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How many 9's does the suez canal have now? It was down for 6 days out of 151 years? That's 3 9's.
If we include the voluntary shutdown around 6-day war and the yom kippur war[1], we'rd down to 52,000 days, of which 6 were blocked by technical problems, resulting in 3 9's roughly.
Seems like something we'll go back to ignoring soon.
Wouldn’t that be like 95% uptime? (151 - 8) / 151 = 94.7-ish.
151 years - 0.021 years / 151 years = ~99.98%
Belt and Road. Containers already take a week on rail via Kazakhstan to Germany, instead of a month at sea.
My friend from a logistics company has made a what-if-suez-got-blocked infographics eight years ago. Railway transport of a container was about 2x more expensive than a ship through Suez, and surprisingly not much faster.
(Sorry, czech only) https://logio.cz/infografiky/co-se-stane-den-pote-co-zkolabo...
They are faster bow, still more expensive so. Lead time was, if I remember correctly, around 2-4 weeks. Before the Suez blockage, I wouldn't be surprised if there were capacity issues on the new rail roads. By see, China to Germany is more around 6 weeks.
Trains are cool, but a containership can move a lot more. A better option might be a second canal.
It's a classic throughput v. latency problem. Ships are high throughput, high latency. Trains are low throughput, low latency.
That said, train throughput seems straightforward to address: build more rails.
This just takes for granted that throughput is more important than latency. I also think that is true generally today (as wasteful as it is -- imagine how much needs to be shipped back and forth because of changing global supply/demand) but I can absolutely imagine a future where we can economically ship only what's needed when it is needed. At that point, should it come, latency will be much more important.
Like this one perhaps? (April fool...)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/01/suez-2-ever-gi...
Train+track system transport bandwidth scales with investment. In concrete terms you can put in more cars up to a point, and if tracks gets saturated you can build more parallel tracks.
Problems with pre existing rail network can be relevant when using existing old infrastructure, but if comparing to a new canal, the point of comparison should be a new rail connection.
And trains derail. It’s not like there are never train accidents.
I thought roughly 100K containers pass through Suez a day.
That's about 1 a second. End to end they would stretch out 600KM - about 1/4 of the distance between German and Kazakhstan.
I don't think belt and road is a viable replacement for a container ship.
The largest cargo ships can carry 24k containers at a cheaper rate... With 6 meter for a 20 feet container, that would be a train with 144 km. cargo. I wouldn't want to wait with my car at that intersection...
Emergency cargo is transported with planes.
> that would be a train with 144 km.
That comparison is pointless. It makes no sense to assume that railway must load at least the load carried by one of the world's largest container ships for cargo to be deliverable from point A to B.
Another pointless comparison is the fact that container ships unload their cargo on ports for it to be transported through railway and roadway to their destination, thus it makes no sense to assume that railway should have to transport 24k containers from China to Rotterdam to then reroute it back to other locations. No, it can pretty much work point-to-point with a little shunting throughout the process.
Most container ships are much smaller though.
You are underestimating something: the sea isn't controlled by a single nation, while a train from Kazakhstan to Germany requires crossing Poland, Belarus and Russia, a different (worse?) type of geopolitical risk.
Pretty tough to pass through the suez canal without going through a few nations' territorial waters
But do big enough trains exist? As in, is the container ship only 4x bigger than the train?
longest train according to wikipedia is 18.000 feet (3.4 miles). If a 40ft containers needs a 60ft car, and they are double stacked, then you can fit 30022 = 1200 TEU of containers on that train. A single large container vessel has 20.000+ TEU of containers onboard. So nope, trains are a lot smaller than container vessels
Why would we want to reproduce the exact same model? Maybe more, smaller trains would do just fine instead of a single gigantic one.
Also, I'd say trains could be easier to automate, so having several smaller trains instead of a single huge one wouldn't be an issue, as you wouldn't add the cost of personnel.
Trains can also go to different places easier, so you wouldn't have to move container several times.
Is there a hard limit on how long a train can be?
Also allows for a lot of automation since everything is guided. The whole system could work seamlessly with little human intervention.
Not to mention that rail has a much lower CO2 output since trains have to push air out of the way, not liquid.
> Not to mention that rail has a much lower CO2 output since trains have to push air out of the way, not liquid.
That's not accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport... mentions:
"The specific energy consumption of the trains worldwide amounts to about 150 kJ/pkm (kilojoule per passenger kilometre) and 150 kJ/tkm (kilojoule per tonne kilometre)"
And for a container vessel:
"Assuming a standard 14 tonnes per container (per teu) this yields 74 kJ per tonne-km at a speed of 45 km/h (24 knots)."
This was calculated for a 14.000 TEU container vessel. Nowadays these container vessels are 20.000 TEU easily. Meaning, the energy per TEU is nowadays lower than above quoted figure.
See also e.g. https://www.quora.com/Why-are-large-cargo-ships-much-more-fu...
Not to mention that rail seems like it'd be a lot easier and more feasible to electrify.
I wonder how far away we are from being able to build rail bridges (or underwater tunnels?) to enable circumnavigation by rail? I'm picturing two loops - one arctic, one antarctic - and tunnels connecting those loops to the Americas (Alaska/Canada and Chile/Argentina), Scandinavia, Siberia, maybe even South Africa and Australia. Seems like something that should be achievable within the next century given the current rate of technological progress.
I saw this really interesting idea a looong time ago:
https://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-04/trans-atlanti... and, personally, $175 billion felt like a lot back then but if it's still in the ballpark doesn't seem that unfathomable today.
> Not to mention that rail seems like it'd be a lot easier and more feasible to electrify.
That's actually quite difficult for this suggestion. The amount of Volts on these lines differ greatly across countries. In this case the intention is to connect multiple countries. In enough countries the tracks aren't electrified. A train which can handle the differences across countries is pretty unique. Tracks can differ in size and lots of trains only handle one electrical system.
See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Europe#/medi...
I've seen a few "solutions" to dump all containers from Asia in e.g. Spain. This so to "reduce" the backlog. Then have "trains" move the containers to the right place. Aside from loads of other reasons why this wouldn't work, just see how many electrical systems are in use. Aside from just: where are these magical ready to use trains? ;)
The real alternative that gets discussed is an Eilat -> Be'er Sheva -> Ashdod canal, in Israel. See recent discussion for example: https://thearabweekly.com/ship-crisis-revives-russian-israel...
Basically the Israelis don't have the short-term capital (neither financial nor human) to build it, so the real question is whether the Chinese are interested in initiating the endeavor.
There were talks about building a train from Eilat to Ashdod, this article claims it's not economically feasable:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/suez-canal-ship-eilat-ca...
Looking at the terrain in Israel building a canal from Eliat to anywhere does not look possible, it would be several orders of magnitude more difficult than building the Suez canal was.
Should be a good idea to give Israel more leverage in the middle east.
At this point the most economically viable solution is probably to widen the Suez Canal.
Can you imagine the political implications of the world trade being dependent on a river running through Iraq, Syria and Turkey. This is a nice scenario for alternative history folks. Those countries would be occupied since WW1 till now.
By that logic, Egypt would still be occupied today.
>(Turkey) would be occupied since WW1 till now.
Hah, that's funny id you know history
And given the current situation, a more realistic alternative is just getting rid of Sisi.
I doubt their situation would be that different from Egypt's, which is fairly similar to the treatment they already receive. Oil and the Bosporus already give them enough resources to attract attention.
I'm surprised no one's yet mentioned zeppelins/dirigibles as a possible alternative to sea or air freight (not passenger), especially for deep inner-continent transport.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship
Hindenburg could lift 10 tons [1]. Ever Given can carry about 20000 as much.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg-class_airship
The ratio of the log of capacity to speed is roughly constant across the various forms of freight transit. Ships are slow but have massive capacity, trains are faster with lower capacity, planes have extremely low capacity but damn they're fast. Zeppelins/dirigibles are extremely slow and extremely low capacity. They have some niche utility when endurance is required (you want to stay in the air for as long as possible) but shipping is definitely not one of those circumstances.
Why not just put cables and tug these ships through the channel? It will reduce these types of accidents and speed up passage of the ships as well. You could build two rail lines on either side of the channel for tugging ships.
The suez canal has two lanes going in opposite directions, you can't therefore tug a ship from both sides so there would be no way to balance the forces.
Northern Sea Route
This is most serious option but with russia.
Also rail transport. It's much more complex politically and bureaucratically though. Would be a lot faster than a ship, though more expensive.
A bit off topic, can we use deep learning/ML on map/sattelite/sea level data to find out the best alternatives?
Some patience, not tackling climate change, global warming and we'll have new routes become automatically available.. don't know how much of a time-save it is, and new ports will probably have to be built, but anyway..
> The Dutch Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis projected in 2015 that the Northern Sea Route may be ice-free by 2030
200km long conveyor belt running parallel to the Suez canal?