[HN Gopher] Panama Canal is so congested that one ship owner pai...
___________________________________________________________________
Panama Canal is so congested that one ship owner paid $4M to skip
the line
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 111 points
Date : 2023-11-13 19:43 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fortune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com)
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Wonder if this will once again ignite talks about the Nicaragua
| canal. My understanding is that it has lots of potential negative
| environmental impacts but both the current value of the Panama
| Canal and its likelihood of getting even more congested almost
| seems to make another canal somewhere in the region inevitable.
| mc32 wrote:
| Why couldn't Panama trench another "parallel" canal? That way
| they have two canals for dedicated directionality.
| cobbal wrote:
| If the limiting factor is rainwater into the central lake,
| draining the lake in two different paths won't help anything.
| mc32 wrote:
| Is there an issue with using oceanic water other than not
| anticipating the need? They may have retrofit some of the
| pump systems but doable?
| hexator wrote:
| I imagine that wouldn't be great for the ecosystem of the
| interior, which is a freshwater habitat...
| mc32 wrote:
| But it's an artificial lake that didn't exist before?
| kimixa wrote:
| An artificial lake created over a hundred years ago now,
| with it's own ecosystem that has developed around it.
|
| And rivers still flow from that downstream, likely
| entering the water table of a much larger area than the
| lake itself. Despite it being "artificial", the water
| still passes through it to downstream ecosystems, as it
| did before any dam construction. While they may be lower
| volume due to the drought and limited releases from the
| lake, replacing that with "Salt water or nothing" would
| still be a _massive_ change.
| fencepost wrote:
| An artificial lake created in part by damming a river
| system.
|
| If you don't think that would have much impact, start
| advocating to alleviate western US water concerns by
| pumping from the Great Lakes and reversing the course of
| the St Lawrence River to flow from the Atlantic into the
| lakes. I'm sure people will be very receptive.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| It's an artificial lake that provides much of Panama's
| fresh drinking water, apart from supporting the locks.
| thehappypm wrote:
| It would take a lot of energy to pump seawater uphill
| like that.
| whyenot wrote:
| The canal also supplies drinking water for Panama's
| second largest city (Colon), as well as several smaller
| municipalities. On top of that, replacing the freshwater
| would kill many of the plants and animals living in and
| around Gatun Lake. It would be a disaster.
| ta1243 wrote:
| How much to pump the water back (either fresh water from
| the bottom lock or replace the whole flight with salt)?
|
| 200,000 tons of water per ship, 26 metres above sea level,
| about 200MWh, so call it 500MWh. With 20,000 ships a year
| that's 50 a day, or 25GWh. A 2GW solar plant
|
| A large solar farm would can reach that capacity (you don't
| need to run the pumps 24/7, so Solar is perfect)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| A quick google shows 1GW ~= $1Bn.
|
| How much more to desalinate the water?
| lostapathy wrote:
| Lots of replies to this comment, but they all miss a critical
| detail: the Panama Canal isn't just a "man made river" at sea
| level, it's a series of locks that raise and lower the ships
| between the oceans, with stops at a few lakes along the way.
|
| Ecology problems aside, you need water at the higher
| elevations to operate the locks, and the lacks have to retain
| enough water to remain navigable. It's not practical to pump
| that much water up hill, so we're at nature's mercy for the
| water supply.
|
| If there isn't enough water in the system to operating the
| existing locks, there's no point adding a parallel set to
| draw from the same limited water supply.
| klyrs wrote:
| I've long pictured a rail canal, wherein loaded boats enter a
| drydock carriage, which whisks them over land to the other
| side. In my head, this works like a ski lift with two parallel
| tracks running side by side. Alas, I am a lowly software
| engineer and the sheer scale of the ships involved is entirely
| out of my experience.
| gizajob wrote:
| Check out the movie "Fitzcarraldo" by Werner Hertzog!
| klyrs wrote:
| You've hit the nail on the head, that's about my
| expectation for how my large-scale civil engineering ideas
| would go in real life. Even _making the movie_ was a
| shitshow.
| pests wrote:
| Modern super container ships can hold 24,000 containers each
| of which is 20ft long.
|
| If you were to line these up end to end it would be 96 miles
| long.
|
| The Panama Canal is only 50 miles long.
|
| You could do it but the entire length of the track would be
| completely full of containers twice over.
|
| I somehow feel it would not be cost effective in the long
| run.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| OP is talking about loading the entire boat onto rails, not
| the containers themselves.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| FWIW, your numbers are off by a factor of two:
|
| Panamax ships carry up to 5,000 TEUs; Neo-Panamax,
| introduced after the canal's expansion, 14,000.
|
| Beyond that, I think OP was referring to a hypothetical
| piece of infrastructure that would dwarf anything we've
| ever built on this planet: drydocking the entire loaded
| ship and moving it across Panama on a massive rail system
| capable of moving entire ships across the land.
| pests wrote:
| Duh, I totally forgot about ships being built for certain
| canal sizes and just went with the maximum I can find.
| kps wrote:
| Ancient Greece had a paved road used to haul ships across the
| Isthmus of Corinth.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos
| carl_dr wrote:
| These things weigh up to 120,000 tonnes - that isn't
| something that's going to move on road or rail.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| So make them as big as the infrastructure supports?
| That's what's happened with cargo ships purpose-built for
| the Panama Canal.
| Detrytus wrote:
| So basically: build a port and a train station at both
| ends, and move containers through railway?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| No, the GP meant to reduce the ships sizes until it's
| viable.
|
| TBH, I have no idea how a rail compares to a canal in
| terms of terrain pressure and building viability. Without
| further information, it's a promising alternative that is
| very obviously limited by the (area) density of those
| ships, but obviously a major investment. Somehow, the
| ship is able to sustain its weight, so it's not an absurd
| idea, but they can just barely sustain it, so it's only a
| just barely not absurd of an idea.
| klyrs wrote:
| I certainly wasn't picturing a standard rail gauge, or
| even a single pair of rails. But now that I'm looking at
| how high they stack containers on ships, I can imagine
| that "add more wheels per axel" might not suffice.
| foobarian wrote:
| I wonder what the costs/issues would be with simply excavating
| a horizontal canal connecting the two oceans directly. It
| doesn't seem an impossible distance.
| wlll wrote:
| Contaminating of the two ecosystems would be a pretty big
| one. The panama canal has the advantage of being fed by
| rainwater from the middle flowing outwards, so keeps the two
| oceans /somewhat/ separate.
| virtue3 wrote:
| I don't think the article mentions this but this is directly
| related to the drought in Panama.
|
| Apparently they had a huge lake reservoir for storing freshwater
| that was then used to fill the locks in the canal. And then
| subsequently release into the ocean.
|
| They haven't gotten the usual rainfall and this is causing
| serious issues.
|
| > https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/03/panama-canal-drought-hits-ne...
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| How does this make any sense?
|
| Why would you need freshwater to go through a canal that
| connects two bodies of water? This seems like very poor
| planning and infrastructure creation. why can't they pump sea
| water through the locks?
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Why pump millions of tons of sea water when the rain does it
| for free? Where will you store the sea water without
| poisoning the lake?
|
| The new locks have added mechanisms to decrease water loss,
| but they do require water.
| mlyle wrote:
| Because that's a whole lot of seawater to pump. Each ship has
| to be lifted 85 feet in several stages, and the ships are
| big.
|
| Not to mention that there are lakes in the interior part of
| the canal.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Speculation: You probably don't _need_ it, but it could be a
| lot easier if the lake has some elevation (so you don 't need
| to spend so much energy pumping), and being freshwater means
| less corrosion to contend with. And whatever the reasons, it
| was probably built like that way back when and retrofitting
| it now is, again, _possible_ but hard /expensive.
| carl_dr wrote:
| The freshwater is because the lakes in the centre of the
| canal are freshwater, and you don't want to kill the
| ecosystem in and around them.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Elevation.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| I was curious so I did a quick bit of googling and apparently
| portions of the canal are actually lakes (Gatun and
| Miraflores Lakes).
|
| Here is a cross-section diagram of the canal showing the
| lakes:
|
| https://www.marineinsight.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/09/pan...
| swashboon wrote:
| It connects 3 - 4 main bodies of water, the lakes in the
| middle are a high spot compared to the oceans on either side.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In the absence of the canal, did these lakes naturally
| drain to the sea, or are they in some sort of natural
| "bowl" that is higher than sea level?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Very few lakes on the planted don't drain to the sea.
| They are usually salty, smelly water bodies that nobody
| wants to be around.
| kzrdude wrote:
| See the cross section
|
| https://kids.britannica.com/students/assembly/view/68621
|
| "Natural bowl higher than sea level" could be called a
| lake.
| fencepost wrote:
| They could likely retrofit to do so but there'd be a lot of
| ecological concerns along with the infrastructure and energy
| cost of pumping billions of gallons of water from sea level.
|
| Ecological concerns wouldn't just be pumping seawater into a
| large freshwater lake but questions of where to intake water,
| cross contact between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans there
| at a new location, etc. Not a trivial set of issues.
| FriedPickles wrote:
| I enjoyed this well made video illustrating how it works:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh79YSCC8mM
|
| And this one explaining how reservoirs can be used to trade-
| off water consumption for land requirements using side ponds:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBvclVcesEE
| reliablereason wrote:
| It would require about 14 MWh to lift a single ship to the
| upper level
|
| Calculating the approximate wattage to lift all that water
| 26m:
|
| 9.8 w/s * 200000000 Liters * 26 m /60/60/1000/1000
|
| 200 000 000 liters was reported on wikipedia as amount of
| water used.
|
| Its a very crude calculation probably of by quite a bit.
|
| It's allot of electricity but the cost of that electricity
| would be essentially nothing when compared to what they
| charge. So I don't know why they don't install massive pumps.
| Maybe they don't want to contaminate the lake with salt
| water, but you would get small amounts of salt water with the
| current system to.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| > So I don't know why they do what they do.
|
| Supply and demand?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| At $200/MWh, that would be around $3k by ship. The energy
| cost is almost irrelevant on the current supply/demand
| equilibrium.
| cellis wrote:
| Can you break this down for the mere mortal physics minds
| here? How did you do this calculation??
| Faaak wrote:
| Simple E=m _g_ h.
|
| m = mass of displaced water h = height of displaced mass
| g = gravity
| kurthr wrote:
| I did it myself, it's about 10MW continuous assuming
| there are 40 ships each taking about 3000 seconds to
| traverse the locks. Each lock is ~30x330x10 cubic meters
| or 1Billion liters (conservatively).
|
| A Watt is 1 meter(lift) x 1 Newton / second. There are 30
| meters of lift. Each liter is 1kg and gravity (9.8m/sec2)
| makes that about ~10 Newtons (9.8N due to gravity).
|
| So you get 10^9kg x 10N/kg x 30m / 3000 sec = 100MW
| continuous. That's about 100, 000 horsepower. Each lock
| would need more than 16MW of pumping.
|
| Solar/hydro power from the rain in lake Gatun is well
| over 100MW. Due to leakage it's probably 5-10x that or
| equivalent to a larger nuclear power plant.
| kurthr wrote:
| Because the locks were built where they were over 100 years
| ago without the need for any pumps since there was an
| existing lake. The number of pumps, installation time, and
| power needed to run the locks (in both directions since the
| middle is at the top) would be huge. I could still happen,
| but take a decade to build out.
|
| The vertical rise is about 26meters and there are 3 10meter
| locks (33mx300m in size) in each direction. 40 ships travel
| through each day (~3ksec per fill bidirectional) and each
| fill is ~1Billion liters or 250Million gallons in less than
| an hour. Lifting 1B liters through 30m would need 100MW to
| power 100% efficient pumps continuously for leakless locks.
| The solar/hydro power of rain is significant.
|
| Also, everything in the lake would die once it was
| contaminated with sea water, and you would be contaminating
| the Pacific with Atlantic water, vice versa, or both.
| perihelions wrote:
| Would it be practical to integrate pumped hydroelectric
| energy storage into a canal lock mechanism? Pump water up
| to lower the water level; harness water flowing back down
| for electricity; and arrange the timing partly towards grid
| supply & demand.
|
| Maybe dig a third reservoir adjacent to the lock mechanism,
| as a buffer between the two levels, to give you more
| flexibility with the timings.
|
| [late edit]: Apparently this is in fact a thing, in some
| cases:
|
| - _" The hydraulic cylinders enable the water used by the
| locks to be pumped back. Up to 48,000 cubic metres of water
| are displaced in a single lockage operation. In periods of
| low discharge on the Meuse, the screws can pump back the
| water lost due to the passage of a ship through the lock to
| the upper canal reach. In normal periods of enough
| discharge at the Meuse, the screws are used to to generate
| green electricity from hydropower."_
|
| https://www.inlandnavigation.eu/power-of-water-and-wind/
| jacquesm wrote:
| > harness water flowing back down for electricity;
|
| Too little head for good efficiency.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| > you would be contaminating the Pacific with Atlantic
| water
|
| Ahh that's what must be making the Drake Passage so angry.
| _3u10 wrote:
| The Cape of Good Hope will not allow this, the mixing of
| the seas should not be allowed.
| hef19898 wrote:
| That kind of cross tamination is a thing, goes also for
| ballast water of vessels. So yes, you'd want to
| minimalize that.
| speed_spread wrote:
| It's much easier to use direct hydraulic power from inland
| upstream fresh water bodies. That's how most locks work, you
| just let gravity do the work. This is super basic technology
| that can still reliably move up million ton cargo ships.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Because those connecting fresh water bodies are higher than
| the sea. So the cheap solution is to fill progressively
| higher boxes with water from the fresh water, until you are
| at fresh water. And then do same thing in reverse.
|
| Perfectly fine when you have enough fresh water, you can even
| somewhat optimize by using same water multiple times. But if
| you run out of fresh water at high point you will have
| trouble.
| iav wrote:
| The locks are filled with recycled water that is stored in
| water saving ponds [1], but this only reuses 60% of the water
| and it doesn't address the other issue that if the water level
| in the natural lakes in Panama interior is too low, then ships
| will have a harder time navigating between the locks.
|
| [1] <https://maritime-executive.com/article/panama-canal-first-
| wa...>
| gwright wrote:
| I believe that is just the newer sets of locks. The older set
| doesn't have that recycling mechanism.
| pietjepuk88 wrote:
| The thing that complicates the use of the water saving
| basins, is that they tend to make the salt intrusion into the
| lake a lot worse [0]. So to limit the salt intrusion (through
| the new locks), they have to _not_ use the water saving
| basins, or flush the locks every now and then using a lot of
| fresh water from Gatun lake.
|
| This was (and is) not as much an issue with the old locks, as
| passage of ships there is ridiculously fast with the use of
| mules. With the new locks, it's mostly tug boats, and
| substantially bigger/slower ships obviously.
|
| [0] Mostly on the Agua Clara side. The Cocoli side is
| generally fine, as the salt wedge doesn't reach the lake.
| Drinking/irrigation water intakes there probably have to be
| (or have been) moved though.
| whyenot wrote:
| It's also a little more complicated than that. A lot of the
| water for the canal comes from Lake Alajuela, which was formed
| by damming the Chagres River. Because of deforestation and
| rapid erosion, the lake has been filling with silt and is no
| longer able to hold as much water as it used to. This is a
| problem that has been known for the last few decades, but very
| little has been done to address it.
|
| This current problem is especially bad because the dry season
| normally begins 4-6 weeks from now and there will be little
| rainfall to re-fill Lake Alajuela (or the lake its water flows
| into, Gatun Lake, the backbone of the canal).
|
| (I previously worked for the Smithsonian Tropical Research
| Institute in Panama and lived on an island in the Panama Canal)
| dessimus wrote:
| Certainly the additional set of parallel locks opened in recent
| years would only serve to hasten the speed with which they are
| dumping the fresh water into the oceans on each side.
| happytiger wrote:
| Nobody ever mentions this part.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Seems to me that if you forced the locks to be used in sync
| so that as the water was being lowered in the exiting lane,
| its water was being used to raise the ships in the entering
| lane. This is such an absurdly simple idea, that there must
| be a reason it is not happening. Does anyone know what the
| water isn't shared between the 2 lanes at each level? Is it
| something with different mass between the ships means the
| amount of water is not always equal?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The water from the "down" ship _can_ be used to raise the
| "up" ship... until it's at the same level as the down ship.
| Then you're stuck without either water coming from the
| elevation of the top of the locks, or pumps.
| wlll wrote:
| Couple of relevant points:
|
| - On the new locks they recycle ~60% of the water used
| already, it's a smart system.
|
| - Another commenter pointed out that they have to allow
| fresh water through the lock system to prevent salt water
| contamination of the lakes.
|
| I guess a reason they haven't retro-fitted (yet) the 60%
| water saving mechanism to the older locks is the scale of
| the engineering efford involved, plus they can charge
| people $4.5 million to jump the queue ;)
| happytiger wrote:
| The fifth paragraph:
|
| > A queue of ships waiting to use the canal has been growing in
| recent months amid a deep drought. To manage the situation, the
| canal's managing authority has announced increasingly drastic
| restrictions for the depleted thoroughfare. The Panama Canal
| Authority also holds auctions for those wishing to jump to the
| front of the line.
|
| It's in there. :)
| iambateman wrote:
| It's wild that world shipping depends in some small part on the
| rainfall in Panama.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _A queue of ships waiting to use the canal has been growing in
| recent months amid a deep drought._
|
| A key point of a lot of climate change projections have been that
| we will be encountering changes that are very hard to predict and
| plan for.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Rising sea levels and deep drought seem at odds with each
| other, but I'm not a climate scientist. Maybe they go hand in
| hand?
| 4death4 wrote:
| Why do they seem at odds with each other?
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Because at least intuitively the panama canal seems to rely
| on seawater, which would seem like it is unaffected by
| drought, and only positively effected by sea level rise.
| klyrs wrote:
| > Canal locks at each end lift ships up to Gatun Lake, an
| artificial freshwater lake 26 meters (85 ft) above sea
| level, created by damming up the Chagres River and Lake
| Alajuela to reduce the amount of excavation work required
| for the canal, and then lower the ships at the other end.
| An average of 200,000,000 L (52,000,000 US gal) of fresh
| water are used in a single passing of a ship.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal
| mongol wrote:
| No the Panama canal passes through freshwater, and you
| cannot let seawater enter for ecological reasons.
| fencepost wrote:
| Keep in mind that water flows downhill free but you have
| to pay for pumping to go uphill.
|
| Climate change CAN impact availability of fresh water in
| the form of rain since warm air holds more moisture, but
| that's double edged - there's more evaporation from
| freshwater bodies as well, and the rain can be
| unpredictable and dangerous since some will be in the
| form of major storms dumping water nobody's equipped to
| store along with all the other storm damage.
| HnUser12 wrote:
| Someone else linked this video and definitely helped me
| understand better
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh79YSCC8mM
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| I know the video covered that it has been tried before,
| but it seems like the long term solution would be to
| actually excavate and connect the seas. We have much
| better excavation technology, and would allow for much,
| much higher throughput than this elaborate contraption
| subject to climate change.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The seas aren't at the same elevation. The Pacific is a
| couple dozen cm higher than the Atlantic Coast, and the
| amount varies. Cutting the peninsula would turn into a
| disaster pretty quickly, even with sci fi excavation
| technology.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'm not so sure that it would make such a huge difference
| that it would be an immediate disaster, across that kind
| of distance there are plenty of examples of more
| elevation, what you would have is a river flowing one way
| instead of two rivers flowing towards the see. Not unlike
| any other island that the sea flows around.
|
| Or is there something in particular that would make this
| connection into a disaster area if that flow got started?
|
| The length of the canal is about 75 km, a few dozen cm
| across that distance would be on the order of 0.04 mm /
| meter, which is barely enough to make water flow in a
| particular direction.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| Interesting that the video only posed how labor intensive
| an excavation would be, but not the differences in sea
| level as a blocker. I suppose it would be related to how
| wide the canal is?
|
| Of course I'm not a subject matter expert on this, just
| wondering what options exist today that didn't before.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's mostly above sea level.
| acchow wrote:
| I'm trying to figure out why they would seem at odds to you.
| Can you elaborate please?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Don't know about original commenter, but I vaguely remember
| from high school science that seawater evaporates into the
| clouds and becomes rain. So if you picture it all as water
| going through a cycle, you'd expect there to be more water
| in all stages if there is more water in one?
| deadbeeves wrote:
| Perhaps there would be more water in total on land, but
| it doesn't mean it would be distributed evenly. Weather
| pattern changes caused by the rising sea level _could_
| mean that some areas get drought, even while standing
| right next to the ocean.
| jjulius wrote:
| Upvoting this because it seems like they're genuinely trying
| to understand what's happening. They don't deserve the down
| votes.
|
| Edit: Even I learned this[1] from this comment chain, so it
| seems to me like this isn't necessarily common knowledge.
|
| [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255008
| mysterydip wrote:
| Yes, I'm genuinely asking, thanks.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| That comment doesn't really seem relevant to the question:
| it's answering "why do you need freshwater for the canal
| when you have sea water", but if I understood correctly,
| they asked "why is there less freshwater around when
| there's more seawater?"
| vkou wrote:
| 1. Drought refers to lack of _fresh_ water in a particular
| region. Sea level rise has next to no bearing on whether or
| not rain is going to fall in <some particular region>. A
| higher sea level does not meaningfully affect evaporation and
| precipitation rates.
|
| 2. Most of the sea level rise expected from conservative[1]
| projections of climate change will be hitting us decades and
| centuries from now. Sea levels have only risen by ~8 inches
| since 1900, but even if we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow,
| we would have another 3 feet to look forward to by 2100, and
| 4.5 more feet by 2200.
|
| 3. Storm surges[1], caused by stronger storms, caused by
| climate change can make low-lying coastal areas
| uninhabitable, _without_ actually drowning them due to sea
| level rise.
|
| ----
|
| [1] Less conservative projections are dismissed out-of-hand
| as alarmist, but seem to provide a better roadmap for reality
| than fairy tales, like the 2C warming that the Paris Accord
| promised us.
|
| [2] The sea level may have only gone up a few inches, but if
| an average worst-storm-of-the-year storm surge has gained a
| foot, it may be the difference between your house being fine,
| and having six inches of seawater in your living room for one
| day of every year.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Thanks!
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Would increasing global ocean and air temperatures lead to
| more water evaporating and a net increase in total rainfall
| of fresh water across the globe, even if it might also
| result in changes to where the rain falls?
| 4death4 wrote:
| It could, or it could lead to more water being held in
| the air and this less rainfall.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, it makes perfect sense: more water in the oceans means
| _less_ in circulation.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Unfortunately, one really needs to divide it as
| "freshwater" "saltwater" and "ice".
|
| It's ice thats seeing the biggest declines. Freshwater is
| mostly just being redistributed.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's less in ice.
|
| It's also probably more in circulation. Way more. But it
| almost certainly also means that water will circulate
| through different places, making sure you have both
| catastrophic floods and droughts.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I get the feeling here that a lot of the climate change
| rhetoric is not at all scientific and based mostly around
| convenience. E.g. I have to trust the IPCC model or I'm a
| "denier" but at the same time when something isn't in the model
| projections it's "unpredictable"
|
| Is there any actual evidence that global warming increases
| droughts in central America? Or is this just another "every
| time a hurricane hits we blame it on global warming?"
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Except the impact was totally predicted. Climate change, with
| more total energy in the atmosphere, increases the occurrence
| of extreme weather events - the lengths and severity of
| droughts, but also the severity of extreme flooding. The best
| example I've seen of this is portions of Australia: would
| have to search to find the source but a great quote was that
| over a ten or twenty year span they had totally average
| rainfall - it was just distributed with 9 years or something
| of extreme drought followed by intense floods.
|
| It has long been known that drought is a major problem for
| the Panama Canal, and that climate change will increase the
| severity and occurrences of droughts. None of this is
| unexpected.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Correct - this has nothing to do with it.
|
| Droughts happen. This is a story not because of the drought
| but because of how busy the canal is and the cargo of the
| ship that paid to skip the line. It was time sensitive cargo.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| According to the NY Times[0], the direct cause is El Nino,
| but climate change _may_ be indirectly responsible because it
| makes extreme weather events more extreme. Furthermore, El
| Nino has been getting worse alongside climate change getting
| worse, so it 's not entirely unreasonable to say "hey these
| two might be related" until new evidence and computer
| modeling is done.
|
| The IPCC model tells you that carbon forcing is going to give
| you a certain amount of global average temperature rise, but
| it isn't a detailed weather forecasting model that can say
| "Panama is going to become a desert on November 13th, 2023".
| If we want to know specific local effects we need to run
| other simulations based off the IPCC predictions. Many of
| these weren't done because it wasn't necessary. The IPCC
| model was already forecasting massive economic damage, that
| should be enough to scare politicians into doing _something_
| , right? :P
|
| To be perfectly clear: there will always be gaps where
| someone can point to and say, "well, over here, we're not
| _sure_ climate change is responsible yet ". We will never
| have enough scientists to study absolutely every possible
| effect of climate change, even retroactively. In fact, this
| is part of why the response to climate change was and is so
| underwhelming. Fossil fuel companies poured billions of
| dollars into junk science to try and promote literally any
| possible alternative explanation, which left enough doubt to
| make politicians hesitate on the potentially risky move of
| moving away from carbon-generating fossil fuels[1].
|
| The thing the average reader should take away is:
|
| - We know global warming will be very, very bad for the
| majority of humanity, but...
|
| - We don't know exactly who and where it will hurt the worst,
| and attributing specific weather events to global warming is
| difficult[2], but...
|
| - Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any
| given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a
| safe bet.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panam
| a-c...
|
| [1] To those shouting the words "nuclear fission" right now,
| I hear you. The fossil fuel companies _also_ somehow
| brainwashed the German Greens and Greenpeace with similar
| bullshit, to the point where Germany is shutting off nuclear
| plants to replace with the _dirtiest burning coal
| imaginable_. Lignite balls.
|
| [2] Like, Nobel Prize level research.
|
| Ok, so there isn't exactly a Nobel Prize for meteorology, but
| physics is close enough.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think you have an unrealistic and unfair set of
| expectations here.
|
| Most climate change models are designed to try and predict
| certain events over others - i.e. sea level rise, overall
| temperature change, etc. It doesn't really make sense to
| expect the IPCC to produce a model that accurately predicts
| drought in Panama (and no one is claiming they have?).
|
| There are a bunch of broad-stroke descriptions about climate
| change. Generalizations about what it may change. Those are
| what I invoked. We expect droughts to get worse.
| Specifically, though it's hard to say how or where or what,
| we should expect to see more 'rare' events (that are probably
| not 'rare' anymore but we kind of lack the data to check).
|
| I guess I would ask you if you apply this level of skepticism
| to any other predictive practice. Pairing general predictions
| ("more drought") with targeted models (estimates for sea
| level rise) is a pretty common practice.
| Lammy wrote:
| Ironically this will be a solved problem once we're able to
| melt the Arctic:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/03/science/earth...
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/03/04/climate-ch...
|
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220620152119.h...
|
| https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/new-unexpected-shipping-r...
|
| https://www.axios.com/2018/08/23/maersk-to-send-first-contai...
| aeturnum wrote:
| I suspect that an overall rise in sea levels will lead to
| extremely difficulties in the infrastructure that loads and
| unloads ships. Again - it's not that _this_ is "the problem"
| - it's that such huge systemic changes disrupt things in ways
| and at scales that we've never previously faced.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| Why not just go around Cape Horn? It takes longer clearly but is
| it better than waiting? My guess is fuel costs for one and maybe
| weather issues? Are there other reasons?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Their shipping contracts may contain immense penalties for the
| shipments being late. Going around adds about 30 days to the
| trip.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Not to mention that there are fairly steep piloting fees for
| the Magellan strait. I wonder if USN carriers take on pilots
| when they navigate it or if they have a political exemption.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Ha. Like the people who take the long way to avoid sitting in
| traffic. Even if it takes longer, it "feels" better.
| bearjaws wrote:
| The article does a terrible job of explaining it, but this was
| a LNG ship.
|
| As the gas heats, it will expand, boil off and be vented out.
| Meaning every additional day is more lost product.
|
| This could be helpful for other ships though.
| recursive wrote:
| If it clearly takes longer, how could it possibly be better?
| mcmcfly wrote:
| Because it doesn't cost $4M?
| wlll wrote:
| 2 weeks round cape horn could cost in the regioin of
| 3,990,000 (see other comments in this thread for details),
| so ~4mil isn't so bad, especially if you're going to get
| penalised for turning up 2 weeks late.
| alentred wrote:
| What kind of cargo may be worth paying $4M to skip the line? I
| assume it should either be something that perishes if not
| delivered on time, or something extremely critical overall.
| jahnu wrote:
| 400,000 bananas, Michael.
| bombcar wrote:
| If a ship is carrying 20,000 containers $4m is only $200 a
| container.
| expertentipp wrote:
| Smartphone cases and drugs.
| Trias11 wrote:
| Bunch of made-in-china crap to be resold at 1000x cost
| theultdev wrote:
| > Eneos' shipping division transports various commodities,
| including crude oil, liquefied petroleum gas, chemicals and
| bulk cargo.
| mdeeks wrote:
| The Flexport CEO said it was an LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas)
| carrier.
| https://x.com/typesfast/status/1724150162531201571?s=20
| Keep an eye on whats going on at the Panama Canal. An LNG
| carrier just paid $4 million to jump the line. This will likely
| be more common for LNG carriers as their cargo will literally
| boil off sitting in the hot tropical sun, but it will be
| interesting to see if container ships end up having to resort
| to similar measures as transits continue to be restricted due
| to the ongoing severe drought.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Presumably LNG ships have recondensors so they can burn some
| small proportion of the gas to power engines to run chillers
| to keep the rest cold?
| gosub100 wrote:
| > some small proportion of the gas
|
| probably about $4MM/(anticipated duration of long wait) =)
| Smoosh wrote:
| You would think that $4 would pay for some excellent
| refrigeration equipment. I wonder what the engineering
| compromises are for the LNG storage on these ships.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I predict that everybody will start paying $4M to "skip the
| line" and then the line will be as long as it ever was _but_ it
| will cost an extra $4M to get through it. Just like when we
| started paying for TV to avoid commercials and then they slowly
| started putting commercials into the TV we were paying for.
| TylerE wrote:
| At some point an equilibrium will be reached, where ships
| that don't want to pay and/or wait just go the long way
| around Tierra del Fuego. That's already what the giant ships
| (like aircraft carriers) that don't fit do.
| p1mrx wrote:
| That's how supply and demand are supposed to work. Eventually
| Panama should use the extra money to upgrade capacity, so
| they can make even more money.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Let's say a container vessel carries 8k TEU, at a shipping rate
| of 3k USD per container. That makes 24 million USD shipping
| cost alone, let's say around 20 million USD. That is without
| considerimg the cargo _value_ , so allnthings be told, if on
| the other side there is a schdeule be kept, 4 million is
| acceptable.
|
| In case of tankers, even more so. The spot market prices, and
| corresponding delivery contracts, make 4 million peanuts
| basically.
| TylerE wrote:
| It probably isn't the cargo so much as needing the ship at
| location X on date Y for the next run.
|
| Sort of like how failures to the ATC system very rapidly expand
| until the whole system grinds to a halt.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Yes, and nobody sees a problem with running the world economy
| this close to the abyss _constantly,_ not even after someone
| yanked the joystick the wrong way and wedged his ship in the
| Nile river, or after the ridiculous Corona-induced
| "container shortage."
|
| No redundancy, no buffers, no fallbacks.
| joewhale wrote:
| Those of you who are interested in this stuff, checkout
| https://www.marinetraffic.com
| reginaldo wrote:
| The Panama canal saves about 8000 miles, which about 2 weeks time
| at 20 knots, plus fuel and crew, insurance, etc. That comes to
| $285k per day. Depending on the wait time (I've seen 20 days wait
| time in the past), that might be a rational decision even without
| considering late penalties.
| happytiger wrote:
| So why doesn't Panama just pump the water used in the locks back
| into the lake so that it isn't lost into the sea on every
| transit? It doesn't seem that such a solution would be profoundly
| technically difficult and it could definitely be done with
| sustainable power in the tropics. Occam's razor.
|
| I know the new one has one that recovers something like 60
| percent from the article in the bottom of this comment, but they
| didn't retrofit the old one?
|
| I've never seen anyone give a straight answer on this one, so I'm
| genuinely curious if this is entirely a natural disaster or
| foreseeable but not economically viable or what?
|
| They also could use salt water for the downward leg to the sea as
| it won't flow back to the lake, couldn't they? I saw nothing
| about this anywhere. But it makes complete sense and would cut
| lake usage in half in both directions. I'm sure that a surcharge
| for such a system would be welcomed by ship owners at this point,
| because the economic impact is considerable. That wouldn't have a
| negative environmental impact as you'd just be introducing
| brackish water to brackish or salt seas at the bottom.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/03/panama-canal-drought-hits-ne...
| slashdev wrote:
| It's even simpler than that. Currently there are hydroelectric
| dams using the same water to generate electricity. All you have
| to do is not do that.
|
| The U.S. used a nuclear generator on a ship for that purpose
| back when they controlled the Canal Zone.
|
| Today I don't see why they don't just install a bunch of solar
| and use the hydroelectric as energy storage to smooth out the
| production.
| pietjepuk88 wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255225 for a back-
| of-the-envelope calculation of why it's intractable to pump the
| water back.
|
| And see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38256185 for why
| the water saving basins are not as great as you would think (at
| least for the new locks). For the old locks, adding them would
| probably just add too much too the leveling time. And the
| construction would take those locks out of operation for at
| least a couple months, and they just cannot afford that.
|
| In the Netherlands we do have locks with pumps for directly
| leveling, reducing/preventing salt intrusion, or "evening out"
| the loss of water with a separate pumping station (look up
| Krammersluizen and Kreekraksluizen). But we're talking a meter
| or 2 water level difference, not a whopping 26 meters. And
| those locks are generally not as big, and even then we tend to
| get rid of those systems where we can (Krammersluizen) as it's
| just too expensive to operate and maintain.
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| 4M? how expensive is it to go around? Would the crew appreciate a
| raise to go around?
| wlll wrote:
| According to another poster about 2 weeks at ~ $285k per day,
| so about $3,990,000 extra. Depending on the cargo and late
| penalties $4.5 mil is in the range of acceptable charges.
| smm11 wrote:
| Just open all the locks and let 'er rip.
| FredPret wrote:
| Not a lot of money compared to the burden of carrying a ship-lod
| of valuable cargo for the extra period.
|
| Cargo insurance, carrying cost of the capital tied up in the
| cargo, running cost for the ship, opportunity cost of doing
| another cargo run in that time...
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