[photopress:bigcontainership_1.jpg,full,alignright]Container ships are getting to a size which is going to create problems for docks. China has the capacity in some of its docks to handle them and those docks which cannot will lost business.
How big are they? Take the container ship Hugo as an example. It is bigger than the Titanic and nearly as long as the Queen Mary 2. Manoeuvering it into docks requires a great precision and delicacy of touch.
The Hugo is just one in a new generation of container ships so big they are often longer than three football fields and wider than the Panama Canal. A typical price for one is $100 million. They have a massive carrying capacity. In the case of the Hugo the maximum load is 8,200 20-foot-long cargo containers which could fill a train stretching more than 23 miles.
Container-ship lines have put about 90 of these huge ships on the seas and about 150 additional ships with room for at least 8,000 20-foot-long cargo containers are being built or on order through 2010.
Neil Davidson, research director at Drewry Shipping Consultants in London said the shipbuilding spree ‘is the biggest boom ever seen in container shipping.’ And the ports have to be able to handle them and unload several holds at a time. Not all ports in China are capable of doing this.
All of the megaships work routes between Asia and the West Coast or Asia and Europe. By spreading crew and fuel costs over more than twice as many containers as ships built 10 years ago, the new giants can shrink the cost of moving containers over the ocean by as much as 30 percent. As a result reight rates have fallen about 10 percent over the past year although not all customers agree.
They are also having wider effect. On October 22, Panamanian voters are expected to approve a $5.5 billion plan to lengthen, widen and deepen the canal enough so it can accommodate most big container ships.
Ports have to enlarge to stay in the game while shipping lines are trying to outdo each other with ever-bigger vessels. In August, Maersk launched its 1,300-foot-long Emma Maersk, calling it the largest container ship ever built. A month later, CMA CGM, based in Marseille, France, and the Hugo’s owner, announced a $1.2 billion order for eight new ships that can each carry 11,400 20-foot-long containers — about 4 percent more than the Emma Maersk’s official capacity.
John Ochs, managing director of Maersk’s APM Terminals container-terminal operation, recalls driving across a bridge on his way to work one recent morning as a giant ship was docking below. ‘I saw this monster sliding under me. I said: “I hope they have Vaseline.”‘
Source: Wall Street Journal