A ship stuck in Suez

What happens if 21st century technology quite literally runs into 19th century infrastructure? An important sea lane is blocked with big repercussions. 

On Tuesday morning, the container ship Ever Given ran aground while navigating the Suez Canal. It swung sideways, blocking almost the entire channel. It hasn’t been refloated yet. Long queues of ships are stuck on both sides.

The Ever Given is large but there are larger container ships. It has a length of 400 metres, a width of 60 metres and a draught of 14.5 metres, with gross registered tonnage of 200,000 tonnes. The ship has an all-Indian crew with an Egyptian pilot for the Canal. It was carrying 20,000 containers bound from Shanghai to Rotterdam.

The Suez Canal, which is about 300 metres wide at that point, is constructed like an inverted cone: The bottom is less wide than the surface, with the embankments sloping in and down. The ship is aground on the east bank. 

Getting it unstuck presents huge challenges. One way is to evacuate cargo, empty fuel tanks and ballast, and float it off with help from tugs. This is really tough since container-moving equipment isn’t very mobile.

The other approach is to widen and deepen the canal at that point to float the ship off. This is now being tried with dredgers, diggers and earth-moving equipment. There is no public timeline for how long this could take, even if it works. A minimum of 10 days is likely.

About $10 billion worth of goods traverses Suez daily, including 10 per cent of global oil and gas supply. Any ship on a Europe-Asia run saves between 10-14 days sailing time by using the canal, rather than going up and down the length of Africa, and around the Cape of Good Hope.

The 195 km Suez Canal was opened in 1869 after 10 years of construction. This gigantic project transformed trade. Ferdinand De Lesseps, a French engineer, obtained a 99-year concession to build and operate the canal. Most of the shareholders were French. In 1882, the British invaded Egypt and took control and operated and protected it through two World Wars.

In 1956, President Nasser of Egypt invoked the concession, and nationalised it. That triggered military intervention by Britain, France and Israel. But Egypt eventually took over the Suez Canal Authority.  In 1967, Israel annexed the Sinai, taking control of the East Bank. In 1973, in a sequence of battles, the Egyptians crossed the Canal in early offensives, and the Israelis counter-attacked by crossing to the West Bank. When Begin and Sadat made peace, Israel returned the Sinai, and the canal was demilitarised. Egypt makes at least $7 billion a year from transit fees. 

In 1869, the canal was reckoned monstrously over-engineered with excess capacity. Ships were much smaller, with much shallower draughts. The canal has been widened and deepened many times. But the Ever Green is at the upper limit of capacity (it is “Suezmax” in shipping parlance).

Mega-projects like the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, and the Trans-Siberian Railway transformed global trade. Containers brought new levels of efficiency. The standard shapes and sizes of containers makes it easy to construct facilities for loading them to ships, railway wagons and trucks. As a direct result, there’s a massive drop in cargo turnaround times. Cargo loading/unloading could take several days in the pre-container era. It is now done in a few hours. Ship designs optimised for containerisation have also led to huge fuel savings.

Containerisation has its own issues. Terminals are unevenly distributed. The east coast of India has lost out to Sri Lanka, for instance. Uneven flows of global trade also lead to endemic shortages of containers in export-oriented Asia, while vast stockpiles of empty containers build up in the US, and Europe. Vessel sizes have also hit limits, where they can barely navigate Suez and Panama. This incident might beggar insurers, once all the costs and claims are totted up. It is likely to have future repercussions on global trade for that reason alone.