> solutions [...] include water-saving sluices that would collect freshwater in basins so it can be reused. To this end, possibilities are being examined to develop and exploit other water sources near the canal. The construction of reservoirs and saltwater desalination plants are also being considered.
There's also:
> The transport route from Asia through the Panama Canal to the US' east coast can be partially rerouted through the Suez Canal
"A canal on one side of the planet is broken? Just use the canal on the other side of the planet."
I'm enjoying that sentiment very much. I wonder if there's a mileage breakdown of China -> US (around South America) versus China -> US (through the Suez Canal).
Normally this area gets a lot of rain and there is not an issue which is how they planned for it. We are in a drought cycle which happens from time to time, but this is obviously a rare set of two events happening at the same time.
With Nicaragua, beyond the corruption and the instability of the government there, many had concerns about the ecological impact of it.
And how is the seed clouding that's occurring globally impacting this [it's very obvious now, for those unaware, there is GeoengineeringWatch.org and their documentary free on YouTube called "The Dimming"], as well as perhaps hurting crops and those local economies enough to shift power-buying power away from those food producers?
Water is, mostly, only added to the atmosphere by evaporation. This is mostly solar, but can include indirect solar (wind) and industrial processes.
Rain 'seeding' can be thought of as offering water already in the atmosphere an excuse to form rain and drop out of the atmosphere. It's about controlling where it rains rather than if it rains.
You don't think weather patterns could shift? It's not black-and-white as "clouds = more rain" - as there's obviously the question of distribution.
Likewise, water vapour in the atmosphere traps more heat - warming the planet; locally of course where there's cloud cover, at least initially, it will be cooler.
I would guess that cloud seeding and Rain making has pretty minimal impact on Panama due to its proximity to large bodies of water. This is in comparison to continental climates where the atmospheric moisture is passing over arid land and different nations.
One note - they don’t pump water out and back into the locks from a neighboring storage. They flush the water. Each ship needs like 40 million gallons?
Maybe title should be insane wastes of water forces authorities…. :)
I had to check if that realistic. 40 million gallons at 85 feet is 11MWh of potential energy. At 70% efficiency it would take 16MWh to pump that. That has to be a small amount of energy compared to what ships take for traveling the detour.
It would take a long time to pump that amount of water out of the lock that you’re lowering, and over time you’ll be pumping saltwater into a freshwater system, which isn’t good. You’d have to do filtering or something, at great expense. Currently it takes a short time to drain the lock, so ships transit faster. It’s pretty fun to do that transit, but I was amazed that the pilot let me conn the ship the whole time instead of doing it themselves. I guess on military ships they prefer we do it maybe, but I was glad for that experience.
My ship had two jet turbine engines that did 31 MW of propulsion, which was a small ship compared to most freighters, so energy wise it would be very efficient still.
The Panama Canal Authority derives ~3 G$ in fees over ~14 K crossings per year for a average cost of ~200 K$ per crossing.
40 M gallons is ~150 K*m^3. Modern bulk desalination turns seawater into potable fresh water at ~0.40 $/m^3, so only ~60 K$. The cost of filtering out any incidental saltwater mixing should be a tiny fraction of that cost.
Even at full desalination it would only constitute ~30% cost increase. Given the minimal amount of filtering that should be required for incidental mixture, it is hard to call that a great expense except in relation to rainwater.
30% is a large increase to a canal that we use for a huge portion of our consumer goods, I think. I do agree that they soups build desalination plants now, so they can use them in twenty years when they’re finished and the drought is even worse!
A Neopanamax vessel is allowed to transport 120,000 metric tons of cargo [1]. ~60 K$ would only amount to 0.50 $/t of extra cost. That is only low single-digit percentage increased shipping cost [2].
And again, that is the cost of desalinating 100% seawater, not the proportionally cheaper cost of desalinating whatever single-digit to maybe low double-digit percent you would actually get from incidental mixture during reclamation.
Saltwater mixing is a good point. But the canal has two lanes. One lane is for one direction. The other lane is for the other direction. I can imagine cases where the saltwater is never used.
The way locks work you can save some by using extra storage ponds but you can’t save it all. You have to move some water into the ocean, because that’s the cost for the physics that move giant ships up and down as easily as this.
Gravity is a conservative force, so if you raise something up really high, dropping it will recover the energy used to pull it up. Of course in practice there's a lot of other things that cause energy loss, but there are lot of dams in the world that exist as "stored power", by pumping water uphill, then getting energy back as the water goes through the dam later.
Big bucket high up is basically a battery. The question then becomes about the details of, like, using the power when the water gets pumped down (if you had two canals, you could probably time filling one with draining the other?). There's a lot of practical things to consider
Imagine one ship going upwards in a lock, while another goes down. Ships and locks are the same size.
To start with, there is a difference in the water levels - and this can be put through a generator to generate electricity as the water flows from one lock to the other.
When the water has moved half way, the levels are equal. You can now use electricity to pump the rest of the way - and theoretically, assuming lossless pumps and generators, you use the same amount you generated earlier.
Unfortunately, low-head generators tend to be inefficient and expensive. Variable head generators are even harder to design to be efficient.
One way is like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel
No water is used up. Virtually no energy is needed either, except to overcome friction. But scaling it up to the size of the locks on the Panama canal would be huge.
They do pump water out and back into the locks from neighboring storage. There is a limit to the minimum amount of water that you can use, though, since the potential energy to raise the ship comes from the loss of water.
I’ve always assumed the energy cost to pump the water would make it cost prohibitive, but I wonder how it compares to rerouting ships or moving containers over land.
You can cross fill and use separate storage - their new locks already use this - but my understanding (possibly wrong) was old locks may not have been using all possible options - it’s a cost / benefit trade off
- "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 Belgium on the Albert Canal (a big canal for Belgium but nothing compared to Panama Canal) they started installing pomps 15 years ago for the exact same reason.
Ok, I’m no civil engineer, but couldn’t you design a siphon system that would only require opening and closing valves to capture the water without any pumping?
Siphons only really "work" if the final position of the water is lower than the starting position. Siphon effect allows the water to pass through an intermediate higher elevation without continuous external pumping energy, but on average the water must still be going downhill to utilize the siphon effect.
Omg, I wasn’t thinking. The surface of the target liquid needs to be lower than the source. I was thinking of a pipe coming in lower than the lake, but that wouldn’t work.
If it makes you feel better I have a degree in chemical engineering, and a few months ago made the exact same mistake as you for an automatic watering system where I put a reservoir of water in the cabinet below a plant and wondered why water was traveling from the planter into the reservoir and overflowing and spilling all over the cabinet and floor.
Some days we're just dumb, even if most days we're pretty smart.
Why is that? Britain is covered with a preindustrial canal network with thousands of locks which use nothing but channels doors and gravity. Literally made of wood and operated by hand.
Raising water on the low side to the level on the high side simply requires joining the two sides together.
If sea level is their high side, I don't understand why they can't use this supply forever.
I think the thing you are missing is that raising the low side means that the next boat to use the lock going up has to drain the high water into the low canal. The Panama Canal has system to conserve that water but some water still moves down the locks both for raising and lowering.
The British locks depend on a source of water at the top of the canal. I watched a video recently about Canal Trust rebuilding lock reservoir. The water levels definitely can limit if locks and canals are usable.
The Panama Canal has a reservoir at the top, Gatan Lake, but the water is low. Sea level is never the high side, it is always the low side.
Some lock flights have pumps to keep the ponds at the top full of water because they are near the highest point in the area so they can't refill naturally fast enough or simply to avoid depleting the upstream water source. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caen_Hill_Locks
You'd have to deal with the Chagres (assuming the current drought ends) as well.
The original excavation was done mostly dry and massive by any standards: 27kt of dynamite were used.
I'm also not a digger, but 26 meters of dredging over a 13km distance sounds crazy expensive. You would have to also widen the valley to prevent landslides into the canal.
Siphoning only works if the destination is lower than the source, otherwise you're looking at free energy, which would definitely be a win for everyone :D
Suez is (was? lets ignore geopolitics instead of physics for now) so successful because it's lock free (ha! tech joke on HN, I'm rocking this :D). The Panama canal was made by creating a massive artificial lake above "sea level" rather than digging a path down to sea level through mountains. Historically this worked, but alas enough corporations profit enough by offloading the costs of their industries onto everyone else as a form of socialism we call subsidized global warming.
There was another nicaraguan canal project that was floated maybe 10 years ago and supposedly financed by the Chinese government. The government officials involved all ended up charged with an assortment of graft surrounding the project.
The idea for a canal through Nicaragua goes back to at least the 1880s, when agents for the bankrupt French canal company tried to lobby for the US Government to buy the remaining assets.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Path-Between-Seas-Creation-1870-1914/... - it's one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. It covers engineering, geography, 19th century stock market investing, medical advances, and the birth of US state capacity to run projects. Highly recommended!
Panama Canal at reduced capacity. Suez Canal at reduced capacity (for very different reasons). Therefore shipping costs and delays are rising. Could this be a trigger for the recession everyone seems to be predicting?
China will end up making high value items where shipping is a small fraction of the cost (Apple already flies most of their products via jet) whereas cheap items that are not labor intensive will move back to near their destination. Other things will move to Mexico and further south.
And it's the same specialization that Mexico has had since the late 1990s and early 2000s when their factories left for China [0][1][2]. That's why Mexican manufacturing has started growing again - costs have equalized between CN and MX manufacturing for intermediate parts.
For example, take apart a Sony PS2, Compaq workstation, or a Toshiba DVD Player from the early 2000s - all the electronics parts in it will say Made in "Mexico/Malaysia/Thailand", and the plastic molding was 50% Mexico and China. China didn't enter the fray until after 2008 when Steve Jobs tasked Tim Cook with exploring manufacturing in China, and Samsung began opening OLED factories there as well.
Low cost gizmos and gadgets have been manufactured in Vietnam and India for a decade now, and within 10 years they'll both also climb up the value chain manufacturing wise. Nhat Tao in Saigon and Sector 63 in Noida have a similar feel as Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen 10-15 years ago.
History doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes.
Mexico also saw economic and political instability 20-30 years ago when its factories began leaving for China. Same thing happened to Thailand in the 1990s, Malaysia in the 2000s, Turkiye in the 2010s, and Phillipines in the 1990s-2000s.
IIRC the big anxiety in China is not really that manufacturing is disappearing, but it’s not clear what comes next.
China has started running into the problems that South Korea and Japan have, where they produce a large amount of university graduates not willing to do blue collar work.
The same thing happened in Mexico, Thailand, Turkiye, Malaysia etc.
Skilled manufacturing continues to grow within China and these countries, but skilled manufacturing requires a high amount of human capital, which means your average Joe ain't getting retrained.
Imo, now is the best time for China to expand it's horrible social safety net. Thailand, Turkey, and Malaysia all did a similar expansion of their social safety net when they were at China's level decades ago.
There's a reason why Turkey today has living standards comparable to Central Europe versus in 1990 when it was comparable to Algeria and Phillipines. And why China didn't catch up to Mexico's HDI until COVID happened, which contracted the Mexican economy to a level unseen anywhere else other than India.
> graduates not willing to do blue collar work
People are willing if you pay them enough. The issue is the pay is relatively low, but CoL has gotten very high.
This happens to all countries. Go read older news articles about Turkiye in the 2000s, Malaysia/Thailand in the 1990s, Mexico in the 1990s, etc.
No, the big anxiety in China is that the manufacturing is disappearing, especially to developed world like Europe and US. With real estate and consumer spending - the 2 of 3 economic engines - in the dumps, China has switched focus back to manufacturing - the other engine. However...
China's annual exports drop for first time in seven years.
Among key trading partners, exports to the U.S. led the decline, down 13% from the previous year. Demand from the European Union and Southeast Asian countries also shrank.
China has always talked a big game about rebalancing without actually making the changes to do so. At some point they were going to run out of export growth as they got richer.
What they need to do, and probably won’t, is stop devaluing the yuan and relax capital controls so that Chinese consumers can invest and spend in something that isn’t housing, and finally fuel consumption growth. The current situation essentially results in Chinese being underpaid.
The problem with China is that they got old and demographically smaller, and decided to pick a fight alongside Russia against Europe and US, before they got rich or at least above poverty level.
China Tries To Censor Data About Nearly 1 Billion People in Poverty
In his article for the business outlet Yicai, Li cited data from a 2021 research paper by the China Institute of Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University, which placed the number of people living on less than 2,000 yuan ($300) a month at 964 million, or nearly 70 percent of the population.
China's population drops for second year, with record low birth rate
The National Bureau of Statistics said the total number of people in China dropped by 2.08 million, or 0.15%, to 1.409 billion in 2023. New births fell 5.7% to 9.02 million and the birth rate was a record low 6.39 births per 1,000 people, down from a rate of 6.77 births in 2022.
Manufacturing is not disappearing in China yet. Or at least not skilled manufacturing.
Any deindustrialization that is happening is in the low margins space like Textiles, plastic crap, and the likes, which have begun moving to Vietnam, Bangladesh and India - but that was always going to happen. There's a reason why those textile factories in Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez in the 1980s shut down by the early 2000s.
For higher value intermediate parts, the manufacturing base continues to exist in China, but is now competing at the same price point as an OEM in Thailand, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Russia before the war, etc.
Prices rising due to longer shipping routes is not inflation. Just normal market dynamics. I think it is important to disambiguate prices rising from increased money supply, inflation, from other causes. One is fixable by policy. Everything else is just the way things work.
Inflation and money supply increases are normal market dynamics too.
The connection is that aggregate supply and aggregate demand intersect at the current price and output levels of the economy. If aggregate supply contracts, this shifts the output level lower, and the price level higher to compensate. Basically, there is a shortage of basic goods & services needed for the economy to function, so the market price mechanism is trying to incentivize people to work on those sectors that are in shortage.
Drilling in a level, these aggregates are divided into consumption (current needs) + investment (production in expectation of future needs). A supply shock in a basic service like transportation means resources need to be reallocated to cover the increased cost. That means decreased investment, and all of the potential investment opportunities competing for a smaller pool of savings (which is just the excess of current production over current consumption). This drives up the "natural interest rate", the cost of capital in the absence of central bank interventions.
The central bank has a choice between feeling the impact as inflation (where prices rise) or recession (where output drops). If it holds policy rates below the natural interest rate, the money supply increases, and you get inflation. The economy remains out of balance; the market is trying to shift resources from investment to consumption, but if rates are artificially low, investment will be artificially cheap and too many people will be writing software we don't need while we don't have enough truck drivers. If it holds policy rates above the natural interest rate, the money supply shrinks, and you get recession. This is letting the economy come back into equilibrium, but it means that all those software engineers will be laid off and have to get jobs as truck drivers.
The Fed's choice is one of these. They can influence whether we feel the supply shock as a painful recession where lots of people lose their job and have to retrain, or whether we feel it as higher prices as the market tries to correct. But because a supply shock is a real drop in output, it means worsened standards of living regardless.
Can't the canal authorities reduce the water used somehow? If you paired up ships so that one going up the lock system is matched with one going down you could just pump the water back and forth from one lock to the other and back. Then way less water would be lost from the system.
The Falkirk wheel in Scotland can move boats with minimal electricity usage. Could a bigger one be built?
Most locks don’t actually pump water around. The water level on one side is higher than the other, and thus there is potential energy there. That is how the locks operate
The Falkirk wheel is quite an immense structure, but each one of it's basins is only 80m long and 6.5m wide. It's moving 500 tonnes of weight each rotation (split between the two basins to keep it balanced).
To service the Panama Canal, you'd need basins 370m long and 50m wide. The new Panamax ships are apparently capable of carrying 120,000 tonnes of weight (no idea what they weigh themselves), but we're talking about swinging around half a millions tonnes of weight. My brain can't comprehend that... are there _any_ moving structures of that size in the world?
If you consider the motion and weight, a large (very large) forge would fit in this category of 250000 to 1000000 in moving mass. Its definitely something we have in our grasp. Unfortunately, youd need not only multiple falkirk wheels, but wheels of varying size, and, there would be cases where a ship might have to wait a while, as theres no equally sized ship heading the other way. On the existing falkirk you dont have to deal with the weight differences because the average boat doesnt add much compared to the water to float it, not the case when its a shipping ship.
On the Falkirk Wheel you don't have to deal with weight differences at all, regardless of the size of the ship. The ship displaces a weight of water equal to the weight of the ship. So when filled to the same level, a side with water and a side with ship+water will balance each other perfectly.
Is getting the ship across the canal even necessary when we're talking about shipping containers? a Flotilla of smaller ships for just a few containers could be used in a continuous convoy.
No, because the salt water is at sea level and the drinking water is at the level the ships need to rise to via the locks. Water flows out from a lake at 26 meters above sea level that is fed by a river that comes from the mountains by gravity.
Making the amounts of water that drains out from there move up requires massive amounts of energy. We're not talking a few little pipes here and there. The pumps and energy generation infrastructure project needed to get that done would probably rival or surpass the Panama canal in complexity, scale, and scope. It would be expensive and take a long time to build. Add to that the complexity of doing that while not shutting down the canal for a few years.
Basically the amount of water needed for the locks is a function of the amount of tonnage that ships through the canal and the altitude that ships needs to rise to. We're talking about pumping millions of tonnes of water up by 26 meters. Think something in the order of hundreds of gwh per day at least. Of course you could continue to rely on rivers for part of that. But still, it might be doable but it wouldn't be cheap.
That and the fact that pumping a lot of salt water would destroy large parts of the ecosystem in Panama is a reason that will likely never happen. The locals might object a bit to that. And they probably also rely on that water for drinking and agriculture.
I'd think you could recapture a lot of the energy as it drained right? Proposed solutions involve a lot of pumping and seem to rely on it. Hydroelectric efficiency is over 90%.
The salt water would be largely contained so I'm not sure why it would be so bad for the ecosystem.
I don't doubt it would be very expensive, everything about that canal has been. But if this turns out to be the new normal, rather than just a weather abberation, it will be cheaper than re-reouting all of those ships, whether the pumping is done with fresh or salt water.
No you can’t: locks need to open for ship to go through and pools mix when this happen. This is also true for lockTop and LockTopMinusOne. In Panama Canal, LockTop is the lake. It’s Lake Gatún and provide fresh water for Panama City as well as other life forms in this pristine region.
Much of the watershed has been protected from development in order to ensure the water supply for the canal. Also, no matter the current level of pristineness/pollution, there's no way pumping millions of gallons of seawater per day would help.
Unless of course it prevented the draining of millions of gallons of freshwater.
No matter what there is some amount of mixing with the sea. The question is at which lock should that happen. Currently it's at lock 1, everyone here is arguing it'd be absolutely impossible for it to happen at any other lock, without providing any justification.
Graphs at page 32 and onward shows that you could (in theory) pump salt water in one more lock upward in both sides. It will make the last lock before lake at 0.5ppt (Atlantic) and 1.32ppt (Pacific). Fresh water is 0-0.5ppt.
So you could cut water by half while still keeping the last lock "fresh", and so long as the incoming flow is more than 2.5x the mixing rate, you could do the same on the pacific side.
The illegal mining operation in Donoso also had an impact on water sources that were supposed to be replenishing the canal in case of a drought like this.
Panama is very rainy on average. The average rainfall in Colón is 3.4 meters (136 inches) per year. Ciudad de Panamá is a little drier with 1.9 meters (75 inches). For comparison, New Orleans, the continental US's wettest city, gets 1.6 meters (64 inches).
But it can vary, and unfortunately, January is the beginning of the dry season, which ends in May.
This may create a window of opportunity for Russia, because Russia communicates with China and NK via land routes, while Western allies are separated by ocean.
An 'average' panamax container ship carries 4,200 lorries/train carriages of goods. The infrastructure to move 100K of those a day 1000s of miles on land would be enourmous and make global trade prohibitively expensive - far cheaper to sail for longer around the capes.
Yep, but those two routes around capes can be disrupted too, which may cause advantage for those, who are not using them. Then it will be easy to plant the message into brains of those 50% who have less than average IQ: "Blame your government for this sudden spike in prices! Vote for those, who want to protect us, not foreigners!"
Mean, median and mode are the three most commonly used averages.
Mean itself can be of various types, such as arithmetic, geometric, harmonic and others.
Median is a pretty good average because it excludes the extremes. Its 'superiority' compared to the arithmetic mean is can be easily explained by a hypothetical situation where you have 100 people and 99 of them are making $1000 a month while only one making $100000. The arithmetic average salary of this whole group is $1990 a month which is clearly not what most people would intuitively consider as the 'proper' average.
We cannot rank all the people and put their IQ into a sorted array to calculate median, so some of us accept loss of precision when we use average numbers.
Rail/Road doesn't compare to ships in terms of throughput by weight so the land route to China from Russia, even if the freight train system were robust, would not handle the same amounts that a trans-oceanic route like China to the Americas could handle (or even China to St. Petersburg if that were needed)
The simple railroad idea is “big ship comes to west Panama, unloads onto trains, which load into big ship in east Panama” but that avoids the strength of railroads.
You have to unload the ship eventually anyway, so you instead have it load into rail and disperse to final destination more directly.
You’d need a heat map of where everything ends up that is going through Panama, but if you’re dumping to rail many of those ships would unload elsewhere.
Or in other words, Europe will be hit much harder by this than the USA will.
Panama has a tiny railroad that follows the canal, if they thought this was a viable alternative they would expand it. I think they realize the labor cost on both ends would make this prohibitive + the time to unload and load up another ship would cause major bottlenecks.
The problem for Panama is that the cost of rail transport is dominated by the time for loading and unloading; once you've gotten to the point that loading/unloading on trains makes sense, suddenly many more countries in that area are competitive; if I recall correctly Mexico is building a rail line across their narrowest part.
To disrupt supply routes and perform whatever they have in their mind. Russia switched to war-time mode, so they think that they can win the war with NATO. Massive disruption in trade routes may shift balance of powers in democratic countries, which Russians may want to exploit. Russians are strong at informational front, they are strong liars and shadow players.
Whatever, but moving a significant part of all the freight from China to Europe through Russia would probably require quite an improvement on the current railway infrastructure.
It's probably a multi track system going all the way through China, Russia (with maybe Kazakhstan or Mongolia in between if they care about shortcuts), Belarus and finally to Poland. Then maybe upgrades to the European railways too to handle the excess traffic coming from the wrong direction (EU harbors are not in the East.) It's not something they can do in a short time and it takes a lot of political collaboration. I think that it's easier for them to win the war, if they can win it, and start buying Western Europe politicians again. Or just start buying them again while the war goes on.
> solutions [...] include water-saving sluices that would collect freshwater in basins so it can be reused. To this end, possibilities are being examined to develop and exploit other water sources near the canal. The construction of reservoirs and saltwater desalination plants are also being considered.
There's also:
> The transport route from Asia through the Panama Canal to the US' east coast can be partially rerouted through the Suez Canal
whoops.