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Chapter 10 Waterborne Freight

We’re at a transition. So far, we’ve looked at a bit of physical geography (Files 1 and 2), some natural resources geography (Files 3, 4, and 5), and at manufacturing, services, and cities (Files 6, 7, 8, and 9). Now we’re going to look at transportation (Files 8, 9, 10, and 11), which ties these things together. We’re going to look at transportation modally, which is a fancy way of saying by type: waterborne freight, railroads, highways, and air transport. Along the way we’ll often hear the word “intermodal,” referring to freight that uses more than one of these types while moving from origin to destination. Besides using transportation to integrate economic geography, I have another motive for spending a lot of time on this subject. So far in this class, we’ve done very little of what many students expect in a geography class: namely, learning the location of places. Well, we’ve done a bit, but it’s always been indirect: where this comes from, where that comes from. Transportation, on the other hand, is just full of locations, and by spending time on it I can chase you to enlarge your place-name vocabulary. So here’s a map showing the world’s commercial shipping at ten in the morning on January 15, 2017. Green is cargo vessels; red is oil tankers; orange is fishing boats. I think it’s a pretty fantastic image, though the ocean is so big that most of the ships aren’t in sight of each other.

http://www.marinetraffic.com/

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Zoom in and you see tankers clustered in the Gulf of Mexico. Cargo vessels of one type or another are running up and down the coasts as well as along the St. Lawrence into the Great Lakes. (Circles indicate ships at anchor.) Tugs, in light blue, are pushing barges on the Mississippi and Ohio.

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Eurasia is even busier, with tankers running east and west from the Middle East and cargo ships running between Europe and the Far East.

Many ships don’t bother with Suez but instead take the long way around Africa. Why? Because the average cargo vessel spends $250,000 more on fuel that way but saves the $500,000 toll that Suez charges. (Ouch!)

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Lots of ships stop at Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and especially Durban, which is the main port for Johannesburg. There is also a more general flow of cargo ships and oil tankers rounding the Cape.

I say the Cape, and you probably think I mean the Cape of Good Hope. But if you look at the map more carefully, you’ll see that the Cape of Good Hope, near Cape Town, really isn’t the southern tip of Africa. The “real” cape is Cape Agulhas.

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It’s pretty lonely down there, and not very good swimming. Lots of surf—and sharks.

The southern tip of South America is even lonelier. The most southerly bit of land is an island called Hornos, from which we get (as you learned in third grade) the name Cape Horn. Some mariners choose to go south of it, an open-ocean route known as the Drake Passage, from Sir Francis. (In this image, two container ships are just south of Hornos and the cluster of islands (the Wollaston Islands) of which it’s part.) There’s a short-cut past Ushuaia. That’s the Beagle Channel, famous from Charles Darwin’s voyage on the ship of that name. There’s another shortcut past Punta Arenas. That route is called the Strait of Magellan. It looks busy, but big ships take the Drake Passage.

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There are crowded spots on the map, too. Here are two of the most critical: the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca. Shut these narrows down and you have a big problem, especially because so much oil passes through them on its way to East Asia.

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=330

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Here’s Hormuz on December 9, 2017.

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Here’s Malacca at the same time.

Tight fit: Singapore Strait is less than two miles wide. (Batam Island on the south is in Indonesia.)

www.Marinetraffic.com

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Another tight fit: about 500 ships pass through the English Channel daily, which is why the Dover Traffic Separation System was created. It requires ships to travel on one side of the channel or the other, as you can see. Collisions still occur, especially in bad weather. The English Channel at its narrowest is about 20 miles across, so it’s not quite as crowded as it seems; on the other hand, there are ferries crossing at right angles to the through-traffic. They’re shown in dark blue.

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All the images in the last pages are based on tracking devices that ships are supposed to carry. Bear in mind that captains sometimes turn those devices off. Here’s a good example, showing how North Korea imports oil that, according to international sanctions, it should not be able to buy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fake-signals-and-illegal-flags-how-north-korea-uses-clandestine-shipping-to-fund-regime-1543402289?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=5

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What kind of ships sail the seas? We’ve touched on this a bit just by picking out the various colors on marinetraffic.com, but I want to dig a bit, beginning with this tombstone at Port Chalmers, New Zealand. It marks the spectacular achievement of one sea captain in the last days of sail.

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There are still sailing ships on the seas, though most have supplemental engines. Here’s a group of phinisi, two-masters still built in Indonesia.

Chief article of freight: lumber coming to Java from the Outer Islands, especially Sulawesi.

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Steamships gradually replaced sail, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal, where the winds are so calm that sailing ships can’t get through. At the same time, ships that used to go wherever they had cargoes (“tramps”) were replaced by ships that had set routes that they regularly followed (“liners”). A famous example is the liners operated by the P&O, or Peninsular and Orient company. (“Peninsular” refers to the Iberian Peninsula.) P&O still exists, but it’s a subsidiary of Dubai’s DP World and operates ferries.

http://cruiselinehistory.com/po-lines-ss-ranchi/

https://www.antipodean.com/pages/books/23272/peninsular-oriental-steam-navigation-co/peninsular-oriental-steam-navigation-companys-guide-book-for-passengers-printed-for-the-chicago

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In the days before container ships, everything was manhandled. The term for freight handled piece by piece is “breakbulk.” Here, on an abandoned dock in London, is a monument to breakbulk handling. You look at it and think that all the stuff would tumble into the water. In fact, such shipments were usually hoisted in nets called slings.

More like this. Still, losses were high.

http://www.buffalohistorygazette.net/2011/02/it-never-rained-on-cincinnati-street.html

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Everything was handled this way, including oil: here’s a Shell dock in the East Indies as late as 1925.

And here’s the first tanker, built to handle oil more efficiently. It reads “Zoroaster,” and beginning in 1878 it carried oil in two iron tanks from the fields at Baku on the Caspian to the mouth of the Volga River and from there upstream, connecting all the way to the Baltic Sea.

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Tankers have grown a bit since then.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323741004578418652461117968 Zoroaster carried 242 tons of oil. This baby carries over 400,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-class_supertanker

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The Knock Nevis was built in 1979. A dinosaur, she was too big to go through the English Channel, let alone Suez.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valemax It was eventually taken to Alang, on the west coast of India, beached, and broken up for scrap.

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General purpose tankers are sometimes called “Handymax.” Panamax is the biggest that can fit through the Panama Canal. Aframax has nothing to do with Africa and comes instead from “average freight rate assessment.” Suezmax, as you would expect, is the biggest that can fit through Suez. Most ULCC’s have been scrapped as too large to be very useful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_tanker There are still over 500 Very Large Crude Carriers, however, and they have almost half of the capacity of the world’s tanker fleet.

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Tankers are owned mostly by companies that are invisible to the public and which change from decade to decade, if not from year to year. In 2009 the top three were Frontline (Bermuda based), Teekay (also Bermuda based), and MOL (Tokyo based). Among the top thirty, two were well-known container-ship operators (Maersk at 14 and Cosco at 18) and two were major oil companies (BP at19 and Chevron at 20).

http://www.tankeroperator.com/pastissues/to09review.pdf

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Ten years later, Frontline had slipped to No. 10, Teekay had slipped to No. 8, and MOL had slipped to No. 5. The top three were now Cosco (Beijing), Euronav (Antwerp), and Bahri (Riyadh). Maersk was still in the business, though it had slipped from 14th to 19th place, and no oil company familiar to consumers was still operating tankers. They probably told themselves, “Remember the Exxon Valdez.” You remember it, don’t you? It was the biggest tanker spill ever in American waters, though there have been bigger ones elsewhere. The ship caused Exxon a lot of grief, was sold, renamed (several times), then deliberately beached in 2012 and broken up for scrap at Alang, the Indian graveyard of the Knock Nevis, too. Here’s a ship that looks like a tanker but isn’t. It’s a dry bulk carrier, in this case one for iron ore. It’s a Valemax ship, built as Vale’s response to the transportation advantage enjoyed by BHP and Rio Tinto, whose mines are a lot closer to China than Vale’s. It’s a funny story, because the Chinese refused to allow Valemax ships to enter Chinese ports. “Unsafe.” Vale began selling the ships to Chinese operators. Presto: the objections went away. The other solution, you may recall, was to unload Valemax ships in Malaysia, then reload onto smaller vessels.

http://www.vale.com/EN/initiatives/innovation/valemax/Pages/default.aspx

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Here’s the map of world iron-ore flows. No big surprises here: Australia and Brazil dominate as exporters, China is the biggest importer.

https://businessmining.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/iron-ore-flows-2015-bhp.png

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Here’s a comparable map for coal shipments. Australia and Indonesia dominate as exporters; China dominates among importers. (Yes, the mapmaker slipped on spelling Colombia. It’s an easy mistake for Americans.)

http://file.scirp.org/Html/3-1210028/76826f20-0f6d-4e42-8b74-d3523c730dcf.jpg

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Iron ore and coal together constitute more than half the world’s dry-bulk traffic. The next most important commodities are grain and bauxite/alumina. The pie chart also shows phosphate rock, chiefly used in the manufacture of fertilizer.

http://www.marinemoney.com/sites/all/themes/marinemoney/forums/MMWeek13/presentations/Wednesday/11%2015%20AM%20Doug%20Mavrinac%20-%20Dry%20Bulk.pdf Traffic in these commodities has grown largely because of Chinese demand.

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So far we’ve look at tankers (red on the chart below) and dry-bulk carriers (green). Now it’s time for the “other dry” cargo, which brings us to container ships and roll-on/roll-off (or “ro-ro”) vehicle carriers.

http://scenariothinking.org/wiki/index.php/The_Future_of_Maritime_trade_in_2020_and_the_implications_for_the_port_of_Amsterdam

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Here’s an example of a vehicle carrier with a typically boxy shape so vehicles can drive on and off the stern (as well as off the side you don’t see here). From some angles, ro-ro vessels don’t even look like ships. This one is the “Wisteria Ace,” which I caught at Fremantle, Western Australia early in 2016. It’s longer than it looks: fully 200 meters. A few months later, when I uploaded this photo, the ship was approaching the Panama Canal.

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These car carriers are vital to the world’s automotive industry. Here, for example, is a depot at the port of Tyne, on the east coast of England. Cars are parked here prior to export.

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Where are the cars coming from? Answer: from a factory five miles to the south, where Nissan runs the UK’s biggest auto assembly plant. It’s at Sunderland. The plant in 2014 made over half a million vehicles, most for export through Tyne.

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The Nissan plant couldn’t function without the port.

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Finally we come to container ships and the container revolution. They lowered shipping costs so much that it’s probably fair to say that the spectacular economic growth of China in the last 40 years could not have happened without them. Here’s the guy who basically invented container ships back in the glorious 1950s. His name was Malcom (that’s the way he spelled it) McLean. His company was called Sea Land. It got merged out of existence long ago. Here he is with a few of his containers and some gantry cranes to load and unload them.

http://logisticshalloffame.net/en/members/malcom-mclean

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Here’s his first ship, the Ideal X, a converted tanker. It’s carrying 56 containers.

https://www.joc.com/maritime-news/container-lines/flashback-slide-show-container-shipping-turns-60_20160426.html?page=0%2C4 Here’s a more recent container ship, with a capacity over 15,000 containers (or “cans” or “boxes,” depending on who’s talking). This particular ship belongs to Maersk, the Danish company that runs the world’s biggest fleet of container ships.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-30700269

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Ports around the world have been transformed by containerization. Here’s Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in the 1950s. (We were here a few pages ago for the tombstone of Peter Logan, that 19th century captain with the speed record for sailing from the UK.) On the left is a pier for train ferries; on the right, a dock from which to handle breakbulk freight.

Here’s the same place today, with containerized operations, plus a couple of cruise ships.

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The impact of containerization on the world economy can hardly be exaggerated. The pin here marks Pohnpei, one of the islands in the Federated States of Micronesia. It’s 2,700 miles southwest of Honolulu.

Here’s a close-up, with the only town up top: Kolonia.

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Here’s Kolonia up close. At the lower right there’s a supermarket, sort of. We think of Ace as a chain of hardware stores, but in some places it’s more diversified.

Here’s part of it.

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Look what’s inside. How on earth did it get here?

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Not this way.

Nor this way.

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But this way, in refrigerated containers. I asked at the store whether the boxes came from Hawaii or Guam. “Hawaii,” was the answer, but the store had other stuff from Australia and New Zealand. This particular ship is registered in Singapore.

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As you might expect, more than half of all container traffic comes from Asia, chiefly China. (The ordinal axis refers to TEU’s, “twenty-foot equivalent units,” the standard measure of containers.)

http://www.joc.com/maritime-news/container-lines/how-container-changed-world-infographic_20150430.html

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Here the country of origin for container traffic. No contest.

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It stands to reason that China has invested heavily not only in ships but in developing the container terminals where ships load and unload. Hong Kong’s Hutchison is the largest of these Chinese investors, but don’t sneeze at China Merchants or at Cosco (China Overseas Shipping Company, unrelated to Costco!).

https://ig.ft.com/sites/china-ports/

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The most important items shipped in 20-foot boxes are stone, glass, and metals—all heavy. In 40-foot boxes (which count as two TEU’s) machinery and furniture. In 45-foot boxes, furniture and textiles—lightweight stuff. Logical, no? The most popular size is the 40-foot box, which accounts for about 70 percent of all traffic. The table here shows where container shipments to the U.S. came from in 2010. East Asia dominates, as you’d expect.

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Here’s what they carried. (The abbreviation HS refers to the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System, used in tariff calculations.)

http://www.pnnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_reports/PNNL-21088.pdf

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The dominant route for containerized freight is a mid-latitude, northern hemisphere belt crossing the North Atlantic, rimming Asia, then crossing the Pacific. South America, Africa, and Australia are afterthoughts. Second key point: the world’s major ports are clustered around the North Sea, the coast of East Asia, and the coasts of the United States.

PART ONE

http://nicolasrapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/F21CHAv2-1.jpg

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With the exception of Dubai, the world’s busiest container ports are all in East Asia. Bear in mind that the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are adjacent but administratively separate. Put them together and they handled 14 million 20-foot equivalent units or TEUs, almost enough for them to have made this list. They’d still handle less than half the number of containers passing through Shanghai.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_busiest_container_ports

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Here’s the port of Shanghai, which as you see from my artistry is actually two ports. The older one is the one on the banks of the Yangtze.

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The newer one is on an artificial island, Yangshan, with 60 gantry cranes in a single lineup.

Here’s part of Hong Kong’s container terminal.

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There’s not a lot of manufacturing in Hong Kong, so where are the containers coming from? China, of course: see the trucks piled up at the border? They’re waiting to cross into Hong Kong.

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Why should Chinese shippers bother with Hong Kong: why not ship directly from their side of the border? Good point: here’s Yantian, only a few miles from Hong Kong. Yantian makes Hong Kong very nervous, because shipping from Yantian is cheaper. For the moment Hong Kong’s advantage is its more reliable financial and legal system: call it the paperwork advantage.

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And here’s Singapore, another very efficient port and for many years the world leader for container handling. The view here is Jurong Island, with more cranes than Yangshan.

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Here’s brave Tanjung Pelapas, just a few miles north of Singapore but in Malaysia. The port was developed as a cheaper alternative to expensive Singapore. Why “brave”? Because Singapore didn’t like the competition and told ship owners that if they berthed at Tanjung they weren’t welcome in Singapore. Still, Tanjung seems to be doing all right: lately it’s been among the world’s twenty busiest container ports.

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Over on the other side of Eurasia, the biggest container port is Rotterdam. To relieve congestion there, an island has been built at the mouth of the Rhine (technically this is the Maas or Meuse, but it’s the chief outlet of the Rhine).

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The city’s first container port was at Heiplaat.

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Farther west, beyond Pemis, there’s a line of oil refineries belonging to Shell, Exxon, and others, the last one labelled MET for Maatschap Europoort Terminal, a tanker-to-pipeline oil terminal. The Shell refinery on the right is Europe’s largest, with a capacity of 400,000 barrels per day. (The biggest in the U.S., you may recall, is Motiva’s Port Arthur refinery at 600,000.)

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Beyond MET, there’s Kuwait Petroleum and still more tank farms. When you get to Europe on vacation, you’ll really want to check this out. What’s that: you say you’ll take a pass? Truth is, it’s not so easy to check this out on the ground. It’s not on the tourist itinerary.

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Finally, we get to the new island, Maasvlakte (Maas Plain). In addition to the oil tanks on the north, there’s a new container terminal and a dry-bulk terminal. Judging from the colors I’d say it was for iron ore and coal. There's also room to grow farther west.

Here’s a close-up of part of the container terminal.

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Several terminal companies operate here. Here’s one of them, APM Terminals, owned by Maersk.

http://www.apmterminals.com/operations/europe/rotterdam The initials APM come from Arnold Peter Moller (1876-1965), Maersk’s founder.

http://worldkings.org/news/world-top/top-100-business-founders-in-the-world-no-2-arnold-peter-moller-maersk-group

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Here it is again, Europe's busiest port. You might wonder why it is more important than French ports. Part of the reason is the Rhine, which ferryies containers upstream and down on barges, but another part of it is that French ports are run by local governments and staffed by militant union members. I’m not taking a stand against either: I’m just pointing out that privately run, non-union ports are more efficient. Choose your poison: better conditions for workers or cheaper prices for shippers and consumers.

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What about North America? Here’s our busiest container port, the twin ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. Unionized? You bet. Run by port authorities? Not so much. These ports are hybrids where port authorities have leased terminals to various private companies.

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Another view.

http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=33.745253&lon=-118.237953&z=14&m=w&search=long%20beach

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Here’s the port on April 3, 2020. The green dots are container ships; the blue ones are mostly tugs, and the purple dots are yachts or pleasure boats.

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-118.240/centery:33.760/zoom:13 A close-up of the area below the label Terminal Island on the image above.

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Over on the east coast, there’s the port of New York. In the old days, there were many docks wrapping Manhattan and Brooklyn, but both those places are islands, which makes them awkward for anything going anywhere else. That’s why the container terminals are in New Jersey, across the Hudson.

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But don’t feel too bad for Brooklyn; the industrial waterfront has morphed to high-priced residential real estate. Want an $11 beer? No problem, just visit the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, one of the neighborhoods. See the IKEA? It’s a big change for Red Hook, a neighborhood described by Life magazine years ago as the “crack capital of America.” Here’s a little gallery of current photos of that neighborhood: https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2016/10/16/realestate/living-in-red-hook-brooklyn/s/16LIVING-RED-HOOK-slide-GGC3.html

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The docks in Manhattan, too, are now obsolete, though you can see a cruise ship docked at Pier 88.

Here’s the New York port authority’s own crude map. And, yes, there’s still a small terminal in Brooklyn, but it has only four cranes. APM has a terminal on the New Jersey side.

http://www.panynj.gov/port/containerized-cargo.html#

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The big news in 2016 for container ships coming to the U.S. from Asia was the opening of the “third lane” of the Panama Canal. The old canal could only handle container ships with a capacity of 5,000 boxes or fewer; now the canal can handle ships with a capacity of 14,000. Ships bound for the East Coast from Asia, but too big for the old Panama Canal, used to have to either head west from Asia and go through Suez or around Africa or, alternatively, spend an extra five days steaming around the southern tip of South America. Now, unless the ships are super big, they can go through the enlarged Panama Canal.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-panama-canal-expands-1466378348

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Enlarging the canal was a gamble: Panama spent $5 billion on the project. Seems to have been smart: look how tonnage jumped over 20 percent in the first year after the project’s completion. Revenues jumped over $200 million.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-panama-canals-big-bet-is-paying-off-1507464000

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Before the canal’s enlargement, containers heading to the shaded area would probably have been unloaded on the West Coast and then shipped east by train. With the canal now capable of handling really big ships, containers going from Asia to Cleveland, Columbus, Louisville, Memphis, and Dallas may head to East Coast or Gulf ports. The principle, as always, is that a mile on the water is cheaper than a mile by rail (and much cheaper than a mile by truck). Who else loses, besides the West Coast and U.S. railroads? How about the Suez Canal, which cut its rates steeply to discourage shippers from switching to the enlaged Panama Canal.

https://www.ft.com/content/0e43acfa-9344-11e7-a9e6-11d2f0ebb7f0?sharetype=share

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Where will those containers land on the East Coast, besides New York? Here are the major ones, along with the biggest ships they can handle.

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Here’s how many containers pass through those ports annually. New York may dominate the East Coast, but Savannah, Norfolk, and Charleston are ambitious. (Combine L.A. and Long Beach to appreciate how completely that pair dominates the national picture.)

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I’ve circled Charleston’s three container terminals. I’ve also underlined the two major railyards that will carry containers inland.

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Many ports work primarily as transshipment points transferring containers from one ship to another. We’ve already seen Singapore and Tanjung Pelapas, which are good examples. Here’s another, Salala, on the south coast of Oman. Suppose an order of televisions is going from China to Johannesburg. They’re sent on a big ship to Salala, then put on a smaller one for the rest of the trip.

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Here’s Algeciras, a port specializing in transshipment to and from Brazil. As you can see from the lower image, it's located just inside the Strait of Gibraltar (at Tarifa), which is perhaps 20 miles west of the famous rock. Huge ships from Asia drop their Brazil-bound containers here for reloading onto smaller vessels heading to Brazil.

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Here's Gioia Tauro, in the toe of Italy and specializing in transshipment between North American East Coast ports and East Asia. For years, Gioia Tauro was also a major destination for Colombian cocaine, but lately the cocaine traffic has shifted north.

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Only about one in ten containers is inspected. Inspecting more would of course slow down smuggling, but it would also slow down everything else, and time is money. Here’s a picture of heroin found in 2019 on a Maersk ship docked in the UK. 1.3 tons of heroin was seized. The obvious question is how much wasn’t.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/global-shipping-faces-troubling-new-smuggling-questions-11578330634?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2

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We’ve already met Maersk. Here are its competitors, ranked by TEU’s or 20-foot equivalent units. Down the list a bit you’ll see APL, which used to be American President Lines. The company was sold to Neptune Orient of Singapore in 1997 and then changed its name to just the three letters. That name survives, but a company higher up the list, CMA CGM, bought Neptune Orient in 2016.

https://ig.ft.com/sites/china-ports/

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Here’s a listing of the biggest shipping container companies in 2018 Notice anything funny about it. Right: not a single U.S. company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_freight_transport

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Federal regulations make U.S.-based fleets uncompetitive except in American waters. They’re safe there, thanks to the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, commonly called the Jones Act, which permits only U.S. flagged ships to handle traffic between U.S. ports. That how Matson survives, relying on shipments to Alaska, Hawaii, and Guam. Its website boasts about the number of international containers the company handles, but compare that number with the chart on the last page!

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Global competition between the world’s big shipping companies is fierce, all the more so because they’re plagued by excess capacity and periodic slumps in traffic. Note the declining traffic in 2015 at all these ports except Shanghai.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/once-bustling-trade-ports-in-asia-and-europe-lose-steam-1461696304

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Shipping prices are volatile, too. The cost of shipping one container across the Pacific jumped during 2012 from under $1,500 to over $2,500; in 2015 it fell from $2,200 to about half that.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21677209-largest-container-lines-are-bulking-up-try-withstand-fresh-downturn-big-box-game

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What to do? The ship owners would like to consolidate. To that end, Maersk in 2017 bought Hamburg Sűd, which handles about a quarter of all Brazil’s shipments.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/maersk-line-buys-german-container-shipper-hamburg-sud-1480590315

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Objections from shippers fearful of monopoly have made further consolidation difficult and instead forced ship owners into alliances a lot like the airline alliances you may know about—for example, United belonging to the Star Alliance, Delta belonging to SkyTeam, and American belonging to Oneworld. The two biggest container-ship operators, APM-Maersk and Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) between them handle over a quarter of all containers worldwide. If they pooled their shipments, they could operate one full ship, rather than two competing ships, each half full. Presto: welcome the 2M Alliance. Not a merger; just working together.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/072a6eec-9213-11e5-bd82-c1fb87bef7af.html#axzz3spfbyuOX

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Here’s a clarifying video produced for CMA CGM’s Ocean Alliance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tju4Kk-Cl1w Just as the airlines in their alliances have tried to create brand awareness by painting the words OneWorld or Star Alliance or SkyTeam on their planes, so here are some containers belonging to one or more of the companies (Mitsui, K-Line, and NYK line) that have formed the Ocean Network Express (ONE).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/japan-catches-up-with-shipping-consolidation-1526031000?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

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We’ll see how these alliances work out, but initial indicators aren’t very encouraging. Compare the actual cost of moving a container with the breakeven costs for the shipping companies. It seems that the companies are still losing money, both on shipments from Asia to Europe and from Asia to the U.S. West Coast.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/japan-catches-up-with-shipping-consolidation-1526031000?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

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In the meantime, we can look at Maersk operations. (You may already have a sense of them because one starred in “Captain Phillips,” the Tom Hanks movie about a hijacking off the coast of Somalia). Here are some route maps from the company’s website. This key route travels from Kobe in Japan to Shanghai, then to Yantian and Hong Kong before touching Tanjung Pelapas and continuing on through Suez to the biggest UK container port, Felixstowe. From there the ship continues to Rotterdam, which it reaches 31 days after leaving Kobe.

http://www.maerskline.com/en-us/shipping-services/routenet/maersk-line-network/overview

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Never heard of Felixstowe? You’ve got company. A hundred years ago, London was a major port, but no longer: the Thames isn’t big enough to handle today’s ships. Here’s a bit of London’s Victoria Dock, opened in 1855 in a bend of the Thames and closed in 1983. We’re about seven miles downstream from Big Ben.

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The Thames does have container ports such as this one, London Gateway, about 20 miles downstream from the Victoria Dock. It opened in 2013.

Felixstowe, which got a big head start (it opened in 1967) is far bigger, handling about half the UK’s container traffic. It’s owned by Hutchison, the Hong Kong operator, but that’s not so unusual: the London Gateway belongs to DP, Dubai Ports.

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Here’s Felixstowe.

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Notice that while Felixstowe is the UK’s most important container port, it’s total tonnage is far behind others. The dark green is petroleum, and the rust color is automobiles for export.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/826446/port-freight-statistics-2018.pdf

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Here’s another Maersk including France, Singapore, and South Korea.

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Here’s a transatlantic route. Travel time from Newark to Rotterdam is 12 days.

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Here’s a U.S.-Middle East route. Transit time from Dubai to Colombo is six days.

Here’s a route dedicated to connecting South Africa to Algeciras. The containers are almost certainly not starting or stopping there; instead they are likely being transshipped to or from vessels heading to Northern Europe or the Far East.

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This transpacific route originates in Taiwan before getting to China.

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Here we have a route that connects several Brazilian ports with the Mediterranean.

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Maersk has been skeptical about the impact of global warming on its operations. Other companies aren’t. Cosco is already planning on using the Northeast Passage from Europe to Asia. The advantage: a journey shorter by about two weeks. The biggest disadvantage may be that shipping companies will be dependent on Russian cooperation. Can they count on it? Nobody knows.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-shipper-cosco-to-schedule-regular-trans-arctic-sailings-1446133485

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Before we leave container ships, let’s glance at the industry from the perspective of Ivanka Trump. Here’s where her products were made before she closed the business in 2018.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/ivanka-trump-overseas/?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.fc9bb3ce276f Washington Post researchers found that between January 2016 and May 2017 four ships carried her Vietnamese jackets to the port of Tacoma (Seattle). (They carried other stuff, too—not just hers.)

Pants and tops came from Indonesia and Singapore.

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Blouses, shoes, and purses came from Hong Kong.

China sent 200 ships with her stuff.

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The journey by sea from Singapore eastward to Long Beach is about 1,300 miles shorter than the distance westbound from Singapore to Newark via Suez, but Ivanka’s stuff bound for the East Coast took the longer route to save the cost of shipping overland across the U.S. How many of these details does she bother knowing? I have no clue. But I do see the irony in her having this stuff made overseas while her father excoriates American companies who, like his daughter, have their manufacturing done in Asia.

https://sea-distances.org/

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Here’s a summary view of container ports. It’s pretty handy for emphasizing the dominance of China and the importance to the China-to-Europe route. Singapore is startling, too: a tremendous transshipment center. The southern hemisphere looks trivial, and even the U.S. isn’t very impressive. Remember: this is just containers. It excludes tremendous tonnages in bulk carriers and tankers. It also ignores inland ports.

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/china-emergence-of-a-trade-leviathan/?mod=article_inline&mod=hp_lead_pos5

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They’re important! Here’s a map showing the 12,000 miles of inland waterways used by commercial shipping in the U.S. Most of the waterways are too shallow for ocean-going vessels, so barges step in. The standard barge is 200 feet long and has a capacity of 1,500 tons. That’s the equivalent of 15 railroad freight cars. Typically, they’re lashed together in flotillas of a dozen barges, which are then pushed by towboats. (Yes, pushed, despite the implication of the name “towboat”.) Within the dominating Mississippi Basin, you can spot the channel up the Tennessee River to Knoxville, the Ohio River to its origin at Pittsburgh, the Mississippi up to Minneapolis/St. Paul, the Missouri up to Sioux City, and the Arkansas up to Catoosa, east of Tulsa. Lots of other rivers show up, including the Hudson, Sacramento, and Columbia, and the map shows some artificial channels too; they include the Chicago Ship Canal, which links Lake Michigan to the Mississippi, the New York State Barge Canal (successor to the Erie Canal, running west from Albany to Buffalo), and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, which links the Tennessee River directly to the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile.

http://midamericafreight.org/rfs/network-inventory/waterways/

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What moves on these waterways? Here are the big four: chemicals (mostly fertilizer and petrochemicals, including fuel), coal, food (mostly grain), and raw materials (mostly sand, gravel, iron ore, and cement). Coal traffic is mostly on the Ohio; grain flows down the Mississippi; iron ore crosses the Great Lakes.

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/americas-waterways-a-vicious-cycle-of-inefficiency/

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More than 80 percent of all the waterborne freight on these waterways is handled by only five companies. The biggest is Ingram Barge, not a household name but the operator of 4,000 barges. Here’s a screen grab off the company’s website:

https://www.ingrambarge.com/home.php

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And here are the top 25 American ports, both coastal and inland. The busiest importers, by tonnage, are Houston and New York. The busiest exporters are South Louisiana and Houston. The busiest ports for domestic freight (originating and terminating in the U.S.) are South Louisiana and Huntington, West Virginia. If you’re wondering why LA/Long Beach looks puny, remember that this is measuring tons of freight, not number of containers.

https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/freight_analysis/nat_freight_stats/images/hi_res_pdf/top25wptonnage2011.pdf

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South Louisiana is logical: this is the port to which barges bring corn and soybeans down river for export. But Huntington? The explanation is simple if you look at the banks of the Ohio and the tugs loading there.

Here’s the Port of Catoosa, on the east side of Tulsa. The channel in these last few miles follows the Verdigris River, a tributary of the Arkansas. What’s on the barges? Try sand, rock, fertilizer, wheat, refined petroleum products—anything heavy, not in a hurry, and not valuable enough to justify shipment by truck or rail (let alone air).

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Downstream a thousand miles from Catoosa, the leading import is overwhelmingly crude oil.

The leading exports are soybeans, refined oil products, and corn.

http://portsoflouisiana.org/wp-content/uploads/2012-final-report.pdf .)

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Think barges are as old-fashioned as covered wagons? Here’s a recent billion-dollar investment in a cement factory owned by LafargeHolcim, a French company that’s the biggest cement manufacturer in the world. The plant is about 30 miles downstream from St. Louis, and it opened in 2009. Producing about a million tons of cement daily, it’s the biggest cement plant in the U.S. So why build it here? You see the lime deposit mined to make the cement (cement is about 85% ground-up limestone). Equally important, however, the plant is on the river and can ship cement much more cheaply upstream and down than it could by rail or truck.

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Here are some of the barges that carry the finished cement upstream and down.

And here are the states to which the company plans to ship cement from this plant. Most of the journeys will be by water. Brilliant choice for locating a cement plant, no?

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Here’s another example, a few hundred miles downstream at Osceola, Arkansas.

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A close up shows several tugs in motion and others stopped.

http://www.shiptraffic.net/2001/04/mississippi-river-ship-traffic.html Come in closer and you can see a grain terminal and a large site at the lower left under construction.

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Here’s what was built on the site. It’s Big River Steel, which opened in 2017 and which U.S. Steel in 2019 announced that it would buy. Big River is a low-cost producer, making steel from scrap and well-positioned on the river to both receive raw materials and to ship finished steel to markets.

https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/post/sources-big-river-steel-fielding-offers-possible-sale-arkansas-facilities

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These patterns are always changing. Consider the Great Lakes, where iron-ore boats (“lakers”) used to bring huge tonnages of ore from Minnesota to ports on Lake Erie.

http://dcc.newberry.org/collections/commodities-and-the-transformation-of-the-american-landscape

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One of the busiest Lake Erie ports was Ashtabula (pronounced ash-ta-BEW-la). Today it’s very quiet.

Here’s a snip from Erie, a town east of Ashtabula. Again, the lakers are history, but the town has managed to re-purpose the docks.

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At the other end of the line, some ports on Lake Superior are still shipping iron ore. Here’s one of them, Two Harbors, which as of 2010 was shipping about a million tons monthly, mostly to mills at the south end of Lake Michigan. (Remember the port at São Luis that exports Vale’s iron ore to China? It handles about ten times that much.)

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We’re about two hours from Hibbing.

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Is tonnage on America’s river up or down? Answer: down 13 percent between 2002 and 2015. (The tonnage for 2015 was 1.7 billion tons.) Why down? Bingo: coal shipments on the nation’s rivers between 2012 and 2015 fell from 173 to 126 million tons: that’s about a 25 percent cut. Blame the rise of alternative fuels, chiefly natural gas. There’s another part of the explanation, by the way. Here we are, about 40 miles downriver from Pittsburgh. Barges heading upstream or down must traverse the Montgomery Lock.

Looks fine, doesn’t it?

http://www.lrp.usace.army.mil/Missions/Navigation/Locks-and-Dams/Montgomery-Locks-Dam/

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Problem is, in 2016 the lock was closed for emergency repairs for a total of 116 days. For barge operators, this was a disaster: time is money, and they have no alternative route.

Want to repair the lock? No problem: just find an extra $782 million for the Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the system. President Trump has promised “to create the first class infrastructure our country and our people deserve,” but his 2018 budget proposed a 16 percent cut for the Corps.

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/americas-waterways-a-vicious-cycle-of-inefficiency/

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Inland navigation is much more important in both Europe and China than it is in the U.S. Here’s a snip from Duisburg on the Rhine. We’re a bit over a hundred miles upstream from Rotterdam.

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Barges can continue further upstream and connect by canal to the Rhone, which leads to the Mediterranean, or to the Danube, which leads to the Black Sea.

http://www.inlandnavigation.eu/uploads/Maps/map_waterways_europe.jpg Here’s the Danube near Regensburg, Germany.

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Here's the Yangtze just below the Three Gorges Dam at Yichang. (The empty stretches aren’t really empty: there’s just no transponder in operation for the website.)

There’s lots of traffic on the river because locks on the Three Gorges Dam make it possible for ships to pass that obstacle. Here, at Chongqing, locally made Ford vans are loaded onto a ferry taking them downstream. The dock’s primitive but does the job.

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Here’s Manaus, 1,000 miles up the Amazon, which is coming from bottom center and flowing to the upper right. Manaus fronts on the tributary Rio Negro.

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A tanker brings crude oil to the local Petrobras refinery. No canals: just the river.

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A container ship heads downstream with local manufactures.

The outgoing freight includes new vehicles. Manaus has long been a manufacturing center despite its remote location: the government gives investors tax breaks to locate here.

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Sad to say, economic growth has been accompanied by mountains of trash. Welcome to the Amazon.

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Here, at the end of the workday, a bunch of men climb into a truck for a lift back into town.

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There are no transponders along the lower Congo, but if there were, we would see nothing like Manaus. Blame the Inga Falls between Matadi and Kinshasa. Ships anchor at Matadi, and their loads are put on the railway running to Kinshasa. Way upstream, you can see bits of railroad track (the black lines) around other sections of rapids on the Congo. There’s one bit near Kisangani and other bits farther upstream; several are no longer operational. Upstream, lots of the river’s tributaries are used for transport of a slow, primitive sort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_the_Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo#/media/File:Congo_Transport_Map.PNG

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If I were better with computers, it might be amusing to hack the website of a big cruise-ship operator and slip this photo into the company’s special promotional offer.

http://www.caperi.com/many-feared-dead-as-ferry-sinks-in-the-congo-river/congo-river-boat-people/