{"id":241,"date":"2024-04-01T22:53:02","date_gmt":"2024-04-01T22:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/?p=241"},"modified":"2024-04-01T22:53:02","modified_gmt":"2024-04-01T22:53:02","slug":"container-ships-dominated-by-foreign-companies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/container-ships-dominated-by-foreign-companies\/","title":{"rendered":"CONTAINER SHIPS DOMINATED BY FOREIGN COMPANIES"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
The 95,000-ton Dali was carrying 4,700 cargo containers weighing up to a collective 262,000 tons when it knocked down the Francis Scott Key Bridge early Tuesday, creating what is known in the media business as \u201ca news event\u201d in Baltimore Harbor that dominated the airwaves and headlines for days.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
But the story is not only in Baltimore Harbor. The story is global. The story spans every sea lane, river, harbor, and port across the world.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\"EpochThe steel frame of the Francis Scott Key Bridge sits on top of a container ship after the bridge collapsed, Baltimore, Md., on March 26, 2024. (Jim Watson\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The story is this: Just 16 companies\u2014eight shippers, three factory groups, and five container lessors\u2014control 81 percent of the world\u2019s commercial ocean transport, container production, and box-leasing capacity.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The eight global corporations\u2014none based in the U.S.\u2014that dominate international maritime commercial shipping are aligned in three self-serving \u201ccartels\u201d that have divided sea lanes and \u201ccargo slots\u201d among themselves with little concern for interests beyond their bottom lines.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
And, so, they are building bigger and bigger ships. The bigger the ship, the more cargo it can carry. For international shipping firms, that offers an economy of scale in saving fuel and lowering the cost of transportation per container. It works for consumers with lower-cost goods. Usually.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Container ships have been steadily increasing in size since they were created in 1956. But it wasn\u2019t until the early 2000s that the \u201cBig Boat Era\u201d truly began.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

Of more than 50,000 merchant ships now plying the world\u2019s maritime trade routes, at least 5,500 are regarded as mega-ships. There are seven major types:<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\n
    \n
  • \n
      Small Feeder\u2014Up to 1,000 TEUs (Twenty-ton equivalent units)<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
    • \n
        Feeder\u20141,001 to 2,000 TEUs<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
      • \n
          Feedermax\u20142,001 to 3,000 TEUs<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
        • \n
            Panamax\u20143,001 to 5,100 TEUs<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
          • \n
              Post-Panamax\u20145,101 to 10,000 TEUs (the Dali is in this category)<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
            • \n
                New Panamax\u201410,000 to 14,500 TEUs<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
              • \n
                  Ultra Large Container Vessel (ULCV)\u201414,501 and higher TEUs<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
But they pose risks, such as cargo concentration, like what happened in Long Beach, California, in late 2021\u2014that can degrade supply chain resilience because only a relatively few ports can accommodate them. And when one is disabled in a sea lane, such as now in Baltimore Harbor or in March 2021, when the Ever Given grounded in the Suez Canal, it can bottleneck maritime trade for weeks and cause worldwide inflation.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
In the big ship era, one ship\u2019s problem becomes the world\u2019s problem.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The big ships pose hazards in confined waterways and the \u201ccartel\u201d is forcing ports\u2014 where possible\u2014to retrofit infrastructure to accommodate them at great expense.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cIf you build it, they will come,\u201d Salvatore Mercogliano, a professor who analyzes maritime commerce at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, told The Epoch Times.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
If not, your port, your town, your industries become backwaters\u2014or maybe your bridge gets knocked down. Baltimore\u2019s Key Bridge joins the Lixinsha Bridge in southern China\u2019s Guangzhou province and the Z\u00e1rate-Brazo Largo Bridge on the Prana River in Argentina as 2024 victims of mega-ship allisions\u2014a new word to learn when a massive ship runs over a stationary victim\u2014in confined waters. And it\u2019s still March.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
This puts American ports in an ever-narrowing crosshair. Without a cohesive national ports and commercial maritime policy\u2014remember when the United States had a robust merchant marine fleet?\u2014the \u201cshipping cartel,\u201d as labeled by the Biden administration, will rule the waves.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cThe way we do things in the U.S. is very unique; ports are run locally by municipal governments or states and then the waters are run by the federal government, so it creates a big problem,\u201d Mercogliano said. \u201cAnd so, you get this competition and then you have the ocean carriers\u201d dictating winners and losers.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
No American port can handle the newest ultra-large container vessels.\u00a0<\/b>It cost taxpayers $1.7 billion to raise the Bayonne Bridge so New Panamax-sized carriers could enter the Port of New York\/New Jersey. It cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion to improve the Port of Savannah, but less than two years later, another study is warranted because the mega-ships can\u2019t get up the lower Savannah River and under the Eugene Talmadge Bridge.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cMega container ships are changing our ports,\u201d acknowledges xChange Solutions, a global container-leasing company based in Hamburg, Germany, in an April 2022 analysis<\/a>. While providing \u201cbenefits like high freight volume and low fuel costs\u201d the also impose \u201cmassive port infrastructure demands\u201d on port operators.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ports around the world are struggling to cope,\u00a0<\/b>writes Evangelos Boulougouris a professor of naval architecture, ocean and marine engineering at the University of Strathclyde for the Maritime Safety Research Centre<\/a>. \u201cThe cost of such projects is immense: the\u00a0expansion of the Panama Canal in 2016\u00a0to accommodate bigger ships ended up costing over $5 billion.\u201d<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cOcean carriers and the financial institutions that bankroll them aren\u2019t paying for updated ports, increased dredging, new warehouses, highways and so on to accommodate these ships. That cost is getting off-loaded to the public,\u201d American Economic Liberties Project Director Matt Stoller told FreightWaves in May 2022<\/a>.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0\u201cWe have a lot of ports in this country but we don\u2019t have enough ocean carrier firms,\u201d Stoller said. \u201cThe ocean carrier firms\u2019 boats are too big for most ports.\u201d<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Many ports will soon be backwaters, the 54-member nation International Transport Forum\u2019s 2015 \u201cImpact of Mega-Ships\u201d report<\/a> predicted, noting the ever-growing big ships were generating cost savings for carriers and decreasing maritime transport costs for shippers, but reducing the number of ports that can accommodate them.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Which brings us back to Baltimore Harbor.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cA long-term fear of Baltimore\u2019s is they may lose business permanently because of [the Dali crash] and that\u2019s because they\u2019re saying in New York\/New Jersey, \u2018You can just shift your cargo here,\u2019\u201d Mercogliano said. \u201c<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
I hate to say it\u2014you know, no one will say it\u2014 but you there are four port directors up and down the East Coast are going. \u2018Thank God that\u2019s not my port \u2026 but, how can I use this to get some business my way? You know, how can I grow Philadelphia? How can I grow Savannah? Because that\u2019s what they do. They have to compete against each other. There\u2019s a finite amount of cargo out there.\u201d<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 95,000-ton Dali was carrying 4,700 cargo containers weighing up to a collective 262,000 tons when it knocked down the Francis Scott Key Bridge early Tuesday, creating what is known in the media business as \u201ca news event\u201d in Baltimore Harbor that dominated the airwaves and headlines for days. But the story is not only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-container-ships-all-foreign-owned"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":244,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions\/244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sterlingcooper.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}