Canal Marks A Milestone

[BillB48]

Making a southbound transit earlier this week, the SK Resolute became the 10,000th vessel to use the expansion Neopanamax Locks at the Canal.  The Resolute is 958'x156' and is a Liquefied Natural Gas vessel   The primary routes of the Resolute are from the east coast of the US to the Far East as well as Chile.  The attached picture shows her moving out of the upper level of Agua Clara Locks.

 

The Canal will mark its 106th anniversary of the opening on August 15.

[CruiserBruce]

Wow...10K ships already? Are they still keeping the per day use well below capacity...like 12 or 15 ships a day? That was the plan for awhile, right?

[BillB48]

Publicly they were shooting for around 12 ships a day using the new locks, don't believe they ever reached that goal consistently.  Traffic has slowed some since the virus, but they had been transiting up to 10 ships per day at the new locks.

[BillB48]

Bruce, you piqued my curiosity... went to the Canal's site and looked at their reports for January and June of this year.  Total daily transits for January for both sets of locks was an average of 37 ships a day, with 9.3ave for the new locks.  The June average for both locks was 28/day with the new locks handling around 7 ships per day.  The loss of two ships per day at the new locks alone comes out to $1 million per day drop in tolls.  July, the latest month available is a little better with 8 ships a day at the new locks, however total transits are only averaging 30 per day.

Edited August 14, 2020 by BillB48

[CruiserBruce]

3 hours ago, BillB48 said:

Bruce, you piqued my curiosity... went to the Canal's site and looked at their reports for January and June of this year.  Total daily transits for January for both sets of locks was an average of 37 ships a day, with 9.3ave for the new locks.  The June average for both locks was 28/day with the new locks handling around 7 ships per day.  The loss of two ships per day at the new locks alone comes out to $1 million per day drop in tolls.  July, the latest month available is a little better with 8 ships a day at the new locks, however total transits are only averaging 30 per day.

Hmm...curious about the math. Do you remember the date the new locks started regular operation? I guess averaging 10/day for 3 years gets you 10k trips.

[njhorseman]

1 hour ago, CruiserBruce said:

Hmm...curious about the math. Do you remember the date the new locks started regular operation? I guess averaging 10/day for 3 years gets you 10k trips.

The new locks officially opened on June 26, 2016, so they've been in use almost 50 months. If this Wikipedia article is accurate, 3,000 Neopanamax ships had used the canal in its first 20 months of operation, which would mean an average of about 5 ships per day:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_project#:~:text=Following additional difficulties including seepage,first 20 months of operation.

 

If the numbers cited are correct, in order to hit 10,000 transits 7,000 ships would have used the locks over the last 30 months, an average of a bit less than 8 ships per day that period.

 

For the full 50 months an average of fewer than 7 Neopanamax ships per day would have used the new locks.

[BillB48]

3 hours ago, CruiserBruce said:

Hmm...curious about the math. Do you remember the date the new locks started regular operation? I guess averaging 10/day for 3 years gets you 10k trips.

 

June 2016.  When they first started 2 or 3 ships a day wasn't unusual.  Slowly built up to the figure for January 2020.  I was able to find on their site the new locks yearly totals for 2018 and 2019 which were 2489 and 2963 respectively.  As far as 2016 and '17 I only sampled various months totals, they did not have a convenient yearly total listed.  For the remainder of '16 the average was a little over 2 per day, while the averages for the months I looked at in '17 were around 5.5 per day.