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.
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)
> 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.
So that lake is like the small open source project that supports the weight of all internet: critical for everybody, yet neglected.
The Canal moves such amounts of money every year, not to say over decades, that preserving the lake in better conditions ought to have been easy. Now the ball of mud is exploding in their faces. It's like if "we" (collectively) never learned.
The canal authority doesn't control the watershed land so it would have been up to the Panamanian government to enact the relevant legislation in the 90s or prior.
That doesn't sound easy at all, even getting better resourced governments to care about things that will directly affect their voters in 30 years in big ways is already very difficult.
Let alone when it's multiple steps removed and the costs are so diffusely spread out across billions of consumers.
> The Panama Canal Authority (Spanish: Autoridad del Canal de Panamá (ACP)) is the agency of the government of Panama responsible for the operation and management of the Panama Canal. The ACP took over the administration of the canal from the Panama Canal Commission, the joint US–Panama agency that managed the canal, on December 31, 1999, when the canal was handed over from the United States to Panama as per the Torrijos–Carter Treaties.
> The Panama Canal Authority is established under Title XIV of the National Constitution, and has exclusive responsibility for the operation, administration, management, preservation, maintenance, and modernization of the canal. It is responsible for the operation of the canal in a safe, continuous, efficient, and profitable manner.[1]
If you disagree, please explain. My understanding was that Panama profits in direkt and indirect ways from the canal, and did so even at a time when the channel wasn't owned by them.
If that is wrong, naive or stupid I'd like to know.
The Inter-American Development Bank loaned Panama the money for the Panama canal expansion, so, my thought is that the money that they're making might be tied up covering the notes for the expansion.
Sounds like a riff on The Tragedy of The Commons. Everyone is so busy so successful using the resource no one wants to pause to consider saving the resource.
It's not Tragedy of the Commons because it's not a commons: there's a single controlling entity that should be interested in managing the resource. It's closer to a discounting problem, because future benefits from investment made today are discounted because it's the future's problem.
(And it's a great service to society that people have been debunking the myth of the Tragedy of the Commons which was an armchair moralist article in scientific clothing that had no empirical basis when it was published and yet got widely cited for a while because it was emotionally appealing.)
To clarify, I did not say it was ToTC. I said riff on, and then I clarified.
The controlling entity clearly is failing, sans charging a cutting in line fee. It's in the best interest of the rest to do something. Yet nothing. Perhaps not a ToTC but it's nonetheless a tragedy, or soon to be. And The Commons elsewhere are sure to be the ones to bear the brunt of the blow.
Can you tell me more about how the tragedy of the commons is a myth? I am no economist, but I thought it was a straightforward and well understood outcome.
The Tragedy of the Commons as a historical event in Medieval England has been criticized (hard to say debunked from this one article, but perhaps there are more).
The Tragedy of the Commons as an economical/social phenomena has not been debunked.
Since 99.9% of the uses of the phrase Tragedy of the Commons are referring to the second case, I'm not sure it is helpful to say that it has been debunked.
>The Tragedy of the Commons as an economical/social phenomena has not been debunked.
This was what I came here for too. I'm sure someone out there is more interested in the history of the phrase than the economics phenomenon it points to, but it sure isn't me. You could rename it the Doohickey, drop any historical precedent, and I'd still be very interested if someone said the Doohickey was debunked.
I suppose it is also worth asking the opposite: is there any reason to believe in the tragedy of the commons as an economic or social phenomenon? There must be anecdotes in favor or against, but so we have any reason to believe it is a generally applicable rule?
Well it's not just historically debunked. There's plenty of modern examples of common resources being well-managed. Take free public transit in some european cities, for example: they're not the trashy full-of-grafiti hellscape capitalists will have you believe.
You should take it the other way around: the tragedy of the commons is a myth. Of course you could cherry pick some story of bad actors misbehaving. But that's not a general rule, it's not bound by fate, and you just have to shove your foot up their face to prevent it. But in the absence of egotistic capitalist pigs, most people are reasonable in managing shared resources and that's how humanity survived for so long before inventing private property. Anedotally, that's also my experience living in collectives for a few decades: there may be abusive situations dealing with shared resources (who ate all the tomatoes?!) but that's only mildly annoying because it's the exception rather than the norm.
You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the tragedy of the commons. Yes, public transit is well managed in certain places, so there is no tragedy. That's the point. Public or common resources must be well-managed and regulated or they're exploited without regard for consequences.
There are plenty of examples of said exploitation, just look at water rights in the US. Your anecdotal and biased experience doesn't disprove it.
A lot of these concepts lack specification on the requirements that must be met for them to occur. If people feel a common responsibility for something, the concept does not apply at all or only to a lesser degree. Our fundamental economic beliefs about growth still reflect this, even with rescue arguments about growth in productivity and efficiency (which rarely apply to any natural resource). In essence the peasants of yesterday are the B.A. of today.
However, there is also the comedy of the commons and the tragedy of the anticommons for that matter. Open source for example doesn't suffer from the tragedy of the commons as much as it is suffering from the tragedy of the anticommons.
Prior to seeing the image above, I always assumed the canal was just a single passageway between a narrow spot of land. In the image you can also see the mentioned Lake Alajuela in the top-right.
> (I previously worked for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and lived on an island in the Panama Canal)
This is, by a wide margin, the most interesting "casually made" comment I'd read in a bit. Any chance you can provide slightly more details? I didn't even know there _was_ an island in the Panama Canal; nonetheless people living on it (presumably all researchers?)
The canals are just the edges of the entire path, the part in between is enormous compared to them. Because they flooded a forest, there’s a lot going on in the intermediate lake.
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.
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.
> 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.
I suspect there's an SEP [1] running at at least 12V in the vicinity, most likely blocking a rather large spacecraft, that's been stationed stationed near the canal, possibly before it was built!
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.
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?
- 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 ;)
I think the main reason is that the (big!) ships just don't have room to pass each other anywhere other than on Gatun lake. They can't pass in the Gaillard cut, and not really in the approach harbors either. So it's one way traffic basically.
Also, anything taking the old locks out of operation for a few weeks/months is basically a no-go. That's just too costly.
As a side note, do keep in mind that water is already "saved" a little by going up in a convoy. With the three lock chambers, you get to reuse the same water three times. Not exactly true of course because convoys start and end, but you get the idea.
In the new locks they pump the water between tanks and the locks. The problem is the water has to be fresh water because to get to the other side you have to traverse this massive fresh water lake. There's always going to be some release of fresh water to keep the lake from becoming brackish.
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 [Edit: unless you have] either water coming from the elevation of the top of the locks, or pumps.
Good article. Says they're already using some solutions that have been raised in these comments, like recovering (some of) the water used and moving some cargo by rail (to meet weight limits).
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?
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.
Drake Passage doesn't pose the same ecological risk, of course because the ecosystems are acclimatized to such a passage being there, but also because it's in the southern ocean surrounded by strong currents and cold water that mostly does not mix with the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. So many of the species at higher latitudes are essentially trapped on their respective side.
Just to add some the last piece of data: According to https://www.global-climatescope.org/markets/pa/, Electricity prices in Panama (in 2021) were $153/MWh, so the costs for each fill would be about $15,300
That sounds like a lot until you realize the largest ships are charged up to $150,000 for a transit.
A 10% price increase is nothing to scoff at, but it's not outlandish to deal with congestion...
Remember that it's not a single lock ships go through. If I understand correctly, ships are lifted in 3 locks and lowered in another 3. That would make it $45k+.
But once you’re talking about anything near 100% efficient pumps, you can have generators too, and a lot of that water is, in principle, recoverable. A bigger issue may be doing any of this without bringing too much salt along with the upward-moving ships.
(Hmm. How about picking up the ships, sans water? I wonder if a way to do this safely could be engineered. Sounds quite challenging.)
Remember, that's 100% efficient continuous 100MW. Realistically, you're looking at 3-5x that for peak power. With the current 10m drop, the head is too low to have anything like an efficient generator. Even the full 86ft drop would be terribly inefficient at the flow rates required.
However, there are solutions to things like this called a "water slope" and one has been built (notably 100x smaller than needed for Panama) and they would (need to) be much quicker as well. Basically, they push a giant slug of water up hill. Notably, one could probably make this regenerative (and you could likely reuse most of the water). That's important since it would certainly be in the multiple GW of power, but it could push/pull (two moving locks up/dn) in <1000sec so traffic through the canal could be more than 5x higher. Of course it would require massive widening, completely new infrastructure (a new giant power plant), and completely new technology.
Here's video of one (and a link to the original) with an explanation. My point is not that this is easily doable, but if you're going to spend the many $10Bs of you might as well get more boats through.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 there are 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.
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.
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.
I haven't found any other collaborating articles, but this one says that it was an empty gas carrier.
> The prospects of a growing wait reportedly prompted one company to bid a record $4 million for one of the open slots bringing their anticipated total transit costs to $4.5 million and still they have to wait another week to get their empty gas carrier on its way.
Later in the article, it says that they might give up their bid, which sounds to me like they had contracts that needed fulfillment with expensive penalties. Probably made the bid to hedge their bets, and are working right now to renegotiate penalties to account for unforeseen circumstances.
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.
LNG is almost all methane which is the lightest hydrocarbon. Methane is so light a gas that it does not liquefy even under thousands of PSI of compression. And at room temperature it only practically exists in a gas form, pressurized or not, so in that case it needs to be handled like oxygen or nitrogen, other light gases where the heavy-walled steel storage cylinders weigh more than the contents even at maximum pressure.
You just can't get that many kilos of such light molecules into a certain space as a compressed gas compared to how dense a liquid gets.
So they liquefy the gas instead before transport and that requires cryogenics rather than pressure. The chilled liquid can then be stored or transported in tanks of much thinner-walled steel since gas pressure is not a major issue. These low-pressure tanks are thickly insulated with lightweight materials to keep in the cold as much as possible.
And unlike the heavy-walled things like the welders use for their pressurized oxygen, cryogenics are handled like the tanks of liquid oxygen, where you can't completely close the cryogenic storage tanks or pressure would build up beyond the bursting point of their relatively thin-walled construction. The cryogenic tanks are constantly hissing as they release excess gas for this reason.
Since no insulation is perfect, the cargo does pick up heat gradually and this causes a certain amount of steady boiloff. Rather than physically becoming warmer, the cargo self-refrigerates by evaporation.
Basically they are loading metric shiploads of really cold LNG and it just slowly evaporates as they go. The cargo temperature is kept constant by self-refrigeration where the condenser is the plant on shore and the evaporator is the ship on its way at sea.
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.
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."
What do you mean by the abyss? Serious question. I don't recall there being critical industries grinding to a halt, people starving, or anything like that from the Suez being blocked.
People see the problem, they have been complaining for decades.
The issues are manifold:
- the Panama Canal has already been built at the shortest site possible, dito for the Suez Canal
- constructing a new canal is (virtually) impossible due to the enormous amounts of rock you'd have to move on the Panama side - there's a reason why the existing canal is raised so much above sea level
- both Egypt and Panama lack the financial resources to construct a new canal or meaningfully expand the existing ones, and public funding from the Rest of World isn't really there either
- the impact to nature is just as massive, which makes that a no-go for environmental reasons - why destroy so much of nature just for even more cheap trinkets from China?
- climate change is looming to kill off polar ice, which would enable ships to use polar transit routes without icebreakers and significantly impede the business of the canals
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Container on rails is a viable alternative for goods shipped from and to China. Used pretty extensively, but more expensive than sea freight (which is basically unbeatable cost wise).
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.
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.
move the hyperloop to panama, scale it up. rails are strong, they can hold 24000 shipping containers. we'll accelerate the steel ships with magnets to incredible speeds and global efficiency will skyrocket.
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.
Why not unload it though and transport by rail? The canals were built for a different world, before there were containers and giant ports for offloading.
Serious question, surely it's expensive to unload but so is waiting for the canal. For some loads it seems like it'd make sense to bridge the oceans using rail.
It could be cheaper than the typical container port, if you can co-ordinate the ships: the Rustbucket Pacific unloads to a train/series of trains that carry the containers to the waiting Rustbucket Atlantic at the other end. No need to sort out destinations at the individual container level.
This does mean that you would like to work with the same shipping line at both ends, to address the matching of ship capacities.
By my calculation, "The Captain" is just under 5 tons per square meter. Contrast that to the neopanamax, almost 6.5 tons per square meter (some uncertainty here -- I'm going by DWT which apparently doesn't contain the ship itself). So yeah, it's certainly heavier, but the areal density isn't an order of magnitude greater.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Out of curiosity, what would happen if they decided to get rid of the locks altogether and just let the water directly flow between the Atlantic and the Pacific through it?
I assume that there would be a current that would erode the surrounding environment, but how bad would it really be?
The canal is significantly higher than the ocean. The French tried and failed to dig a canal straight through and the eventual solution was to use locks to raise the ships on each side and then lower on the other side.
I'm not sure why they can't just pump ocean water up into the canal. Perhaps it's just too much water to be feasible.
The electricity to do that would (in the near term) be hydroelectric, so in energy terms you'd be chasing your own tail.
I thought about this maybe being a usecase for small modular nuclear, another commenter suggested that that has already been done (when the US was running the show).
Several others have commented on the environmental issues with pumping seawater into the freshwater ecosystems.
That was in 1880 though. Excavation equipment was not as capable as it is today. Today I bet it would be possible to get rid of the locks, but it would not be cheap.
like digging down 25 meters has been done numerous times all over the world. But having to do that for I think like 70 to 80Km distance wise from would not be cheap.
Googling it brings up a pretty interesting (and accessible) journal article on this subject by one Peter C. Hains, apparently the guy who "laid out the plans" for the canal:
I thought part of the reason they have the locks in general is there is a lot of elevation change, digging a "straight line" through would have been enormously more work.
The Arctic shipping routes will become competitive relatively soon. The US is behind in this area. Russian and China are investing heavily. The traffic at the Panama Canal will accelerate alternatives. Interesting to see where this goes in the next decade.
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…
I guess the contract on the LNG comes in to play, is it selling at an already agreed price or the price on delivery, what is happening to that price in the next 30 days, are there penalties etc.
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?
Typical losses with LNG are about 0.1-0.15% per day depending on the type of carrier. A round trip around the cape would add probably 20-25 days or so for a typical ship. More for slower ones. So, the price of that is 2-3% losses. The value of LNG fluctuates wildly in recent years. But it's not cheap. At the peak, a single ship could be carrying hundreds of millions $ worth of LNG. So, a few percent losses is quite significant.
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.
Not an expert but your question intrigued me - I found a document (https://pancanal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/N07-2021.pdf) which has a lot of info about how transits work. It does look like commercial passenger vessels get special treatment: they're exempt from a requirement to arrive the day before their booking, and they're allowed to book transits up to 730 days in advance, and on the other hand required to book no less than 366 days in advance. Other vessels wanting to transit the Panamax locks in the normal fashion have booking available on various schedules between as much as a year in advance and as little as 2 days notice, so queuing is inevitable. Essentially the uniquely predictable schedules of cruise ships mean they can be handled separately from the often ad hoc trampiness of cargo arrivals!
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.
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[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.
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?
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?”
The drought is probably just bad luck. They should have had a couple hurricanes go through there. Sometimes you just don't get the rain. AFAIK from news people freaking out every time there's a hurricane (good source, I know) climate change is causing more of them.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If you look at the example of the Suez canal, where some 700 species from the Red Sea have now colonized the eastern Mediterranean, the idea of directly connecting the Pacific and the Caribbean sounds like an environmental disaster. Not to mention the difference in sea level - there would be a lot of water flowing west to east before that balanced out, and raising the sea level in the Caribbean does not seem likely to make anyone happy.
While I don't disagree with the environmental concerns, ships use HFO (a very dirty type of fuel that's essentially tar) and account for ~3% of all greenhouse gasses. It may be a net win overall if a proper canal can save many more ships thousands of miles of emissions per trip.
The Caribbean is facing seal level rise anyway if we don't find a way to reduce emissions. Again I'm not an expert on this subject, but it doesn't seem cut and dry that a canal would be an environmental disaster if it were possible to excavate.
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.
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.
It'd be highly susceptible to erosion, and the channel wouldn't be stable. It'd either expand gradually over time with all sorts of ecological ramifications, or deposition would clog the channel constantly. Who knows, might do both depending on seasonal factors? Imagine the damage a hurricane might do to those massive cliffs, for example.
That all sounds quite different from an immediate disaster. Those things apply to any river and those typically have a slope well in excess of that. Not that I would argue in favor of cutting a channel between the two but it doesn't sound as though this is an insurmountable problem, basically well within the elevation difference that even a single minor lock would be able to handle.
You might even have to add a pumping system to the lock to ensure that it would fill up fast enough.
Tides would take care of the filling. The Pacific tidal range is something like +-6.5m, the Atlantic side is <1m, plus whatever offset due to weather and phase error in the tidal times due to the earth being a sphere. A system of locks could handle it, that's exactly what the existing canal is after all. It's just more expensive and impractical to construct/maintain the deeper into the continent that canal cuts.
Ecologically, it's mainly about connecting the Atlantic and Pacific hydrologically. They're different temperatures, salinities, turbidities, etc.
Yes, but whatever the elevation difference if it were done at sea level (presumably the average between the two nominal levels on both sides) there would always be less water to be displaced in the resulting locks and that would in itself be a win, but the amount of material displaced to make the channel may well outweigh that by a considerable margin. I take it the engineers have run the numbers and decided that the current solution is the optimum or very close to it in terms of economics.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
[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.
> it's not entirely unreasonable to say "hey these two might be related" until new evidence and computer modeling is done.
No it's not. But in practice that sort of relation seems to have about a 10% chance of being an actual casual relationship.
> Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a safe bet.
When there is fuzzy evidence that X causes Y it is not safe to say "X causes Y" and I'm not willing to concede an exception to this when X = climate change.
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.
One, it was an empty LNG tanker. Two, the owner might still walk back from the bid. Three, the canal's capacitybis limited because of a lack of fresh water.
I highly recommend a visit to the Canal Museum in Panama City if you get a chance.
It has the original engineering drawings of many of the places the canal was proposed and surveyed and was going to be built before Panama was finalized for practicality and political reasons.
To quote my own blog from when I was there:
> The number one attraction in town is obviously The Canal and before visiting I make a stop at the museum in Casco Viejo which is amazing considering the tiny $2 admission price. My engineering background means I’m fascinated by the surveying work that was undertaken before construction began. One map in particular shows proposed routes through Tehuantepec in Mexico, through lake Nicaragua, through a couple of different places in Panama and finally one using a river mostly in modern-day Colombia. The decision didn’t actually come down to the “shortest” distance to dig as you might think, but primarily on how the mountain range through Central America would be dealt with. The final location chosen meant it was possible to create a huge in-land lake and use locks to elevate the ships 28 meters to that level.
Really, really fascinating. I went back for a second day.
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.
The $285k was not an estimation of what it costs to run a ship per day. They merely divided $4M by 14. So it was an estimation of how much saving two weeks to go around is worth to the highest bidder, per day.
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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...