[HN Gopher] Giant container ships are ruining everything
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Giant container ships are ruining everything
Author : throw0101a
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-05-20 12:59 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.freightwaves.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.freightwaves.com)
| kogus wrote:
| I have a lot of problems with this article.
|
| Point 1: The industry is consolidating and might be price fixing.
|
| The author makes a leap from "ships got bigger" to "the industry
| consolidated" without establishing a real link. Are large ships
| the reason for consolidation? I think a more likely reason is one
| that the author herself mentions; the economic downturn of 2008
| diminished demand and the survivors consolidated. Maybe that gave
| them extra power, and maybe that power needs to be reined in -
| but I'm not convinced that ship size was the reason there.
|
| Point 2: Port congestion How many times in the last 100 years has
| port infrastructure needed an upgrade to accomodate larger and
| better ships? Surely we can expect a permanent cycle of
| Advancement is made>>Port cant handle it>>Port
| upgrades>>Advancement is made. Is that really a problem?
|
| Point 3: Too much capacity By continually
| flooding the market with capacity, ocean carriers drove down
| their own shipping rates.
|
| How is this not a direct contradiction of point 1? Are dominant
| cartels abusing their power to gouge consumers? Or are desperate
| cartels selling space cheap just to avoid half-empty ships?
|
| The article also does not mention the advantages of larger ships,
| which are substantial. Fewer, larger ships represent less total
| ocean noise pollution, less total fuel consumed, and
| straightforward efficiencies of scale.
| [deleted]
| mojomark wrote:
| Point 1: Concur with your assessment that the article didn't
| make the connection clear, but there is a connection. A large
| part of the issue is that as ships grew larger, the CAPEx
| required to compete drove many smaller shippers to sell their
| businesses to one of the tier-1 shippers. Survival of the
| fittest. Sure, there is still business for small shippers for
| short sea or inland shipping, but the barrier to entry for
| large trade is currently prohibitive.
|
| Point 2: Port upgrades to handle magaships is a major problem.
| Shippers keep building extreme size vessels, requiring local
| governments to dredge and increase roadway infrastructure to
| handle the added throughput, and ports to extend docks and buy
| new/bigger cranes.
|
| Point 3: Rates per container-mile plummet as capacity grows.
| Prices are driven down due to what remains of competition.
| That's a good thing for trade/consumers. If these few, large
| shippers start price-fixing, that will be extremely
| problematic. The bigger issue with overcapacity (from my
| perspective anyway) is waste. Larger ships often operate
| partially full. That means lighter drafts and hence lower fuel
| consumption, but it still means your moving thousands of tons
| of steel around the world for no reason. What's needed is a way
| to scale ships to match the cargo capacity as global trade
| demand fluctuates.
|
| Megaships do not scale. Aircraft do not scale. Trains and
| barges, however, do scale.
| Someone wrote:
| > Shippers keep building extreme size vessels, requiring
| local governments to dredge and increase roadway
| infrastructure to handle the added throughput
|
| I would think consumer demand requires larger throughput, and
| that requires larger infra.
|
| If ships doubled in size but demand didn't go up ports would
| handle half the number of ships each time period, and roads
| would get non the busier.
| mojomark wrote:
| Companies have enjoyed eating low-hanging fruit of building ever-
| larger cargo ships to reap the reqards of Economies of Scale,
| whild wholly ignoring the realitues of Diseconomies of Scale,
| which is what we're seeing now.
|
| Not one to point out a problem without a proposed solution...
| there is a solution in extensible transport with distributed
| propulsion. The technology is ready. It has the potential to
| solve all of the author's stated issues, and if done correctly,
| will alleviate the 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions in the
| shipping industry.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| My local farm supplier had a similar lament. He competes with a
| COOP. Used to order fertilizer by the truckload, but the COOP
| ordered it by the train-car. So he had to as well, to get the
| better volume price.
|
| Then the COOP got bigger, ordered a trainload. So he had to. Then
| they went up to a barge. Then a barge train.
|
| It's the future. We cannot say "Let's all pay less for
| everything!" and "Lets keep using inefficient transport!" without
| being hypocritical.
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