Re:The Suez Canal will be widened
by bombcar on Sunday May 16, 2021 @10:25AM
(#27173920)
You can see the practical limit in the ships designed to go directly from China - Los Angeles - as it's just open sea.
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Those ships still have to enter the harbor and then have to be unloaded. The Benjamin Franklin has a 52 foot draft and stacks containers 10 high [1]. That means deeper dredging and bigger cranes. She called on LA, Oakland and Seattle but now transits from Asia to Europe via the Suez Canal.
Who pays for this dredging and these cranes? The localities. It's difficult to defray these costs with shipping fees. American President Lines pulled their headquarters from Oakland to Phoenix when Oakland did that. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMA_CGM_Benjamin_Franklin
[2] https://www.prlog.org/10551489-apl-phoenix-headquarters-relo...
No doubt those waters are ideal given the high traffic and limited geographic barriers, even these however ships would still need to dock in LA.
I am not saying the limit doesn't play a major role, I am saying if it's was the main bottleneck there would be a lot of r&d in solving it, solving it would certainly help, but the economics and other limitations mean solving welding won't mean a revolutionary change to ship sizes