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A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

westerninvestor.com

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Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#61

Post by bombcar »

maroonblazer wrote: post #59
avidphantasm wrote: post #52

Panama Canal at reduced capacity. Suez Canal at reduced capacity (for very different reasons). Therefore shipping costs and delays are rising. Could this be a trigger for the recession everyone seems to be predicting?

Isn't it more likely to be a trigger for continued/increasing inflation? I.e., the goods still need to get where they're going, but it's going to cost more, either through longer routes or more expensive means (rail/truck).

Take all the goods at Walmart. Find the cheapest largest ones - eg, the ones that fill a container with the least dollar amount.

You’ll find that many of those are already made in the USA, especially if they can be made by robots.

Here’s one now! https://www.walmart.com/ip/Hyper-Tough-32-Gallon-Heavy-Duty-...

China will end up making high value items where shipping is a small fraction of the cost (Apple already flies most of their products via jet) whereas cheap items that are not labor intensive will move back to near their destination. Other things will move to Mexico and further south.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#62

Post by bombcar »

elif wrote: post #55
aidenn0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No; at some point you're going to lift the water up. That requires pumping.

Why is that? Britain is covered with a preindustrial canal network with thousands of locks which use nothing but channels doors and gravity. Literally made of wood and operated by hand. Raising water on the low side to the level on the high side simply requires joining the two sides together. If sea level is their high side, I don't understand why they can't use this supply forever.

The sea level is the low side. The lake is the high side - which works great until the supply of lake water dries up.

The obvious solution is a sea-level tunnel a hundred miles long. Probably cheap. ;)

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#63

Post by anonymfus »

elif wrote: post #55
aidenn0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No; at some point you're going to lift the water up. That requires pumping.

Why is that? Britain is covered with a preindustrial canal network with thousands of locks which use nothing but channels doors and gravity. Literally made of wood and operated by hand. Raising water on the low side to the level on the high side simply requires joining the two sides together. If sea level is their high side, I don't understand why they can't use this supply forever.

Sea level is a low side on both ends of the channel.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#64

Post by bombcar »

AdamN wrote: post #38
oneshtein wrote: post #32

This may create a window of opportunity for Russia, because Russia communicates with China and NK via land routes, while Western allies are separated by ocean.

Rail/Road doesn't compare to ships in terms of throughput by weight so the land route to China from Russia, even if the freight train system were robust, would not handle the same amounts that a trans-oceanic route like China to the Americas could handle (or even China to St. Petersburg if that were needed)

The simple railroad idea is “big ship comes to west Panama, unloads onto trains, which load into big ship in east Panama” but that avoids the strength of railroads.

You have to unload the ship eventually anyway, so you instead have it load into rail and disperse to final destination more directly.

You’d need a heat map of where everything ends up that is going through Panama, but if you’re dumping to rail many of those ships would unload elsewhere.

Or in other words, Europe will be hit much harder by this than the USA will.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#66

Post by bombcar »

raverbashing wrote: post #43
oneshtein wrote: post #32

This may create a window of opportunity for Russia, because Russia communicates with China and NK via land routes, while Western allies are separated by ocean.

And no port that is constantly free from ice

Yet.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#67

Post by alephnerd »

bombcar wrote: post #61
maroonblazer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it more likely to be a trigger for continued/increasing inflation? I.e., the goods still need to get where they're going, but it's going to cost more, either through longer routes or more expensive means (rail/truck).

Take all the goods at Walmart. Find the cheapest largest ones - eg, the ones that fill a container with the least dollar amount. You’ll find that many of those are already made in the USA, especially if they can be made by robots. Here’s one now! https://www.walmart.com/ip/Hyper-Tough-32-Gallon-Heavy-Duty-... China will end up making high value items where shipping is a small fraction of the cost (Apple already flies…

> high value items

Medium value parts actually (eg. OEM).

And it's the same specialization that Mexico has had since the late 1990s and early 2000s when their factories left for China [0][1][2]. That's why Mexican manufacturing has started growing again - costs have equalized between CN and MX manufacturing for intermediate parts.

For example, take apart a Sony PS2, Compaq workstation, or a Toshiba DVD Player from the early 2000s - all the electronics parts in it will say Made in "Mexico/Malaysia/Thailand", and the plastic molding was 50% Mexico and China. China didn't enter the fray until after 2008 when Steve Jobs tasked Tim Cook with exploring manufacturing in China, and Samsung began opening OLED factories there as well.

Low cost gizmos and gadgets have been manufactured in Vietnam and India for a decade now, and within 10 years they'll both also climb up the value chain manufacturing wise. Nhat Tao in Saigon and Sector 63 in Noida have a similar feel as Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen 10-15 years ago.

History doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes.

Mexico also saw economic and political instability 20-30 years ago when its factories began leaving for China. Same thing happened to Thailand in the 1990s, Malaysia in the 2000s, Turkiye in the 2010s, and Phillipines in the 1990s-2000s.

[0] - http://international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf

[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2003/BUSINESS/12/13/china.mexico.reut/

[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/03/world/as-china-gallops-me...

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#68

Post by nashashmi »

ok_dad wrote: post #33
stkdump wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to check if that realistic. 40 million gallons at 85 feet is 11MWh of potential energy. At 70% efficiency it would take 16MWh to pump that. That has to be a small amount of energy compared to what ships take for traveling the detour.

It would take a long time to pump that amount of water out of the lock that you’re lowering, and over time you’ll be pumping saltwater into a freshwater system, which isn’t good. You’d have to do filtering or something, at great expense. Currently it takes a short time to drain the lock, so ships transit faster. It’s pretty fun to do that transit, but I was amazed that the pilot let me conn the ship the whole time in…

Saltwater mixing is a good point. But the canal has two lanes. One lane is for one direction. The other lane is for the other direction. I can imagine cases where the saltwater is never used.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#69

Post by thehappypm »

scythe wrote: post #13
jgord wrote: post #2

I was amazed to hear they relied on large amount of fresh water supply to refill the lochs for each ships passage.

Panama is very rainy on average. The average rainfall in Colón is 3.4 meters (136 inches) per year. Ciudad de Panamá is a little drier with 1.9 meters (75 inches). For comparison, New Orleans, the continental US's wettest city, gets 1.6 meters (64 inches). But it can vary, and unfortunately, January is the beginning of the dry season, which ends in May.

Wow! That is a truly insane amount of rain. Perfect place for this canal which essentially runs on hydropower!

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#70

Post by nashashmi »

avidphantasm wrote: post #52

Panama Canal at reduced capacity. Suez Canal at reduced capacity (for very different reasons). Therefore shipping costs and delays are rising. Could this be a trigger for the recession everyone seems to be predicting?

> Suez Canal at reduced capacity (for very different reasons).

Is traffic still going the southern way towards the Red Sea from the Mediterranean?

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