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Bigger Isn't Better As Mega-Ships Get Too Big and Too Risky
HughPickens.com writes: Alan Minter writes at Bloomberg that between 1955 and 1975, the average volume of a container ship doubled -- and then doubled again over each of the next two decades. The logic behind building such giants was once unimpeachable: Globalization seemed like an unstoppable force, and those who could exploit economies of scale could reap outsized profits. But it is looking more and more like the economies of scale for mega-ships are not worth the risk. The quarter-mile-long Benjamin Franklin recently became the largest cargo ship ever to dock at a U.S. port and five more mega-vessels are supposed to follow. But today's largest container vessels can cost $200 million and carry many thousands of containers -- potentially creating $1 billion in concentrated, floating risk that can only dock at a handful of the world's biggest ports. Mega-ships make prime targets for cyberattacks and terrorism, suffer from a dearth of qualified personnel to operate them, and are subject to huge insurance premiums. But the biggest costs associated with these floating behemoths are on land -- at the ports that are scrambling to accommodate them. New cranes, taller bridges, environmentally perilous dredging, and even wholesale reconfiguration of container yards are just some of the costly disruptions that might be needed to receive a Benjamin Franklin and service it efficiently. Under such circumstances, you'd think that ship owners would start to steer clear of big boats. But, fearful of falling behind the competition and hoping to put smaller operators out of business, they're actually doing the opposite. Global capacity will increase by 4.5 percent this year. "Sooner or later, even the biggest operators will have to accept that the era of super-sized shipping has begun to list," concludes Minter. "With global growth and trade still sluggish, and the benefits of sailing and docking big boats diminishing with each new generation, ship owners are belatedly realizing that bigger isn't better."
So don't try to be bigger and better because you will be a target. Got it. Thanks, bullshit media!
I don't see anything in the links that really is specific to mega cargo ships except for the need to improve docks (tends to be a once off cost though). The decline in shipping affects ALL ships big and small and if anything the economies of scale will likely mean the smaller ships will be driven out of business first as the larger ships have reduced costs per container. the cyberattack and terrorism stuff is just a bullshit, any cargo ship carries potentially hundreds of millions in cargo and any are equally good targets, if anything the extra security and better trained crews on these make them somewhat safer.
While simplistic drivers favor ever larger ships every professional knows that change costs money. Increasing the volume of traffic is cheaper than serving an ever larger boat, but the environmental impact also changes with size making the total cost different for each and not always one way or the other. Perhaps maritime drones with solar power will become the transport of the future, but for now we are stuck with marine diesel with byproducts that make shellfish and crustaceans inedible, and which concentrates in ever higher vertebrates until it kills them. For now part of the answer is to reduce transoceanic shipping, especially between areas that are connected by land. The costs of the Russian trans siberian railway are large but come mainly from the gauge differences involved in shipping from China to Russia and then to the rest of Europe. Train technology could do with some improvement as the great-grandfather of all industrial technology and from it all else.
Nothing supports the summary and conclusion of the obviously biased author. Why is this crap accepted by the editorial staff. Oh, right, it's slashdot.
german economy newspaper FAZ covered this already in march: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wir...
Benjamin Franklin is possibly one of the greatest Americans ever. In fact, it is believed he took credit, through extensive use of the Pennsylvania Gazette, of proliferating the name "American" throughout the colonies in order to unite the people under a common name and cause. When people take pride in being an American, it's because of his efforts to get the people to stop being New Yorkers or Bostonians, etc...
Here is a megaship labeled "Benjamin Franklin... London". So his name is stamped on the ass of a ship that is registered in the place he fought against, because his own America has become less of a tyrant than England with regard to taxation.
Let me pause for a moment here and simply express myself with a question "Holy what the fucking fuck?"
Let's continue further and say that this ship is carrying cargo the wrong direction. Benjamin Frankly surely would have been pissed if he knew that his name was stamped on the ass of a megaship designed to carry everything from wind-up frogs to American flags all made in China while the American's shipped back raw materials and money. This ship damn near symbolizes the destruction of almost everything Benjamin worked his entire life to build.
Where the hell is the petition to remove his name from the ship... maybe label it the Genghis Khan instead or maybe just Earth Wrecker?
Ship transferred to Asia > Europe route from the west coast of the USA due to:
1) Insufficient demand
2) Suboptimal cargo port facilities
Ship transferred to different route
The so-called 'mega-ships' are not new
They have been prying he oceans for the past few years already
Major ports in Asia such as those in China, in Hongkong, in Korea, in Japan and in Singapore, plus ports in Europe such as the one in Rotterdam can support the mega-ships without any problem
Only the lazy Americans are crying foul, bring up all kinds of silly excuses, just so that they can 'escape' the inevitable
Mega ships (tankers, cruise ships, etc) strike a lot of whales. Search google images for "ship strike whale" for hilarious photos.
The Explorer class ships (to which Benjamin Franklin belongs) are built in South Korea and China.
And to add further insult to injury, the main engine is made in Finland!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Nothing supports the summary and conclusion of the obviously biased author. Why is this crap accepted by the editorial staff. Oh, right, it's slashdot.
I for one am glad we have these bullshit stories for me to troll and post nigger jokes on. If anything like actual news or important discussion was happening, I might feel a tinge of regret about that. But with a steady supply of steaming SHIT like this, I can continue with a clear conscience. You nigger.
These guys are developing something smaller, much smaller: http://anemoi.nz
> so-called 'mega-ships' are not new
> They have been prying he oceans for the past few years already
A lot longer than a few years. Caligula's "Giant Ship" was built 2,000 years ago. It was considered huge, 100 meters long. The Titanic was - well, titanic, at 269 meters. Sixty years later, the Nimitz was a mega ship at 332 meters. This week, the 400 meter Benjamin Franklin is a mega ship.
People have been building "the biggest ship ever built" for thousands of years.
Too risky for who? If the economics, including the cost of insurance, didn't favor bigger ships, they wouldn't get built.
Today I added "Benjamin Franklin" to my list of phrases replaced by "Big Cock"
...are just some of the costly disruptions that might be needed to receive a Benjamin Franklin and service it efficiently.
Thought for sure I'd get a "Hackers" reference here...
For a start cargo insurance isn't carried by a single entity, it is naturally spread around all the people who are shipping items. So a larger ship does not have a material effect on insurance as you still just insure your containers. Also, with ocean shipping, time taken is not as important as with air travel, so true hub and spoke systems can work exceptionally well. You use massive ships to carry between hubs and smaller ships to run to smaller ports. If it adds a week to the shipping no one really cares.
As for crew. The Benjamin Franklin requires 24 crew. That is hardly hundreds of hands that is going to have a material impact on the cost of shipping. The MSC which is slightly larger has a max crew capacity of 35 but are operated standard by a crew of 13, again not breaking any economics.
Oh but lets throw in "cyber terror attack"!!!! That will get them. Oh piss off. The thing is slow and in the middle of nowhere most of the time. If you could some how take control of the throttle and the rudder, and somehow prevent the crew from cutting fuel lines, dumping fuel or fouling the props you MIGHT be able to crash it into a dock. Which while it would make a spectacular mess aint exactly the scariest thing I've ever heard of.
I dont understand. It seems the only risk is the author doesn't like whats happening.
When the ship came to my town the local media was full of stories about people gawking at the huge behemoth. What's really unfortunate is that if people were seeing with their third eye rather than their deluded, sensual eyes which can be bedazzled, they would be lamenting such things, not celebrating them. That ship represents a human population that is spilling way out of control, killing Earth's ecosystems and wreaking environmental catastrophe. It represents the stripping of resources from Earth on vast scales which is totally unsustainable. That ship is a symbol of humankind's failure, not progress. If you don't believe it, wait 100 years.
What would be a true cause for celebration would be to *not* need such a ship, to limit our use of resources, to manage our population wisely, to live sustainably on Earth, not to continuously rape it on increasingly vast scales and act triumphalist about it.
Instead of going all postal, you might just take a minute for reflection.
Basically, economy is a kind of optimization algorithm running in a non-static environment with feedback. At the moment, you have an advantage in marginal costs by building ever bigger monsters. There's a time lag involved, mainly because of technology -- the shipyards and techniques have to be built, after all.
So things move towards bigger ships, in an analogue of good old "gradient descent". Companies either follow the trend or are outcompeted by lower marginal costs and go broke. Good old "market economy". Two issues spoil the thing:
- gradient descent is blind. Like a mole it follows its nose and is (most of the time) good at finding a local optimum... and gets stuck there. Two valleys further it is much greener and more fertile? Tough luck
- once the size of the thing (ship, but also semi fab, whatever) reaches the order of magnitude of the whole economy, strange things happen. The whole thing becomes highly non-linear (it was non-linear all the time, anyway) and difficult to understand.
You thought economists are shamans and spin doctors? Wait until the next phase of global economy really sets in.
Can we ban Hugh Pickens, please? Throw out BeauHD while you're at it.
This is terrible.
No, I'm not just adding to the heavenly choir of self-appointed negativists, that seem to flood into the wake of this article. Has somebody pissed in everybody's favourite drink today? As far as I can see, there is nothing factually wrong about this article; we all know about economy of scale, and we all ought to be able to understand the risks associated with having huge concentrations of valuable cargo floating around in the oceans with virtually no protection, as far as I know. Pirates have been targeting cargo ships in the waters West of Africa for years, and it seems obvious that at some point there will be more of this, organised by larger, international gangs. Add to this the fact that the larger the ship, the harder it is to maneuvre, and the bigger is the financial impact when a shipment is lost. It is not very surprising if we are now reaching the point where ship owners are beginning to feel nervous enough to start looking for alternative ways.
The obvious question, to the thoughtful and sover minded reader, is what can be done to address the problems? Should ships sail in convoys for protection? Should they always be accompanied by naval vessels with great agility and considerable striking power? How about the very significant environmental problems caused by shipping - perhaps it would be worth considering sail ships in some form, or sail assisted ships, and smaller cargoes? Or should we move to a much more localised for of production as much as possible? There are many problems, and loads of potential solutions, for those that can be bothered to think.
These things ought to be of interest to technically minded people - these are real-world problems, that are important to solve, as opposed to how many gigaflops are available on the graphics card in your game PC.
After all, these ships are too big to fail.
/sunglasses
Once upon a time there was SEA mail at all post offices. Postage was affordable or even cheap.
Then Came 9/11
Then SEA Mail went away, and everything had to be AIR Mailed, with extra for this and that extra for batteries.
The oil went to 140bbl and airmail became expensive say $5 lb to global destinations.
Then oil prices dropped to 48bbl and guess what - Airmail prices stayed the same.
Bring back SEA Mail. My rubber duckie or Chinese electric nose picker can wait a month.
Just fill in the oceans and drive across. (from the Irish department of Transport)
Let's continue further and say that this ship is carrying cargo the wrong direction. Benjamin Frankly surely would have been pissed if he knew that his name was stamped on the ass of a megaship designed to carry everything from wind-up frogs to American flags all made in China while the American's shipped back raw materials and money. This ship damn near symbolizes the destruction of almost everything Benjamin worked his entire life to build.
And that part in bold right there is to illustrate you don't know what the blubbery fuck you are talking about.
The trend these days is not to centralize and distribute, it is to localize. At least, when it comes to building things. More and more companies are looking to manufacture where they sell, and for many reasons. Among them, the risk of having your entire global manufacturing capacity in one place, the time to market impact of slow shipping, and failing to understand the target markets because you have no presence there and end up with poor or no VoC at all.
My company is global-local. We make the same sets of products, but we do it individually in the places we sell. We share technology within the company of course, but when it comes to our different markets, it pays big to design and manufacture locally.
We have no need to use container shipping because we have design centers and factories on every continent. The risk is spread, the products are more targeted, and we can be fast.
that's the real problem with this supply chain...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I realize that this is Slashdot and the centre of gravity for discussion is technology but I really think that storms at sea, fire, mislabeled volatile cargo and other more mundane issues are more likely to affect ships great and small than cyber attacks.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
When a ship is twice as heavy, energy usage to maintain the same speed is increased by 50%. This decreases the amount of fuel spend on transporting each ton of cargo. It is this specific part of physics, which makes money minded investors aim for big ships. It's the best both financially and environmentally. Also one 20k hp engine doesn't use twice as much fuel as one 10k hp engine because internal friction and similar aren't doubled. That's another reason for going big.
It's valid to talk about the issues in going big though. If things goes wrong, it goes very wrong in a short time. If an oil tanker sinks, the bigger it is, the worse it is for the local environment. The limited number of ports and the need for cranes is less of a concern. More people work on land than on sea in order to keep the container ships sailing. They calculate the financial risks and tradeoffs and if building that big would be stupid from a financial point of view, they wouldn't do it. They don't build a $200 million ship and go "oops, too big. Oh well. Let's just not use it". At that pricetag they planned for everything and consider all options, tradeoffs and risks.
The bigger your porn collection the riskier it is to store.
Really, the article simply illustrates the woefully ignorant state of reportage by "professional" news sources. No wonder the interwebs are kicking their ass.
The economies of scale are simply inarguable. The daily fuel consumption of a relatively ancient 8000-teu vessel is HIGHER than todays 18k+ teu ships like the Ben Franklin. IIRC it's about $25000/day.
And the fact that the US is scrambling to meet their infrastructure needs is more a comment on the decrepit state of US port and infrastructure that hasn't been materially upgraded since the 1970s. The rest of the world's major ports CAN handle them. (And handle them a shit-ton more efficiently thanks to US unions' lock on the shiphandling bottleneck.)
Ocean carrier profits are flat and worse, but that's nothing intrinsic to the size of the ships, there are just too many ships out there - and this was the result of ridiculous crude prices in the mid 2000s that prompted carriers all more or less simultaneously to make the long-term investment in new vessels. And considering a 10,000 teu ship would cost $150 million, they might as well build a 20,000 teu ship for $200, no?
The market currently reflects this gross surplus of capacity, that's all. As these carriers' new big ships all start to come online, what they'll do is retire the crappy, inefficient, polluting smaller older ships and replace say a 5 vessel string with 2-3 new ones. This means the same bandwidth, but less-frequent sailings.
Yes, the industry is due for a round of consolidation, but there's a certain point where the smaller carriers - the Yang Mings, the Zims, etc - aren't operating for profit anyway, they're being sustained by their state as a strategic/commercial resource. The largest carriers are (over the last 16 months) slaughtering each other on the TPEB and Asia/Europe routes, but that's each other and is likely to sort itself out long before pricing ultimately is transmitted through the value chain to the retail level.
It's too bad that Bloomberg couldn't have been bothered to find a professional reporter that understood the market.
-Styopa
Is "terrorism" the new word for "crime", and "terrorist" for "criminal"? We're going to need new dictionaries because I don't see how stealing cargo from a ship is poloitoical coercion or a method of resisting government
Twinstiq, game news
Carting is an economic activity mentioned by Adam Smith himself in the Wealth of nations. Making carting inefficient, overloading it with costs will be equivalent to levying tariff on imported goods (our exports are simply imports for our trade partners). Piracy, terrorism, insurance premia ... anything that makes shipping more costly will create more jobs in the USA.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"suffer from a dearth of qualified personnel to operate them"
I guarantee you that the bigger ships require the same sort of people as the smaller ships, just far far less of them relative to how much cargo is carried.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
especially on fue
I know I'm repeating myself from the thread about Oasis-class ocean liner, but... How come this kind of mega-ship is powered by burning fuel ?!
Explorer-class container ships (e.g.: the mentioned CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin) are bigger and heavier than Nimitz class Aircraft carriers (e.g.: USS Georges H.W. Bush), and the later are powered by nuclear reactors.
I can understand that, in the case of tourism vessels, nuclear propulsion might sound as potential target for pirate/terrorists (though that hasn't prevent Russia to operate a few exploring/tourism nuclear vessels around the north pole).
But in the case of megaships? All the ware stored in the containers is *already* a potential target for piracy (as mentioned in the summary). Compared to potential billions worth of stolen merchandise, the nuclear propulsion is probably pocket change. It won't add much to the security challenge that these megaships are already facing.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And if any competent person had written the article, that would have been made clear in the first sentence or two.
I would have basically structured it that way: "Back before the recession ... blah blah blah ... economies of scale yadda yadda ... big ships [...] Now yadda yadda ... excess capacity ... blah blah blah ... small ships".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Ships are getting bigger and bigger not because of "globalization", it is all down to physics and fuel costs.
Imagine a ship with length L. The hold volume ~ L^3, the drag area of the hull goes with L^2. Double the ship size, holding everything else constant, you move twice as much cargo volume for the same fuel.
Things get even better if you go for really, really big ships going at slow speed. Fuel burn goes with velocity cubed V^3, so for a given ship, if you half the velocity, your fuel burn per unit volume of cargo is reduced to 1/8th of that at the original velocity.
Physics and fuel economics is pushing the industry to use massive, slow container ships. Another cost benefit is that having fewer, bigger ships means paying less crew for the entire fleet.
These savings will have to be balanced with the insurance and security costs associated with a single vessel containing such a massive quantity of valuable goods, but "globalization" isn't the prime motivator.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
They will be big enough...when you don't "sail" the ship, you just drive a truck or run a train across the ship to cross the Pacific.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Given that the guy's surname is Minter, I'm kinda disappointed that the article title isn't "Attack of the Mutant Mega-Ships".
Maga-ships are much more fuel efficient per ton-mile. Given the Saudi's dumping on the market, bunker fuel is pretty close to free right now, so speeds are up and smaller ships are more profitable. When the price of fuel oil goes up, the bigger ships will become more valuable.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook/03...
Now imagine a ship more than twice as long, suspended at bow and stern over the void. Snap!
http://www.nap.edu/read/11635/...
".... With the current trend toward larger vessels and longer voyages, the risk to mariners is increasing and the ability to avoid rogue waves takes on an even greater importance. I get the impression that certain classes of vessels have overemphasized construction economies at the expense of crew safety. In conducting the research for this book, I was shocked at , somewhere in the world. Ironically, with the environmental sensitivity that exists today in most parts of the world, if an oil tanker spills a few hundred barrels of oil on someoneâ(TM)s beach, it is front-page news. But let a 650-foot-long bulk carrier suddenly disappear with 30,000 tons of cargo and its entire crew, and it may only be noted in passing in the newspapers...."
http://www.nap.edu/read/11635/...
Pretty obvious what the risks are.
Is it really that much more efficient?
Why don't we just spend $200 million to build a pair of hyperloop-like tubes across the sea floor--then we can zip cargo containers back and forth zippity-split all day long.
The ocean is vast and deep, my friends, and insurance is cheap.
My question is: Is a ship without a sail still "sailing"?
".... With the current trend toward larger vessels and longer voyages, the risk to mariners is increasing and the ability to avoid rogue waves takes on an even greater importance. I get the impression that certain classes of vessels have overemphasized construction economies at the expense of crew safety. In conducting the research for this book, I was shocked at , somewhere in the world. Ironically, with the environmental sensitivity that exists today in most parts of the world, if an oil tanker spills a few hundred barrels of oil on someone's beach, it is front-page news. But let a 650-foot-long bulk carrier suddenly disappear with 30,000 tons of cargo and its entire crew, and it may only be noted in passing in the newspapers...."
http://www.nap.edu/read/11635/...
Honestly? You are surprised by this?
You spill a bunch of oil on my beach and I care...
Some ship goes awol in the middle of nowhere, and I don't.
This is the same for hard drives.
The larger the capacity the more there is that can be lost.
The higher the density the more delicate it is.
Therefore I suggest megaships be in arrays like RAID and make floatups!
Pity you didn't bother to think either.
Everyone already thought about all those things, and guess what. Big boats won, the bigger the better. More efficient, more environmentally friendly. Even if you are thinking piracy, 1 big ship is much easier to protect than a bunch of smaller ones.
No. Terrorism by definition implies political motives. Look it up. A mugger has no political motives for their crime.