Maersk Lines has ordered a new batch of Container Ships that will hold 18,000 TEU
Does anybody have an idea of which ports worldwide will be able to handle these ships?
Prince Rupert, BC perhaps…
[quote user=“CSSHEGEWISCH”]
Does anybody have an idea of which ports worldwide will be able to handle these ships?
[/quote Reading the information at the link above, Maersk says the ships are intended for their “Asia - Europe” market, so they are not intended for use at us / Canadian ports.
Not many. From an article in The Guardian at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/21/maersk-containers-shipping-emissions
which was linked on the above Maersk webpage [emphasis added - PDN]:
"But the ships, which are nearly twice as large as the majority of the world’s 9,000 container ships, were designed solely for the China-Europe route. Only Felixstowe in Britain, and Rotterdam and Bremerhaven in mainland Europe will have the facilities to handle them, along with Port Said in Egypt and just four ports in the east, including Shanghai and Hong Kong.
“They will definitely stimulate further trade between China and Europe, but they are too big for any ports in north or south America. Eventually we would like to be able to take them to the US but for the moment they would take four or five days to be unloaded there,” said Kolding."
[:-,] These suggest to me what Paul Bunyan’s containership might have been like. “Paul’s ship was so big, it could carry an entire year’s production from a good-sized Chinese province or a medium-size Third World country. Now that was a good thing, because 3 months were needed to load at the origin port and another 3 months to unload at the destination port, and that was just for the loads - the empty containers coming back would take just as long to load and unload, so his little boat got only 1 round trip a year. But that worked out OK, too, because Paul’s ship was so long that the bow was arriving at the destination before the stern left the port of embarkation !” [swg] (Copyright 2011 by Paul D. North, Jr.)
Seriously, from the Guardian article excerpt above, you can
Won’t work that way Paul. The Triple-Es are all about reducing operating costs. Fuel and crew are the big components there. The faster sailing times were not a market-driven decision, they were a capital cost recovery decision. To get an adequate ROI with the smaller ships, the ship had to sail faster and thus initiate more revenue starts per year. The bigger the ship, the lower the capital cost each box has to carry, because capital costs of the ship are non-linear with size. The more specific information that was in the shipping press yesterday indicates that in a market downturn, it would be the smaller ships first laid up.
The bigger question with these ships is whether the shippers can consistently marshall sufficient boxes to fill them on a timely basis on each arrival at the origin port. It won’t do to sail with empty slots, and it won’t do to sit on the goods at the manufacturer or pile up the boxes at the outbound port to build enough volume, and it won’t do to park them at the pier for long periods awaiting the arrival of boxes from the shippers.
RWM
OK, thanks for that clarification - I kind of thought so - what the Triple-E’s do is introduce a new “price/ schedule point” option into the mix from the current norms - “a little cheaper if you can live with a little slower”, and of course there will be market segments where that will fill a need. And I know you don’t care for my frequent references to John Kneiling, but the faster times and “ROI” sentences in your 1st paragraph above reads just like him - merely substitute “train” for “ship”, and there you are. Then again, you’ve never said anything like all the principles he advocated were invalid … . .
Your second paragraph is the basis of my “Paul Bunyan’s containership” tall tale above . . . [swg]
- Paul North.
Paul, I doubt the prices or schedules will change by one dollar or one minute as a result of these ships. What will change is how much money APMM takes to the bottom line. If they have assessed the market and the math correctly, these are category killers. If they get it wrong, they’re giant white elephants.
Take a look at the schedules of container shipping: the vast majority of the capacity in each lane sails on exactly the same transit time.
RWM
The Great Eastern was a white elephant ahead of its time. Still, ships kept growing.
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-civil/civsh-g/gt-eastn.htm
Right of way clearances and gauge are not a major concern at sea. Ports and canals are another matter. If this ship is profitable, more will be built. Ports will be rebuilt.
If these behemoths start to berth in North America, what effect on carriers overland to final destinations?
The bigger the ship, the more it wants to go one big port that is backed up at its gate by a big load center. Multiple destinations ruin the economics for a big ship. Also, the transit time favors the closest port, partially because of the value of goods but mostly because of the cost of the transportation service. Longer hauls are costlier hauls. That equation is why Los Angeles and Long Beach command around 36% of the volume but have only 8% of the demand. These ships won’t fit through the new Panama Canal locks.
As far as effects on railroads, the big ship isn’t an issue so long as it’s calling at a big port, because the container streams flowing out the port’s gate are blurred and at big ports there are multiple ships arriving daily. From a railroad’s point of view consolidation of freight from smaller ships to larger ships does not create meaningful volume spikes. It’s more a total volume issue for the railroad, and that in turn is more of a GDP and trade growth issue.
RWM
This is starting to sound like the container ship version of a unit train.
Sure, because the ‘giant hand’ of the marketplace has driven all of the participants to about the same level of efficiency, time, and price. One physical characteristic of transportation is that that each mode has an optimum speed, and doesn’t operate much off that norm - planes not slower than 500 MPH or so, ships not much faster than 25 MPH or so, and trains not much faster than 20 - 40 MPH, etc. You may remember that about 10 years ago there was a proposal by an outfit in Philadelphia for a high-speed containership - “FedEx of the seas”, I think they called it - to try to fill part of the huge gap in time and price between air transport and conventional ships - but that didn’t go anyplace. Maersk has apparently now found a way to offer a differentiated service in the other direction - a little slower and cheaper.
I see what you’re saying - why should Maersk share any of the 26% of savings ? - and that would certainly be true if they had the same transit and door-to-door times as the other conventional ships. But they won’t - keeping that attribute is doubtful, in view of their longer loading and unloading times, and about 20% slower speed on the high seas.
So: Are you seriously saying that a shipper is going to accept a 20% to 50% (my estimate) longer transit t
No one is fast-steaming any more. It’s all slow-steaming. Could a competitor fast-steam in competition? Sure, but the higher fuel costs aren’t going to be recovered in higher rates. The faster ships were built for an economic model based on an assumption of fuel costs and a capital cost recovery scheme that is no longer operative. What Maersk is saying with these ships is “why build-in higher speed when we no longer need it?” Higher speeds were required not so much because the shippers demanded it, as because the shipping lines needed it in order to get enough turns out of the ships to meet what they expected would be the Return on Investment (for a rate structure that kind of blew up, and for a fuel cost that escalated dramatically).
Paul, I think what’s not clear to you is that service and pricing in container ships has very little transit time and price differentiation. It does have port call differentiation though (which does matter). A good analogy is the price-matching of competing gas stations on the same block. And of course their product (gas) and service (a pump) is not differentiated.
RWM
If the other shipping lines don’t follow Maersk’s lead, they won’t survive. The recession was a blood-bath for the shipping companies. Unless Maersk got it wrong, and I kind of doubt that. Fuel prices are rising again with the unrest in North Africa, environmental considerations are becoming more important. The new ships will have the same number of crewman as the Emma Maersk class, but carry 16% more containers.
This video shows the new ZPMC container cranes simultaneously unloading 4 - 20ft. containers or 2 - 40ft. containers. Combine that with 7 or 8 cranes working each ship and you can move a lot of containers on and off quite fast. Of course you need a powerful computer to plan the loading and unloading. You don’t just wing it.
ZPMC Twin 40ft spreader crane The narration is in Chinese, but you can see the new spreader working at the 1:00 mark
I would assume by now all the container crane makers offer something similar.
BTW if you look at a map, the vast majority of containers for Italy land at Antwerp, Rotterdam, Bremerhaven, or Hamburg. and then are hauled back across the Alps to Italy. Those four northern ports can handle the super ships, whereas Italian ports cannot. The smaller ships that can serve Italy directly cannot compete , even with the much longer distances, with the economies of scale offered by the larger ships and larger ports. The c
Some quick & dirty math
Port time is anticipated to be 3 days which equals 4320 minutes
Vessel contains 18000 TEU … if you offload and reload you are handling 36000 TEU.
To handle 36000 TEU in 3 24 hour days that is 8 1/3 TEU per minute - every minute of the period.
Now I understand the TEU stands for Twenty foot Equivalent Units which is the standard measure for container ships and a significant number of the containers actually handled are 40 foot and larger so the actual number of lifts would be somewhat less than 8 1/3 per minute…still there will be a whole lot of lifting taking place. Also accumulating or distributing 18000 TEU at a single port would appear to be creating a traffic and storage nightmare…
Since they already (apparently) manage this with 14,700 TEU ships, I’m not sure of the dockside management and logistics risk of this increase to 18,000 TEUs in a single ship.
Would that even FIT in the docks?!
In the US probably not, in Rotterdam or Bremerhaven yes. In both ports the newest container docks are separated from the North Sea by only a breakwater. The new Maersk Dock at Rotterdam would have been 3 miles from shore fifty years ago, now it is dry land, the Dutch have filled in that much of the North Sea.
Now there’s an organization with high hopes for the growth of globalization…
My guess is that when reading here it is definitely not a case of’IF’ only when. That video of those cranes handling 4 20’TEU 's is almost ballet-like. Precision like that calls for consistant replication over and over!
The Maersk link speaks to the fact that they are going to put 10 of these Triple- E Class ships into service.
Using the commonly spoke about 280 trailer sized containers per train (40’,45’,48’,53’ common US trailer sized containers) utiliing Double Stackers that is a large number of trains in to an out of a port to lunoad and reload a Triple-E Class vessel, and then add in the number of smaller sized vessels similarly functioning around the port. Figure the Northern European posts mentioned for movement and out and their option does not currently include double stacking on train.
I would be concerned that traffic to and from the ports will definitely have to be addressed at some point. Either with some sort of interval to embargo certain kinds of traffic, to simply let the road transport traffic segment function, and the population to move about.
I would expect that there are going to be plenty of problems to be discussed and worked out to gain the maximum value from the larger ships and the attending rail corridors. [2c]