The big question of toll rates is still unanswered
Assessments of the impact of the widened Panama Canal are needing rethinking.
Firstly, the common fiction that 12,000 TEU will be the post-Panamax standard has been demolished. It's now 14,000 TEU, but don't expect rows of vessels to be lining up outside ports, their masters fuming because the main channels are too shallow. (The maximum draft through the canal will be 50 feet. Only two East Coast ports can take the bigger vessels, Baltimore and Norfolk.)
Latest expert wisdom is that 6,000-8,000TEU vessels will be calling at East Coast ports. The only difficulty with this assessment is that these sizes are rapidly being done away with – 48 percent of the world fleet will be post-Panamax by 2014.
What's more, the volume of traffic through the canal will increase only moderately. At this month's Northwest Intermodal conference in Portland, Oregon, Rodolfo Sabonge, vice president of market research and analysis for the canal, said, “We’re not expecting more transits – it’s economies of scale. We don’t think the expansion of the canal is really going to have the tremendous impact that people seem to think there will be on the intermodal system. We see growth around the world that will allow the Canal to maintain market share and provide many new opportunities – we think this will be the game changer.”
Railroad and distribution executives agreed that most of the traffic switch from the West Coast has already taken place.
A Panama Canal Authority study last year found that post-Panamax vessels will have 18 percent more productivity and a 40 percent increase in total service capacity.
This was based on a Suez example of a weekly service of 11 vessels of 8000 TEU serving the East Coast ports in 2008. They had an annual productivity of 38,000 TEU each and total annual service of 410,000TEU. The same service of 4800TEU through Panama has an annual productivity of 31,000 TEU/vessel and total service capacity of 248,000TEU/year.
Most hopes for the canal's future are being pinned on cost savings. A figure of about $400/TEU compared with intermodal rates from the West Coast was mentioned at the Portland conference.
The most important figure has still to be made known – toll charges – which could make nonsense of all cost projections. These are still secret and nothing has been said either as to whether they will be based on capacity or load.
(To see a schematic of the dimensions of the new locks go to http://www.pancanal.com/eng/expansion/informes-de-avance/brochure-eng-2010-v2.pdf and scroll down to Page 7)