contraband was hidden behind marble slabs and fiberglass. The manifest showed that the recipient was "to order." In short, according to a report, "the ship's owners, operators, and officers had no knowledge or reason for suspicion regarding the container."

So... the potential for using containerized freight for terrorism is... what?

001sky• 13 years ago

So... the potential for using containerized freight for terrorism is... what?

Delivery vector, WMD in particular. Boat drives under Golden Gate and goes Boom. Captain never knows.

michaelt• 13 years ago

In addition to the direct harm of a bomb, the political reaction - tightening dock security to be like post-9-11 airports - could have massive economic impact.

dsl2• 13 years ago

Remember before 9/11 when airport security was sane? The biggest thing they kept drilling in was "don't leave your bags unattended," followed by "don't carry items for persons unknown to you."

Abstraction from consequences allowed for a large number of things to make it aboard planes. With minimal risk of getting caught, you could try once a week to put a bomb on a plane until you managed to succeed.

Shipping containers are effectively the same threat. Due to the globalization and efficiency of trade, I can ship a box full of anything I want anywhere in the world, and the only way anyone will know the contents is if I declare it.

Container cargo is how a ton of bad stuff gets into the country. Not just terrorist stuff, but drugs (and we aren't talking mexican skunk weed here), military grade arms, sex slaves, counterfeit nikes, etc. It is pretty much the wild west.

Something should be done to verify and inspect cargo. A container full of 20 Filipino girls bound for massage parlors should be found and stopped. There is no realistic way of catching more than 1% of illicit shipments without serious investment or impacting the volume of trade that can take place. The best efforts than can be made, unfortunately, are by swinging the terrorism hammer to get dollars.

snitko2• 13 years ago

How about you make things that are illegal - legal. Then you don't need to inspect anything. And for those things that are truly horrible - like sex slavery - stop fighting the symptom. Shipping companies are not the root cause of sex slavery. There is a demand for such things. Eliminate the demand and there will be no sex slaves.

Zigurd3• 13 years ago

The best efforts than can be made, unfortunately, are by swinging the terrorism hammer to get dollars.

You seem to be making a virtue of terrorism pimping. One of the biggest problems we have is the oversized security state. You are advocating for more, achieved by the same means that got us to where we are.

thret• 13 years ago

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/

Related article previously submitted on HN, about what happens when one of these containers has radioactive cargo.

kayoone7• 13 years ago

Another little known fact:

Cargo ships also burn a lot of very nasty bunker fuel. The ships going through the panama canal have carbon emissions per year that rival those of all motored vehicles in the US combined (800 metric tons vs 1100 metric tons). Each ship burns 200 to 400 tonnes of fuel per day (worth $40K-$80K)

dsl2• 13 years ago

"Bunker" isn't a type of fuel, thats just what it is called when store aboard a ship (the "bunker" is where coal used to be stored). Large ships burn about a dozen different types of fuel oils.

Cargo ships are also the most carbon efficient means of transporting goods. Better than trucks, trains, and planes.

kayoone7• 13 years ago

I didnt make a judgement, just pointing out a fact. That they are the most carbon efficient doesnt mean it couldnt be improved/replaced in the future however.

I just find it funny how politicians in my country try to save carbon emissions by enforcing a speed limit on highways or only let newer cars into the city areas...it just doesnt make no difference at all on a global scale.

_mulder_2• 13 years ago

Cargo ships are also the most carbon efficient means of transporting goods.

Only due to their scale, there seem to be very little 'carbon reducing' technologies employed in the shipping trade.

I don't know why some sort of modern Sail power hasn't been looked at. If you're sailing with the wind why would you not save "$40 - $80k" a day?

Of wind turbines for that matter, as far as I know, most ships still derive electricity from diesel generators. Why not wind or solar?

protomyth2• 13 years ago

Cargo ships are also the most carbon efficient means of transporting goods. Better than trucks, trains, and planes.

A lot of cargo companies have been running the ships at half speed to conserve fuel. With margins so slim and some cargos not on a tight schedule, it works fairly well. This also reduces emissions.

kayoone7• 13 years ago

it IS definately very nasty stuff they burn: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...

jotm2• 13 years ago

Well what can you do, use jet grade fuel on them? Hell, even using "normal" diesel fuel would increase the prices for everyone else, plus the ships' engines don't handle it well anyway...

Noughmad• 13 years ago

Nuclear reactors. It's good enough for the military, and some icebreakers.

mapt2• 13 years ago

"Little known" or "Made up on the spot"?

The US motor vehicle fleet consumed 174,930 million gallons of fuel in 2006 according to http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004727.html

There are 308 gallons of fuel to the ton, in crude oil (somewhat different from gasoline, but not sufficiently different to care about)

That's 567 million tons of fuel consumed by the US motor vehicle fleet per year.

There are 370 million tons of bunker fuel consumed by the entire global shipping industry per year according to http://www.futuresmag.com/2012/10/15/cleartrade-exchange-to-...

Only a tiny fraction of that industry is presently passing through the Panama Canal.

Headlines: "Global Merchant Shipping Tonnage to Reach 12.4 Billion Metric Tons by 2015, According to New Report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. "

"...canal traffic in 2009 reached 299.1 million tons of shipping."

The canal is much, much shorter than an average oceanic merchant shipping route, so an even lower fraction of ton-miles is spent on shipping through the canal. Transit times are on the order of 1 day (compare with a typical trip on a vessel slow steaming at 18 knots), so even if you assume they're running their engines full-blast inside the canal (they're not), this is still a tiny fraction of the above sum.

Carbon emissions, in case you weren't paying attention in chemistry class, are normally about 85% of the mass of complex hydrocarbons (nC=12n, n2H=2n, +2H=2), so these quantities are almost directly comparable. Bunker fuel is indeed nasty stuff, but their carbon emissions are not particularly unique (nor are any hydrocarbon fuel's) - they do have more subtle sulfur and particulate air pollution.

kayoone7• 13 years ago

Well i should have included some of my notes when posting this, as people were even arguing about the fact that the fuel is nasty, which it clearly is. Anyway:

US carbon emissions from 2008 for Motor Gasoline: 1.135 BMT[1]

Total worldwide shipping emissions: 1.12 BMT [2]

And yes, its some nasty stuff they burn [3]

[1] http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/carbon.html#transportatio... [2]http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/feb/13/climatech... [3]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...

newsmaster3• 13 years ago

Might be a good idea to stop doing things which cause people to send you bombs.

philipb• 13 years ago

What goes around, comes around.

bane6• 13 years ago

Doing what violent people want you to do so they stop hurting you is usually not the optimal solution.

lostlogin2• 13 years ago

Where do drones fit into this theory? Using the crudest possible measure - deaths - it's hard not to see the US as the "violent people" you describe. It has become a cycle, how do you suggest breaking it?

newsmaster3• 13 years ago

Funny, that's exactly what the brown people said.

JetSpiegel• 13 years ago

If the Internet should be neutral, why should this peer-to-peer container-switched network be different?

freehunter• 13 years ago

Well for one, you can't really email someone a nuclear bomb or chemical weapon. The most you could do over the Internet is detonate an already-existing bomb (either a real bomb or blow something up Stuxnet-style).

Zigurd3• 13 years ago

Containerized freight has never been used in an act of terrorism. For that to be a concern, it would first have to be plausible for terrorists to get a nuclear bomb and have the capability to set it off. Then, using a shipping container would have to come to the top of the list of how to deliver it. Neither is now plausible.

bbatchelder• 13 years ago

I worked for a start-up for quite a while working on this problem. We had a system for CTPAT enrollment of a supply chain, but that proved to go nowhere pretty quickly.

We ended up being part of the Advance Trade Data Initiative (ATDI) where we received a feed of data corresponding to Bills of Lading, Advance Shipment Notices, Stow Plans, Container Updates, etc. We were able to take that feed of data and marry it to other open source intelligence (watch lists for crew, commodities used to cover contraband, historical location data for vessels, historical data on containers, etc) and a rules engine.

The result was a risk score for each shipment, and an aggregate score for each conveyance.

Customs officials then used this data to target their scanning/inspection, instead of trying to do 100% of all cargo.

Not only can this approach be used for security concerns, but also for combating smuggling of legal items by importers trying to circumvent tariffs and taxes.

Hey, here is a screenshot from their website: http://www.greenlinesystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/m...

Here is a marketing blurb on the product: http://www.greenlinesystems.com/cargo-risk-targeting/

the_watcher2• 13 years ago

The section on arms shipments to Nigeria reminded me strongly of the film "Lord of War," where Nic Cage's character notes that his favorite cover for his arms is the combination of tropical heat and old potatoes.

caycep• 13 years ago

Does this remind anyone of the Guild navigator ships in Dune?

The secret world of cargo ships

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