I says to myself "that would be the day" lmfao ya think Isriel is gonna stop dropping bombs all over the middle east??? Paid for by the USA of course but that's beside the point.
Saying it will end isn't boundless optimism. Saying how it will end is though. In this context he's indirectly saying that the war is not that important and it will end eventually. (millions of lives are important but there is 8 billion people and the conflict that is happening now is nothing compared to what has happened between world war 2 and now, planet had much bigger conflicts that threatened whole population)
I certainly hope it does, but it's far from mathematically certain. It's like a predator/prey differential equation. Birth and death will find an equilibrium, whether the death is natural or violent. As long as neither side is strong enough or willing enough to completely wipe out the other, it could plausibly go on forever. Or until the sun burns up or something.
My information is that the original engineers that planned the old Panama Canal, built reservoirs for the full locks to pump their water to when then wanted to lower a ship. The new "SmartAss" Panamax Canal builders neglected to build the reservoirs and chose to flush the receding locks into the ocean. Now they are scrambling to build the additional reservoirs.
I wouldn't say it's a bad design idea to not pump it back into the reservoir. It's a engineering design issue. Pumps require energy, gravity doesn't. Of course this design choice didn't account for changes in weather. So yeah they will need to correct it now.
As a Panamanian, the government is planning to dam other rivers to supply water to the canal. We have a lot of water, it's just not distributed efficiently.
Just some shop talk: I appreciate that you put the sponsorship at the end. I think this makes it more effective - your whole video gets watched without losing as many viewers, and we're left with the sponsorship in mind at the end. It looks like a good service too. Nice production!
Quick correction… As someone who has actually been through the Panama Canal… The water is not pumped. There are not any pumps involved, unless there are pumps in the new section. The original locks use gravity only. I do not know if that is the case for the new locks, but I would imagine so.
Kinda. It would "fix" the mechanical problem but I imagine operating costs of pumping so much water around all the time would be big and it would take very long to shift that amount of water around unless you built some gigantic pumps...
This video is junk, so I quit watching a third of the way through. Panama isn't getting the same rainfall in all parts. My in-laws are Panamanian, and while there was a drought in Panama City, my mother-in-law said it was pouring rain in her city nearer to Costa Rica. Climate change has zilch to do with the Canal, although this is what the officials are saying. What they are not saying is that a former president had the hardwood trees cut down and sold, and of course the money went into her pockets. The American's planted those trees to stabilize the water supply and ecosystem. Once again, corrupt government is partly to blame.
I never connected the idea that raising those water gates would have a fresh water cost. Crazy that theyre just dumping drinking water by the millions of gallons for every single ship that goes through.
the system like this wouldn't necessarily need to dump the water into the ocean, just make side-reservoirs in both entrances to keep a closed loop of water through the canal. regardless, american engineering is know for one thing in particular, making extreme things that waste as much resources as possible with the lowest quality and the highest price tag. so there's why the panama canal is doomed, they didn't account for basic stuff or any mildly extreme scenario. it just works(tm).
Just as a side note, fresh =/= potable. Fresh means it isn't salt water or ocean water. Potable or drinkable water means it's safe for human consumption
That water would still run into the ocean without the panama canal. That's just how the water cycle works. The only difference is that instead of continuously flowing out to the ocean in a river, it gets dammed into reservoirs and released in bursts whenever the locks let ships in and out.
@@nyft3352 It's actually really brilliant engineering that doesn't consume any resources at all. Water evaporates from the ocean, falls as rain, forms into rivers that flow back into the ocean. That's just what water does. All the canal builders did essentially was built a few dams and sluice gates they can open and close to control the natural flow of rivers to raise and lower the water levels in small reservoirs (i.e locks). In order to have a closed loop they would have to pump an entire river back up to the top of the mountain, which would consume quite a lot of electricity. Currently it's actually generating hydroelectricity in addition to the shipping lanes, since the entire system is gravity-fed.
The panama canal could be re-built to double the number of ships passing through using the same amount of water. Currently, the locks can only be run in one direction at a time so when ships are going up, the level of the locks are changed with no ship in the lock when the level is lowered. If the locks were separated by a small lake, big enough for two ships to pass they could run ships in both directions simultaneously so that the locks never changed level without a ship in the lock, doubling the throughput without using any more water. BTW, the reason they are limiting the cargo on the ships has nothing to do with the amount of water used, the same amount of water is used to change the level of the locks when a fully loaded ship is in the locks, or completely empty. The reason for reducing the cargo is to prevent the ships from running aground. The lower level of the lake means the channel is shallower, and the ships must have a shallower draft.
I think rebuilding the locks that way would only save half the water since you're just equalizing the water level between the up and down locks before raising the up lock to the reservoir level. The 3 basins on the new locks save more water (3/4 instead of 1/2). I think the only way to save more water in the locks is to either use more basins, which has diminishing returns or using some combination of low head turbines with pumps to pump water into the lock from downstream using the energy in the water coming in from upstream. both have pretty serious diminishing returns, so it's hard to do much better than 3 basins like the new locks have.
@@thamiordragonheart8682 No, it would double the throughput using the same amount of water. For example, if you put the intermediate lake at the same level as the water when the gate between the existing locks is open, you could pipe the water around the lake from the upper lock to the lower lock and have the locks behave exactly as they are, and it would work without any water flowing into or out of the intermediate lake. But the pipe is unnecessary, you could just use the intermediate lake as the pipe.
@@douglaspeale9727 duh. you're right. I was thinking two separate lanes. admitadely, your probably also right with separate lanes as long as there's enough space to cross over. I think you could design it on the Atlantic side, but the pacific side is too steep.
actually, now that I think about it, it should work that way as long as each lock never goes up or down without a ship in it, so as long as you alternate transit directions it should work, so I would assume the Panama Canal already does that.
I’m Panamanian and I got to tell you, they did teach me about the canal when I was in middle school, matter of facts I went on a school trip to the canal and I got to tell you first 9 min of this video I learn more about the canal than I did all 14 years I lived there, all I knew about it was how the boats pass through it.
Les get to the root of the problem causing les rain........ The selling off of the Amerzon to foriegn developers.cattle farmers.loggers.The pumping of ground water for bottling by some of the worse offerders chased out of many states in América. Devlopents go in with swimming pools and not ONE but 2 & 3 golf courses thats require millions of gallions of Walter per day. Nobody wants to talk about the REAL cause because both the goverment and forigners make money. I toured South América last year so im speaking with authority. TO HELL WITH THE CONSIQUENCES!!!!!!
Fun fact, Costa Rica had a trans-oceanic railway network connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic via trains, but it was discontinued in the 90´s for "financial" reasons and now the train only runs in the central valley area where 60% of Costa Rica´s population lives, leaving the rest of the line in disrepair. To be honest, its shocking that the government is not seriously proposing fixing the rail line as a possible proyect, specially with the current events :(
A similar problem here in the USA, we have the rail infrastructure in order the move these huge containers between the East Coast and West Coast. Sure, it requires some upgrading, but I don't understand why these companies don't consider using trains more. Takes about 3-5 days to get across country. Creates jobs, takes less time now with the 18+ day loop around South America and is also much greener than using large container ships and probably costs a whole lot less.
Panama does have one and it is used as well, so does Mexico and the USA but regardless of where the train is, a canal is more efficient than a train regardless of where it is
@@mathgamer8787I don't think you understand just how many containers a container ship holds...it's immense, and it would take dozens of trains to even carry a single load of such a ship; then you count the fact that there's many hundreds of these ships just for North America alone and the equivalent in trains to replace them would be in the THOUSANDS. There's absolutely no way to build enough rail to accommodate that type of traffic even considering that a train could do about 2 trips AND UNLOAD/OFFLOAD in the time it would take a cargo ship to just get to its location; the US certainly does need more rail, but it's never going to replace container ships. The only thing that will eventually replace container ships in the future (and even then it probably won't do so entirely) are massive jumbo jets and huge, modernised cargo blimps. Note: the latter above is indeed in serious development by many companies, while blimps have been plagued with issues...modern technology is solving most of them, and we'll likely see massive cargo blimps in the skies in the next several decades at minimum
Was just reading recently that the El Niño is actually in the process of already transitioning back to a La Niña, which is definitely much quicker than people were expecting for how strong this El Niño seemed to be
In my opinion the easiest thing to do is just to build reservoirs along the locks. This is what the (admittedly smaller) locks on the Rhein-Main-Donau Kanal in Germany do. Since they don't have much water entering the canal at its highest point when a ship wants to go down through a lock they simply pump all the water into a concrete tank. When a ship wants to go back up they pump the water back up into the lock. It uses basically zero water and solves the problem.
Thats what I was thinking, just build additional reservoirs along the locks to minimize freshwater loss. The water from the last lock is currently just being pumped into the ocean, so why not save and reuse it?
Panamanian here we need actual politicians running the government instead of the corrupt monkeys that are inside of it. They don’t care shit about deforestation around the canal or doing something about it they just want the dividends of it to fund their stupidity and corruption
@@MamboGimbobilithat was exactly what I was thinking aswell I wonder why this isn't being done, maybe the amount of water is too grand for our modern tech or it requires really expensive pumps
Really great information and excellent delivery. I feel like I definitely know a lot more about today's world..economy trade and international current affairs as well as geography and climate. Thanks so much!
Is it? The straight of Magellan avoids those imaginary dangers. The narrowest part is two miles, visit Punta Arenas, right on El Estrecho de Magallanes 🇦🇷
@@relwaretep "Do you take the Panama Canal like a Democrat, or do you go around the Horn?" "Uhh, the canal?" "No damn it! You take the Horn like God intended!"
You don't necessarily need to sail through Drake's Passage. The Beagle Channel and Strait of Magellan lie just north of it and have much calmer waters. It's what ships used to do before the Panama Canal was opened.
Interesting that the Mexican canal proposal also includes industrial parks along the route. Instantly sounds like "set up your new vehicle assembly plant here" to me, which is a pretty genius position to take, especially compared to the other alternatives proposed.
I think turning the rio grand into a new canal would solve the border issue create jobs n secure easy travel for the U.S. navy n prolly take the same amount of time to sail down to Panama n then cross
It is exactly as you imagine it, it's the ace in the hole to attract investment in the area, along with tax breaks and part ownership of the land after a set amount of time in use. It's meant to increase development in the area as well as solidify the project by injection of capital from mega corps. They're also building oil, and gas pipes along the corridor.
Worth mentioning that the canal is useful and can save millions of $ (and many, many lives of crew members) because Cape Horn is the most dangerous and vioent stretch of ocean on the planet. Many ships that go through there face unreal waves (sometimes surpassing 15-20 meters of height) that travel very fast and are incredibly steep that badly damage the ships and their cargo if they are container carriers, without mentioning the enormous weight that the ice adds to them, as water is sprayed by the waves and immediately frozen all throughout the ships, making them very unstable and prone to sinking. The clash of the currents from the Southern Ocean with the South Atlantic combined with the immensely powerful winds create some of the most unique and destructive waves on the planet. Once you go in, you can't turn around, you simply have to proceed. The weather can go from extremely bad and dangerous to straight up deadly in a matter of minutes with no warnings. The horrific stories that many seafarers have to tell about that passage are heart wrenching to say the least, many of them thought they wouldn't make it out alive because the conditions were just SO bad. So yeah, it is a very dangerous place to go through, you really do NOT want to go through that passage unless you absolutely have to.
When you are describing how the locks work there are no pumps, only valves. The valves are opened from the higher lock and water flows due to gravity to the lower chamber and stops itself when they reach equilibrium.
But that wouldn't be enough, right? It'll work for the bulk, but the weight of the ship with cargo will leave too much height difference between the two locks, I'd assume.
Interesting Fact about the Panama Canal. During WW2 when Countries like Japan were building the largest Battleship of all time (Yamato) the United States largest Battleship designs were limited by the width of the Panama Canal. So the United States largest battleship was the (Iowa Class Battleship) instead of building wider was built longer. The Iowa Class Battleship was a full 24 feet longer than the Yamato. This extra length made the Iowa Class much faster than the Yamoto. Iowa's could travel up to 37 MPH meanwhile the Yamoto top speed was 31 MPH.
Another key difference is that the USS Iowa and her class are still in commissioned service, albeit not active duty; meanwhile the Yamato is a coral reef.
@@Lusa_Iceheart minor nitpick, the Iowa's ahve been fully struck from the naval register, they are not ever expected to return to service. And Yamato is too deep underwater to be a reef.
Yeah but the longer Hull also meant it was less manuverable. The iowa class has a turning diamter of 760m, the yamoto has only 585m (175m smaller diameter), this is extremely important in the age of torpedos.
As it means for a given speed the yamato can turn better meaning it can maintain higher speeds in combat without risking it's ability to turn out of the path of torpedos.
What's really cool about Suez canal, that it doesn't have any locks and it's also wide enough for ships to move on their own. It's basically straight connection of two seas.
That is also why the Pacific ocean is called like that, due to the ships leaving the tumultuous Drake Passage and suddenly encountering a way more peaceful stretch of sea... Hence, Pacific ocean
@@happilyham6769 Between 2013-2022 807 ships sunk and around 300 were (generally) modern cargo ships, Yknow' back in April of 1912 some other people thought their modern (for the time) ship was unsinkable.
I remember in 2013 I lived in Colombia for a while, one of my favorite conversations was about how Colombia has been planning to connect some of those rivers to create a second inter-oceanic path, one that would be less convenient than the Panama canal, but with a much higher capacity for ships.
No way in hell man, I live pretty near one of the country's most prominent rivers and that would require absurd ammounts of engineering to work, let alone connecting ALL the rivers, and the time ships would have to spend is ludicrous compared to Panama's Canal, and not to mention the incredible ammounts of corruption and malpractices common in the government of this beautiful cesspool of a country
In 1901, the United States government's Isthmian Canal Commission determined that the Atrato River was not suitable for a canal, due to the length of the route (over 100 miles) and the large amount of silt carried by the river, and recommended Nicaragua and Panama as preferable sites.
Both Nicaragua and Mexico have seriously proposed a second canal in the past, as well as Colombia. The Chinese-funded Nicaraguan one even got as far as some digging started - which was a major motivation for the widening of the Panama canal (ie the wider Panama canal able to take bigger ships made the Nicaraguan one uneconomic). But the cheapest and easiest way to give much needed redundancy for trade is a railway and a couple of large container ports. Then of course there is also the Northwest passage which is now becoming open most summers ...
@@kenoliver8913 That timeline is not quite right. In Panama we had a national referendum in 2006 that approved the expansion of the canal. The project began the same year. It was inaugurated in 2016. The Nicaragua canal started doing their façade digging in 2014. The reason was that Panama was having a major economic boom (10-15% YoY) due to all the money invested and the Chinese and Nicaraguans wanted a slice of that
As commented above, no water is pumped in the Panama Canal, it's all gravity fed. The new set of locks are hugely larger that the original set, to take much larger ships, but they use 7% less water. 60% of the water in the new locks is reutilized and never leaves the system. When talking about all of the different projects in other countries, what you didn't mention in the video is that Panama has two Canals; one wet and one dry. The Dry Canal is a very efficient container cargo train that joins the ports on the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea (there is no Atlantic in Central America). The Dry Canal train transports goods across the 80 km isthmus much faster than any of the options in other countries, and has been running for many years, so all the logistics and other issues are well-proven. To increase the water capacity of the lakes, Panama is looking at options for more reservoirs. As mentioned in the video, the vast majority of the population of Panama is near the Canal, and the sites of proposed dams and lakes are in low population density areas.
I also thought this same thing, the thinness of the country means that any form of land transport would be worth it maybe just to avoid the extra 18 days
@@mxandrew For powers that can have multiple ships on either side that's a possibility. For groups that rely on the ship itself making the entire journey, a land porterage isn't exactly possible. If the US Navy to Taiwan example occurs, they're kind of sending the ships full of guns, men, supplies, ammunition, medical, equipment, etc., which means the whole ship goes or naught at all.
You didn't mention that Panama recently completed the Panamax locks which are much larger than the old locks, big enough to accommodate the larger container ships and supertankers. Larger locks mean greater water consumption. The dams and reservoirs built for the old Panama Canal didn't have the volume to run the new locks. The Panama government will have to build some new dams to supply enough water to overcome a drought.
Panamax is a size of ship referencing the maximum size the old locks. The new size is Neopanamax. And these new locks are more efficient, ad mentioned.
I work in logistics and we pretty much never ship through the Panama Canal…. All products from Asia heading to the east coast just disembark at LA or Sea/Tac and rail across the US to the east coast. Doesn’t make sense to use the canal these days since most of the ships coming out of Asia can’t even fit through the canal…
@@rcl5555 not really. A few large carriers have rail as apart of their transport portfolio and intermodal transport is quite common in the industry. It’s very common to have something shipped to a port, loaded onto rail to a distribution center and then trucked to an end consumer. V
@@leewald733 Interesting! I'd think that for a long distance transportation (e.g. across the continent) a single container ship taking 5000 TEU would be more economical than ~20 trains that would carry the same load, especially taking into account not just fuel but also loading/unloading...
@@rcl5555 the problem is the canal’s width hasn’t been updated to accommodate those size vessels. Hence why 40% of the US imports come through LA. It can still accommodate Naval size vessels and small container ships but the massive vessels that are used in most mega ports these days are just way too wide. Instead the traffic in the pacific usually takes a circular approach where they just go from port to port around the pacific dropping and picking up loads. That’s vastly more efficient for the fuel costs. With rail there is SO many trains coming out of LA it’s insane, you can usually get a pretty solid rate for overland transit of the same TEU or FEU (i usually work in FEU’s). The other nice aspect to this model is if you have to throw some air into the mix it doesn’t completely change the distribution strategy. You just fly it into the same entry port city instead of ship it.
😂😂😂 los barcos que no pueden pasar por el canal de Panamá es una mínima parte de la flota mundial.. Y es así porque no tiene sentido construirlos más grandes y que no puedan pasar por el canal NO SERÍA RENTABLE.. Hablas sin saber y sin tener algo de lógica por lo menos.. Un contenedor sólo paga de 30 a 40 dólares por atravesar el canal.. Es tan importante el canal.. que cuando lo amplíen se construirán barcos más grandes.. En pocas palabras los tamaños de los barcos dependen del canal de Panamá..
25:00 to add up to the Colombian alternative: - In the past, Colombia had overcomed the geographical difficulties of the mountains and had a respectable railroad system. Due to various issues, like lobbying by the trucker guilds, most of the lines have been abandoned. The current government is pushing to revive them, and popular opinion wants the trains back. - The US had also proposed a canal through the Darien Gap in the Colombian part, but it was discarded for environmental concerns. I say that Mexico is the only one right now that can get profit out of the situation, as it already has a transoceanic train.
As a Oaxacan, the Transistmus is set to make big moves starting this year thanks to the current government taking very good advantage of the area to set up the trains, however the biggest problems are currently the rampant corruption that will inevitably bog down this project like it has done to the Toluca High Speed Rail Network and also that the Transistmus is servicing both freight and passenger trains as a concession to the villages which were affected by the construction or whose homes were expropriated illegally by the government without compensation.
@@dmbfannh well... the US said they need to use nuclear explotions to dig the cannal there... And it's also necesary to disrupt the flow of a major river in he region
Over a century later, is it still impossible to build a sea level crossing canal in Panama? 26 m doesn’t seem prohibitively high to overcome. This would not only eliminate the need for rain water to fill the canal but vastly increase the size of ships able to transit, leading to more revenue.
One of the main reasons for the war in the M.E. is the Suez Canal lot trying to stop competing routes being dug by Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon that would take ships from the Persian Gulf to the Med. Russia wants routes the Caspian and Black Sea to the Med too.
@@jackb1997 probably over compressed or improper use of normalization or limiting. Usually the audio is better than this but it's very noticeable here.
As a seasoned Civilization 6 player, whenever I play the Earth map as one of the American Civs, I always try and build a city where Panama is because your ships can just easily slip through the city. It's absolutely vital for controlling the seas around that part of the world!
@@NONO-hz4vo That depends. If you're playing as Australia on the True Start Earth map, ships is all you need. As long as you can control the seas around you, no-one will ever land on your island. Obviously though, that's good if you want to play defensively. If you're going for a domination victory, you do need land combat units, although ships can still take most coastal cities.
4:30 You should have mentioned that Panama would not even exist as a country if it wasn't for the canal. It used to be part of Colombia. When separatists declared the isthmus independent, Teddy Roosevelt immediately officially recognized them as an independent state because of his interest in building a US canal through that land. Edit: Roosevelt also sent US warships to blockade both Panamanian coasts so that Colombia couldn't send in their troops to restore control; and southern Panama's impassable Darien Gap prevented the Colombian army from driving up there, too. The new Panamanian government was naturally grateful to the US and granted the US a perpetual lease for control of what would become the Canal Zone.
Waiting 18 days is still significantly cheaper than traveling 18 days, though at some point it might be cheaper to unload it onto land transport over land and load onto another ship - that is though requires a lot of infrastructure change to streamline something like this
You have to consider that the Drake Passage is free. So the alternatives are: 1) Cost of waiting 18 days + Panama Canal fare 2) Cost of sailing 18 days (additional fuel cost) If the situation becomes critical enough, going around Cape Horn could become an alternative for some ships.
It's interesting that you have overlooked the Panama Railway which has been operational for decades carrying containers between the two ports of the canal. Expansion and upgrade could also increase the carrying capacity of the "fifth" alternative.
Yeah, that's true. In fact, part of the cargo of the crossing ship is actually moved with the Railway as the ship is passing through the Canal. So, improving this Railway can actually open another Railway Route and even allow the transfer of cargo in the same way that would be done with both the Paraguayan-led Transoceánico Highway, Colombian Railway and Mexican Railway Alternatives Of course this should also come with other measures in respect of Oceanic Trade such as an standardization of Cargo Ship Sizes (which is also important to consider after what happened a few days ago in Baltimore or when the Mega Cargo Ship got stuck in the Suez Canal a few years ago) as well as preparation for dealing with trouble makers (such as the Somali Pirates (which they do still exist) and the Houthis) without heavily relying on having Military Ships escorting them all the time
While that definitely helps, it is far less efficient in both in terms of total volume of cargo and emissions created. A cargo ship can haul a ton of cargo 2000 mi per gallon whereas rail [per ton] is typically 500 mi per gallon
In 67, 68, and 69 the I was on the USS Boston and we’re transitioned the canal both ways. The US hired many Panamanian to maintain the entire canal. I went thru the canal three years ago on a cruise ship and the canal is in terrible shape with rust and lack of painting. When jimmy peanuts gave the canal to Panama this is not surprising due to the lack of maintenance.
There is also the land bridge in existence between the US Pacific NW & the US East Coast. The Ports of Tacoma & New York have been operating together for years.
@@CanMav You don't, but most of the alternatives mentioned in the video are also land transport. In many cases it's only the cargo that needs to be transported, not the ships.
@@ETophales thing is, a long train, and I mean a really long train can have around 130 train cars (personally, longest I´ve seen was 112 cars long, but I know there are longer ones). They can go nuts and go 200 cars on a single train but rail intersections would become much more dangerous. While a single container ship can carry up to 15,000 containers, each around twice the capacity of a train car. That´s why a water canal is many times more efficient that a train line. However, given that Panama Canal will not be operating at full capacity, the shortest land route by train becomes the second best aternative. This is because a ship takes 8-10 hours to cross the canal, but a train would take a bit less than 5 hours to cross those 118 mile railway, meaning they can load cargo on the Pacific, unload it in the Gulf, then loading cargo on the Gulf and unload it in the Pacific on its way back and be done about the same time a ship would take to make it just one way. So, by doing this non-stop and adding several parallel railway lines, you can indeed reach numbers similar to the Canal. Now, while there is a rail line between NY and Tacoma, that takes 3 days on train (at least for passengers, not sure for cargo trains). Sure, it is there, but you can´t compare the time it takes to go between both coasts to what it takes on Mexico or Central America.
What are the draft restrictions for? Shallower draft means more water is used to lift the boat. A rowboat uses the most water and the largest Neo-Panamax uses the least.
Just a tip, you're making the name Tehuantepec harder than it needs to be: it's only four syllables, te-wan-te-pek. The digraph "hu" before another vowel is always a W sound in Spanish, and languages spelled according to Spanish rules, like Nahuatl ("Na-watl"), which is the source of many Mexican place names.
The "hu" is easy to explain, but good luck getting people to understand that final "tl" 😅The word Nahuatl has two syllables, but I think the average person trying to sound it out would probably pronounce it with four.
Obviously, it would be expensive, but does anyone know if Panama has considered pumping the water back to the lake when draining the lower locks instead of dumping the fresh water into the ocean?
Directly it’s a bad idea as the other comentes said it’s pretty much polluted water it could costly but it’s is possible to retrofit the reservoir pools which are used on the new locks But again we need a real administration not corrupt monkeys
Water from the lower lock mixes with the higher lock every time they're opened, which is why the strategy is to always have the water flow towards the ocean as much as possible so that minimal amounts of salt water can make its way all the way to the top being diluted at each step. (Also means gravity is doing the work so you don't need to be burning fuel so much.) Pulling the water back up to any higher lock counteracts this and gets into the lake, and the more water is reused the more poluted it becomes. It does feel like there should be a way to help reduce how much water it costs but they have designed it to be pretty efficient already (while avoiding poisoning themselves too much), with ships going up and down at the same time to cut the usage in half. (And actually, I just realized that they actually do a bit of this, each of the locks in the newer systen has a reuse basin already that is designed to catch as much as it can while minimizing pollution into the lake) I also saw some other commenters wondering about a nuclear powered desalination plant to help produce more fresh water from the oceans, but I suspect that can't produce enough to meet demand.
@@theevermind It's already expensive, most often prohibitive to desalinate water for human consumption. Forget trying to make enough for a billion dollar canal to operate. If that tech was available, the owners would be trillionaires.
As far as I understand, the difference between the Panama Canal and others is that it has a canal between two lock systems. And this canal is not connected to other water systems, so it can dry out.
12:50 is wrong. The load restrictions (actually draft/depth restrictions) are due to the water levels in the lake. In fact, the amount of water required to raise the level of the ship is fixed at the loch surface area multiplied by the total elevation difference and entirely independent of the ships size and weight. It's not intuitive but if you have a measuring cup that holds 2 cups and you want to raise it from the 1 cup line to the 2 cup line you have to add 1 cup of water, it doesn't matter if you have rubber duck in it or if you fill the bottom half with sand first, you still have to add 1 cup of water to move the water level up.
I'm glad you point this out. I sat here thinking about it for 15 min. "Lighter ships displace less water and thus require less water to move through the locks" intuitively sounds so correct and yet is so wrong.
The draft restrictions aren’t to reduce water usage per transit. It actually increases water consumption per transit. The deeper a ships draft, the less water needed to be added to each lock. The draft restrictions were added (really reduced from what they are normally) because ships would otherwise potentially run aground given the lower lake levels
That makes more sense! I wondered why they'd limit the load on ships given that carrying as many containers as possible is the whole purpose of the ships' existence.
Thank you. That one was doing my head in! Also, I know they can't pump sea water into the locks because you don't want that in the lake right... But why does the fresh water they use not get reused? Surely it could be pumped into holding tanks or something. Why does it all just get flushed?
Actually you're both incorrect, it uses the same amount of water regardless of the ships displacement therefore if you wanted to maximise tonnage transferred per litre of water used you'd only allow the biggest ships possible (fully loaded) through. But as you rightly say the draft limit is due lower lake levels. The best way to think about it is that say the ship rises by 6m when the water equalizes in locks 1 & 2 then you effectively take 6m of water out of lock 2 and put it in lock 1 but that's undisplaced water from 'under' the ship as the ship is still displacing the same amount of water before and after the lock equalizes.
@@SteepSixif you pump the lock dry to stop the fresh water from escaping into the sea you would essentially leave the ship scraping the bottom, damaging the ships keel. I would love to be a fly on that rooms wall when the Panamanian reps try to explain to shipping companies that their multi million dollar cargo carriers are going to be consumables unce they go through the locks. Because those things are definitely not designed to sit on their own keel while fully laden with cargo and fuel.
@@Hileeeee Displacement, by definition is the volume of water a ship takes up. A larger ship has a larger displacement than a smaller ship or the same ship but with more cargo onboard vs less cargo on board. The lock needs to be filled or lowered to the same level no matter what for ships to pass to the next lock. If your ship is displacing more water, less water is required to be added or removed from the lock to bring it to the correct height. Lets say the locks require 4 million gallons of volume to be raised / lowered to the next lock's level. If your ship displaces a million gallons of water, you only need to add / remove 3 million gallons of water. By raising the draft restrictions, and given the locks only allow a set width and length ship through, ships have to displace a lower volume. So if your ship can now only displace 800,000 gallons. You need an extra 200,000 gallons of water added or removed.
Another option is to connect the Alaska Railroad to the rest of the North America rail network. Freight could go from Asia to Anchorage and then be shipped by rail faster to the East Coast than coming through the Panama Canal.
that’s a good idea, i’ve been advocating connecting the Alaska railroad to Canada for a long time. seems like a no brainer. They could also catch about 20% of the fresh water in the streams that flow into the ocean in Alaska, Canada and pipe it south to the southwest. but no! they let it go in the ocean and waste it.
This february in Los Angeles, it was one of the wettest ever recorded. I live in the deserts of Southern California, and we received two and a half times our normal february rainfall. And it's not done raining.
None of the water used in the Panama Canal is pumped. The ships are raised by water flowing from an upper lock chamber to a lower chamber. Ships are lowered by lowering the water level in the upper chamber were the ship is to the upper level of the next lower chamber.
@vejet why would you want to install pumps and have to maintain when they work or fix them when they fail when the water has been flowing from the level of the lake down to sea-level for free for over a century?
@@thomasetchberger8678 Because without it the system could cease to function in severe droughts? I mean did you even watch the video, that is exactly what is happening. Yes I understand adding pumps will result in some significant upfront capital and installation costs as well as ongoing maintenance costs, even if they are not continuously used. But I think it's a just wee bit better than the alternative solution i.e. the "hope and pray method", that the rains come back. I mean how is that even a viable option when your entire economy literally depends on normal canal functionality? It's sheer incomitance that they haven't installed pumps already if only as a contingency to deal with exactly this type of problem.
@@vejet the Panama canal uses 2.6 million megalitres of water each year. That's 2.6 billion tonnes to send 26 metres uphill and several kilometres inland. Pumping just a fraction of that would cost more than the canal is worth. Ships would stop using the canal because it would be cheaper to take the 18 extra days to go all the way around South America, or they'd just stop carrying those routes altogether.
@@vindik8or 1300 GWh is the yearly energy needed in the absolute worst case scenario which equates to about 300 Million EUR per year at the absolute worst price for kWh .. so it can be done, and it can be done economically. Build a nuclear reactor and the problem is solved.
I live in Panama City, and can see the machines for unloading ships at Puerto de Balboa, when I look west from my balcony, and the pacific (Bay of Panama) when I look south. This rainy season has been one of the wettest. So, whilst last year was very dry, this year we have had to deal with excess rain, and the effect it has on our small country. The lakes which feed the canal are at capacity.
@@Rando_Shyte Yes, it's likely that the scripts are at least partially AI written given the speed at which he puts out 50-minute videos on all sorts of geopolitical topics.
dont worry with modern ship and technology it only will consume more oil to move things around world and country that have oil will decrease prices for that companies because at end of day they need rich countris to buy things.
@@t.n.h.ptheneohumanpatterna8334 Are you not up to date on the whole "Red Sea" incidents occurring right now? Last time I checked, the Suez canal is there to provide quicker access through the red sea rather than having to navigate the continent of Africa
Im sure they can modify the canals to be a closed (or mostly closed) loop that dose not need to dump water as much. There just has not been enough incentive to do it until recently
The pumps required for that would be absolutely enormous, and require an absolutely huge amount of energy to run. Its easy to underestimate how much water is being moved and how much energy that requires. If you think about the largest bulk fuel tankers, they generally can pump about 2000kL per hour, which is an incredible amount due to the need to pump the ship empty in the minimum amount of time to reduce the costly time spent in port. At that rate, it would take 96 hours PER LOCK.
@@tasquizztaylor1698 If it was profitable enough, they could build the infrastructure to support it. The real problem is not allowing the fresh water to mix with the salt water beforehand. If all of the water could be pumped into a separate reservoir and desalinated it could just be returned to the lake. It's also only 25% salt water so this would be cheaper than if you were trying to desalinate 100% salt water. The fact that they want to flood thousands of acres instead of attempting an engineering fix for the problem blows my mind.
@@tasquizztaylor1698 lol at using boats with pumps on them as your point of reference. You may as well have said to compare to the world's largest datacenters, they generally can pump about x kL per hour, which is an incredible amount due to the need to keep the CPUs cool and reduce the costly burnout of NVDIA H100s. At the end of the day, neither stupid reference point application actually requires truly large pumps. You can have much larger pumps when needed if they aren't on a boat, powered by a boat, etc. Did you just go there because the panama canal reminds you of boats? A smarter reference would be the edmonston pumping plant.
@@tasquizztaylor1698the worlds largest pump as of 2019 can do 60,000 liters a second. If it’s 200,000,000 L per crossing (wiki) that’d be a hair under an hour. ((( I’m bad at math and this is hypothetical)))
Mother nature doesn't care about your race, genetics or nationality; it will kill everything that you love and own. Incidentally, humanity can deal with mother nature like how we literally slowed down the rotation of the Earth by damming.
Not only is the Panama Canal not the only lock system it’s also not the first. The lock system between Lake Superior and Lake Huron works the same way and it’s older.
First off is it just me or is the audio distorted and low quality for this video? Anyway I'm half Panamanian and got a lot of family there. it's kinda sad the effects of such a vital part of the economy and world economy, but it's resource usage harms the citizens so much. i've often been down there in the dry season and it's usually pretty bad and there's water rations and stuff going on. I can't imagine how much worse it could get. I'm curious what would happen if we just started investing in local small businesses instead of transporting everything around the world.
I think it's just you on the audio, it sounded fine to me. As far as the local business investment goes, that won't happen in the US at least, until the flurry of cheap crap from China drys up. Once the big boxes like Walmart collapse, then it will have to go back to small business by default. But there will be a whole lot of pain before that happens. The Panamax addition should have been designed to reuse more of that water instead of ejecting it into the ocean. But with the contractors they used, I'll be amazed to see it last twenty years.
This may be a dumb question/impossible solution but why not either: A. Instead of dumping the last section of water into the ocean, pump it either back into the canal or back into the reservoir using something similar to an oil pipeline. Or B. Set up desalination plants along the coast to pump sea water (that is converted into freshwater) into the freshwater reservoirs? I know both would be expensive but I have to imagine that if this is one of the single most important trade routes, it probably generates enough wealth to do so, or maybe multiple countries that depend on this trade route would all contribute to such projects considering the need for quicker shipping and route access.
in response to solution A: (not an engineer, just an internet idiot lol) I would have to assume it has something to do with the unavoidable mixture of salt and fresh water being dumped back into the lake itself. We'd have to remove the salt from the water before dumping it back in the lake and vice versa.
I would suspect a desalination plant would be far less expensive to build at each end, then digging whole new waterways to connect extra reservoirs to the main lake. And require a lot less land as well.
The operational costs long term of a desalination plant would far exceed the short term costs of the resevoir extensions though. Like, once the waterways are built, there's not a whole lot of maintenance or upkeep to them.@@Krahazik
@@PA_Sword Yeah they would have to make somekind of storage separate from the lake. A closed system. The lakes would be there to 'refill' the closed system as it inevitably losses some water with each passage since no closed system that I can imagine would be 100% perfect. Still if it ends up recycling even 2/3 of the water each time that would be huge for them. The problem is. I am not sure how they would pull that off without a complete rebuild and redesign. It was designed in a different era(like some cities) and to fix it is no small project at all. Almost to the level of tear it down and start over.
I think they would need to desalinate something close to 1.872 Billion gallons a day (via the numbers presented in this video) to be fully reliant on them, and that doesn’t sound exactly feasible. Plus you still need to distribute it away from the coasts back to the center of the canal for usage.
What this really shows is how accustomed we've become to the luxuries, comforts, and conveniences afforded to us by uninterrupted international trade. Going back is unthinkable.
Imo it rather shows how much short term profit matters. There are alternative projects to both Panama and Suez canal, but it costs money and who needs redundancy when there is already one built? Our global economy has gotten so reliant on the easiest solutions built decades ago that innovation is mostly limited to how to conduct trade itself. Just recall how much we were scared of a global economic crisis when Ever Given got stuck in Suez Canal. One damn ship. And anyone who defends this line of thought with costs and time, just think that both Panama and Suez were built in 10 YEARS, with technology wastly inferior to what we have today.
Management is about always going for low hanging fruit. Ex of a typical grocery chain. They will maintain and "fix" a constantly breaking refrigeration system that keeps malfunctioning, rather than repair it... because "the upfront cost is lower". Thereby proving it's not IQ that makes you smart...it's how you use it. Sidenote: how is a pattern recognition test an indication of intelligence. Once you learn the pattern it's easily replicated. 😒🙄
Panama thought they were being handed a gold mine, but they failed to understand how much of a loss it was being operated at. The US was subsidizing it the entire time it was operating under their control.
Ive been saying for a while that a country depending on international trade is a very bad idea. Because if something goes wrong, everything falls apart. Trade is fine, but there also needs to be a robust system in place for self sufficiency. Nothing can top being able to take care of yourself, especially when an emergency happens.
During the mid-1960s the U.S. was researching a plan to blast a sea level shipping canal across the isthmus of Nicaragua using dozens of thermonuclear explosives. One of the reasons that plan was abandoned was a study indicated much of the massive amount of radioactive fallout would likely impact surrounding residents.
Can’t help but think that shipping by road/rail from Houston to LA would be cheaper than the Bi-Oceanic Corridor through Paraguay and three other countries.
The LA/Long Beach ports could probably absorb additional traffic in a few years, but the main constraint is the freight routes into the ports. Because they’re surrounded by the fully built out LA and Orange County, it’s hard to build additional transport infrastructure (e.g. new rail lines/wider freeways) quickly or cheaply.
Mexico is considering building deep ocean ports on their Pacific Coast to unload container ships onto rail lines running up to the US and their Caribbean Coast ports for loading on shorter draft vessels that can be unloaded at ports along the US Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. UP wants to run an additional rail line or two west along the border to handle more intermodal freight but are being stymied by New Mexico and Arizona.
Retrofit, at enormous cost, so that the first two chambers on either side of the canal are pumping water from the ocean up and then filtering back down
After spending 6 weeks in South Africa right now, I can say their ports cannot handle this. Father in law works in Durban Ports and its already a 3 month wait time because 1/4 cranes are even working.
@johnburns4017 right near the start the video mentioned that ships are rerouting around Africa due to the Suez being so dangerous right now. When this was the norm south Africa was a common port that ships would stop at.
Very vew ships use the Drake passage. Most go through the Magellan strait, which goes through an area of fjords and is deep enough to allow even larger ships to go through.
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec train in Mexico has been in operation for at least one month, not in 2030 as the video says. The train takes approximately 6 hours to travel from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico.
The video said there has been a great link for over 100 years but hasn't always been well maintained. And that the current project would add more links
@@israelugalde8658 Pues es bastante obvio, no? Agarró las vías que ya existían desde el siglo pasado, le puso un tren medio nuevo, "comprobó" que si servía la ruta y se colgó otro logro. Realmente crees que acabaron un proyecto de ese tamaño en un par de meses? Un proyecto que ha sido famoso a lo largo de la historia de México por nunca realizarse al 100%. Crees que la infraestructura puesta a principios del siglo XX es suficiente para soportar la carga de una ruta comercial de este tamaño. No necesito darte fuentes para algo que es obvio.
There have to be additional options, albeit expensive. Example: Raise rates and build additional reservoirs at each end. Then pump fresh water to/from recycling reservoirs instead of just emptying it into the ocean.
Simple f* solution... - pump water back into the sweet water containers (not to the sea) - cause originally you're not really "pumping" water from the higher reservoir to the lower, you're just using a natural pressure (at cheap) for levels to equalise; Pumping back up with actually mean an expenditure of energy (so money); but hey...
thats the way. They will just start doing that if needet. will increase pasage cost by a bit, but that will still be cheaper compared to using even more energy to sail around SA.
There's actually a good reason why. It takes about 1.02 kilowatts to move a foot acre (a lot, The Panama canal uses 160 per day for 36 ships) of water up one foot. That doesn't sound like a lot until you realize the Panama canal is 312 ft above sea level. This would require 1.8 gigawatts of energy to move every single day, bare minimum. Now let's say they only need to pump half of their water back up that way they can save on energy. About .9 GW. This would require a nuclear power plant to power or three or four natural gas or coal power plants running constantly just to provide power to one purpose. It would be a solution and could even be cost-effective potentially. It would cost roughly 22,500 to make enough energy from gas, which actually isn't too much considering the toll prices. It would take about 400 million to make each of those gas power plants though, though that is much cheaper than coal or nuclear to start out with. This is not including the prices of installing all those pumps, that could also be really expensive. These are all just estimates based on online searching, the real cost could be lower or much much higher if they have to do a lot of importing themselves of things. It would also take years to implement so it's one of those things where it's actually kind of difficult of a decision to make if potentially all you have to do is wait for the next rainy season. Hopefully this helps explain things
Hevely loaded ships displace more water which actually causes less wastage when passing through the locks. The problem is that the lake is now so low if a ships draft is too deep it wouldn't pass over the sill in the lock to get into the lake
Yes you are correct. Larger ships with heavy loads displace more water, meaning less water needs to be pumped into the lock, saving water. At 12:52 I had to stop because "lighter load displace less water and require less water to move through..." Is wrong and does not science.
Simple although costly solution: Install a few powerful gas turbine generators connected to massive pumps. Run them when needed to pump the water back up. Charge ships extra when pumping is needed.
@GM_Steelhaven keep in mind the water at the bottom is contaminated with salt water, you'll over time, increase the salt contents of the lake drastically, so just pumping it back might not be feasable. What I don't get is: this is a region near teh equator, it should have plenty of sunlight: why not use some solar energy to desalinate and pump the water back up to replenish the lake, also using it to supply freshwater to the people? obviously its expensive
@@AstralJaeger Solar panels aren't magic, and most people aren't aware that solar panels are consumables with a limited operation period. You spend over a decade of electricity needs all at once when installing solar panels, and by the time you break even, the solar panels start to break. You're better off just building another coal powered power plant, and in poor south American countries, that's the only option. Also, desalinating water is one of the most power demanding things you can do, and it's more economical to literally just truck in cheap fresh water from across the country than to make it from salt water.
Much of the canal traffic can be bridged by US and Canadian railroads that routinely run stack trains with ship's containers from coast to coast. It'll keep our east and west coast ports busy too.
@@Stroggoii i didnt think a cargo train moved slower than a cargo boat but i had to google it anyway. cargo train in the us is limited to 49mph while a cargo ship max speed is 24knots or 27mph.... distance between both coasts is roughly 2500miles while from LA to panama in a straight line is 3500m - a cargo ship will take minimum 4 days at sea for that alone. of course, 240 containers from a cargo train to the 14k in a ship (max at panama canal) is a big difference. Is it possible? yes. with current third world railroad system the US have? hell no.
@@xbadjokerx, do you realize that it would take 58 entire trains of 240 containers to move 14,000 containers? It’s not the land speed of the individual trains that is important. It is the time between sending the first train and the last train reaching its destination that matters.
4:46 Panama Canal locks' freshwater supply problem 5:27 canal lock animation 7:11 each ship passage consumes 52 million gallons of increasingly scarce fresh water 10:39 Lake Gatun the main drinking water source for Panama 11:58 dramatic reduction in # of ships allowed through 17:5523:20 four Panama alternative proposals, none of which will address current predicament 24:21 Colombia transoceanic train network connection through Andes 25:17 potential Nicaragua canal revisited. HKND failure, Ortega oppression, corruption 29:45 Mexico Isthmus of Tehuantepec 30:46 2020 AMLO rail renewal announcement 31:33 could start shipping in 2028, fully open 2033 33:00 potential Panama Canal fixes
One minor detail. You mention that they pump water into the fist lock from the second. Only this is not how it works. It is all operated by gravity. At the beginning of this century I was working for a firm that was building a rail and shipping facility that would take containers by rail from one end to the other to accommodate super max ships. Perhaps they will have to move ahead with this.
neat, seen more colour and detail of south america through your video than other resources i seen. edit i also remember seeing a project for a helium balloon in the sky gaining water onto dimples on the plastic. the water downfall could be used for electricity. i wonder if these could be used to help refill the lake, reducing water rations. i doubt it could work fast enough for replacing all of the water used, just adding more to the lake.
for cargo shipping, the obvious solution is to use rail to transport containers from one coast to the other - sure, have to unload and load the containers, but it's doable and the ports could expand to add more cranes and it means coordinating shipping routes to have vessels operating in both oceans that participate in the overall delivery of containers, so more effort there but that all would probably still be preferable to 18 days of a longer ocean only route
This is my idea as well . I figured surely somebody has brought rail transport up as a better alternative. You did ! Although massive and loaded up, I'm sure a rail car could be designed to have the entire ship and it contents loaded onto it from the water and secured for the crossing till it is released on the carts downward decent into the open waters at the end. Constant movements , throughout and no time losses consuming unloading and reloading to still be transported on something separate. Not practical. Any new procedure to get through the gauntlet passage must have a very high number of benefits and better results. Especially when water is becoming increasingly less available or sacrifices something important from its sources. I hope to see this Panarailama Canal idea become a must do project. If we can rail over Chynobl, I'd bet a cargoship rail system like this can be quickly engineered. Darryl Johnson Panco 2/¹⁰/24
Hills could be a problem of course but like the locks stair stepping as they are , may I suggest a a couple of lift systems using less elongated flat graded sections Then.... at the proper end place of the rail design that section will lift the entire ship up to meet the next connecting section. Sections made as long as possible considering hills and inclines that are made to acend let's say a 2% grade over a optimized distance. Cargo is capable of high pitching and rolling in stormy seas so a small grade can be maximized without balance issues occurring. Lift could be hydraulic or even better counter weighted. Their are the bridges that lift via counter weights for passing frieght that are great feats of modern simplicity still working today , plus a huge task that wouldn't require electricity . A funicular? Sorry if i called it wrong,, it Uses a a counter balanced system to clime steep terrain and is quiet.. the sections how ever made will then repeat till the end and the cargoship is slowly released by the rail cars hold and dives down into the open waters letting the ship separate launch and continue to its ultimate destination. Thats my added two cents to this improvement. Please add your thoughts or improvements to this idea. I know a think tank of creative engineers hacking out a solution would evolve into another wonder of the world . Darryl Johnson Panco (product development and design concepts)
The problem is that a big part of ocean transport cost is actually the loading and unloading. Not to mention the absolute insane scale of ships means they will take days to load and unload. Let alone the cost of operating the trains themselves. It might actually be cheaper to just install juge pumps from the ocean. But they would probably be an ecological disaster (salt fresh water).
@@snoomtrebhuge pumps + closed system to minimise the salt cross over. That's one benefit of doing it the current way, no salt ingress into the lakes.
Really the Nicaragua one seems like a project to give people jobs and spread out money so people come to their nation to buy stuff. The reason for trucks instead of rail is rail cuts straight though without need for stops most trucks use human drivers so they need to stop for rest and food. They will require support businesses along the way bringing business to their country if it happens. The problem is until it is complete almost no one has a reason to use it. There are already other ways to get to where people live so it isn't a good road except for a shipping line that will cost a lot and barely be used but by shipping businesses. So it isn't a good road as to pay for maintenance most likely toll booths will be set up some where along it increasing the price to use it or the road will fall into disrepair which will decrease use of it.
Seems like they could pump the water for the first lock into a water tank, instead of into the ocean. Then draw it back out of the tank to raise the lock up again. This would save a huge amount of fresh water. They could even use a water tank for each lock if they wanted. The first one is the most important though.
The problem is: they don't pump the water into the ocean; they let it drain down and out for free. The narration keeps using "pump" where they should say "drain down"
@@johnmorriss5308 I understood that, but there's nothing stopping them from either pumping it or draining it down into a side tank, rather than into the ocean. They'll have to pump it back in, but that's certainly not a technical hurdle.
should be fairly easy to accomplish!? Even powered by sustainable energy to some extent. Turbines/solar and wind if possible. The lake is also a battery - Noone thought about that, apparently. We are doomed
That was my thought when I saw the animation...instead of using the water from the lake, just "suck it" in huge tanks and then release it when you have to fill it up. I don't see anything dramatic. But of course, we need to blame me travelling by car for the fact that Panama canal is not working. P.S: I have watched up to 9.40 when writing this comment, and will carry on later.
It's kind of funny how he's sort of talking about El nino like it's an abnormal event even though it's been going on for a really really long time and that regular intervals.
If the Panama Canal can only handle 10-12 ships per day then the land route doesn't have to compete with the canal, it just has to compete with the Drake Passage.
@@billhutchinson6318 the issue I'm picturing is the fact that it's a single giant highway from one end to the other. In most countries, a truck bottleneck is rarely a problem because the trucks go all different ways. In order to stay competitive you'd need essentially a truck leaving the dock every few minutes. Now add millions of people who have access to places they never have before and you could have traffic jams literally dozens of miles long
@skeetsmcgrew3282 I'm not saying that it necessarily will be a solution that makes economic sense. I don't know enough about the situation and all the relevant factors. The only point I'm making is that the alternative land routes are competing with the economics of going around the Drake pass, not the Panama Canal.
Yeah, the shipping company I'm using for the move to Japan has warned me that it now could be up to 6 months from when they pick my stuff up at the end of the month in Virginia. One correction though, is that most of the ships which use the Canal now, use the more modern locks series on either side, given the original set of locks were never built with modern super cargo ships in mind. So while the older sets are still there, Germany and the US Army Corps of Engineers built new sets on either end back in the 2000s (Germany on the Pacific side, US on the Atlantic).
Safe travels to Japan. I was stationed in Norfolk area for 14 years; 1989-2003. Spent 4 months in Yokosuka Japan in 1986 while deployed on USS Cape Cod AD 43.
A very interesting and well put together vid, but unless i missed it, the problem with the Panama Canal, is more to do with the mix of sea water that is an endless tap, and freshwater that is not, perhaps all the lower locks on both sides should be pumped from the sea to fill?
The Bi-oceanic corridor is a terrible idea, you'd need THOUSANDS of trucks just to service one cargo ship. It's crazy that they didn't use rail for that since rail already can support containers and you need significantly less crew and fuel using a railway. Additionally the Northwest Passage also exists as an alternative.
It is a good idea for south America though, if they can build it before anyone else. And once they do, it won't really matter how little time and money it saves compared to sailing around cape Horn as long as it saves at least some.
If the goal is to get shipping containers from coast to coast, why would you build roads for trucks instead of rails for trains? Each truck can only move 1 or two containers where the trains can move hundreds. Trucks are for distribution from arteries not the arteries of travel themselves. Plus, since there would be very few stops for the train, it would be one of the best candidates for high speed rail.
From my understanding, limiting the amount of cargo that each ship is able to carry decreases the displacement of the ship. This means that more water is actually needed to move the ship through the system (each lock has a finite volume and with lower displacement, more of that volume would need to be filled with water). The decreased displacement helps with the ship traversing the lake which is shallow. When there is a water shortage, ships are more likely to get stuck which would cause major delays and expenses.
@@CRneu yes but the video is missleading in the sense that it emphasises the ships weight in place of its draft. a havier boxier cargo ship might have less draft than say a light sailboat with a deep keel.
@@CRneu Locks don't operate from where the bottom of the ship is but where the top of the water is. That level has to be the same no matter how deep the vessel is sitting in the water. Lower displacement means that more water has to go under the ship to lift it to the same level.
@@GloriousSimplicity What happens here is the switching of locks which is the Problem. Inside a Lock the amount of water stays the same, regardless of displacement. But when entering and exiting the Lock you will get different effects. If you exit the lock low to high, you push the displaced water to the ocean from the lock. Then add the fixed volume to increase. After that if you exit the lock the displaced water from you has to be replenished from the lake. However, if you were to use a singular massive lock and alternate the up and down direction you will remove this effect mostly. Since from top to bottom: You displace water from the lock to the lake, take the fixed amount out, displace Water from the ocean to the lock. The amount of water here is propo
Ah. That makes more sense. I was thinking the same thing. That higher displacement would actually reduce the amount of water needed as each chamber has fixed volume. But, lake levels makes sense.
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec crossing is being considerably improved; not only does it provide a way to transfer goods between the Pacific and Caribbean, it connects with the North American railway network, and multiple large industrial parks are under construction. It will make a good alternative to Panama for many sorts of traffic.
You’re wrong about the reduced amount of cargo reducing the amount of water used. The draft (the ships depth in the water) restricts the amount of cargo/ depth. If a ship were perfectly square, the same size of a lock,, minus an inch or two, it would require mere tonnes of water to lower or raise it. If the draft/weight is reduced, it requires an equivalent amount of water on top of the reduced cargo to lift or lower the ship. Reduced cargo is increased amount of lake water used.
I was hoping someone said it. The ship displaces the water. Therefore the ship takes the place of the water that is displaced. Instead of lowering a full lock lock of water, the canal lowers a lock of water, minus the water that would have been in the space the ship occupies. Moving up through the locks is the opposite, however. When the ship moves through the lock gates, it displaces the water in the higher lock, moving it into the lower lock around the hull of the ship. Using your example, moving that ship out of the highest lock moves almost an entire lock of water out of the lake, where a lock with no ship (or a sail boat) would not draw any water from the lake when the highest gates are opened, only the fixed amount of water “pumped” from the lake into the lock to equalize the highest lock with the lake to raise a ship of any displacement. Moving a ship of any displacement from one ocean to the other uses similar amounts of water, as a greater amount of water used going up towards the lake, would be offset by the lesser amount of water used going down towards the ocean. Right? Your “lock sized ship” helped me visualize the water flow when raising a ship.
Some of the solutions to the Panama Canal problem include: (1) Build a new, sea-level canal nearby. Nicaragua is looking at this. (2) Increase the water in Lake Gatun by pumping from a lower elevation. This latter solution would probably require desalination of seawater, since Lake Gatun is a freshwater lake, but this would also assist in providing more drinking water to the nearby population. Both solutions are horribly expensive, but may have to be addressed before too long.
You failed to mention a fifth alternative to the Panama canal. The Panama Canal Railway. Opened in 1855, this is an already well-established cargo trade route linking ports on both sides of the canal. Most shipping companies are just choosing not to use it. Because of this I don't see how many of these other road and rail projects will be able to succeed without a drastic and permanent reduction of cargo capacity through the canal or significant increase in cargo moving between the Atlantic and Pacific.
Also, the Panama Canal Railway is currently owned by CPKC. In theory, cargo could travel by rail from basically anywhere within the US, Canada, and Mexico to ships waiting in Panama.
The major issue with that solution is most trains carry 200 40’ containers whereas the Ever Max which passes through the canal carries 7,800 40’ containers. It would take 39 train trips for just one ship.
You're not properly visualizing how big these container ships are. Thousands and thousands of containers. The process of unloading the ships onto numerous trains sending them across, unloading the trains onto another ship, sending the trains back and repeating several times would take longer (and produce more pollution) than just going around the continent.
The Bi-Oceanic Corridor is going to need to become a rail route as well if it's going to be to be a truly serious high-volume route. I'm also a little surprised the Panama Canal Railway was never mentioned, though it does need some significant expansion to become a bigger player.
It's in the plans. Connecting various existing roads firts was way easier financially and politically. Building the railroad will take time, unfortunately.
12:50 Restricting load sizes makes no sense and actually makes the situation worse. The locks only hold a fixed volume of water and have to lift/lower the same height regardless. The most water they would consume would be to cycle them with no ship in the lock at all. To minimize water use, they should want the largest, heaviest ship, displacing the most water possible.
It just shows that some people have a talent for speaking confidently even though they completely lack understanding. The theory about ships possibly running aground makes a little more sense to me, but that risk would depend on the draft of the individual ship, not exactly on the tonnage loaded.
“The war in the Middle East will eventually end.” That’s what I love about this channel: it’s boundless optimism.
Which one
I says to myself "that would be the day" lmfao ya think Isriel is gonna stop dropping bombs all over the middle east??? Paid for by the USA of course but that's beside the point.
Saying it will end isn't boundless optimism. Saying how it will end is though. In this context he's indirectly saying that the war is not that important and it will end eventually. (millions of lives are important but there is 8 billion people and the conflict that is happening now is nothing compared to what has happened between world war 2 and now, planet had much bigger conflicts that threatened whole population)
It WILL end, we just dont know when
I certainly hope it does, but it's far from mathematically certain. It's like a predator/prey differential equation. Birth and death will find an equilibrium, whether the death is natural or violent. As long as neither side is strong enough or willing enough to completely wipe out the other, it could plausibly go on forever. Or until the sun burns up or something.
My information is that the original engineers that planned the old Panama Canal, built reservoirs for the full locks to pump their water to when then wanted to lower a ship. The new "SmartAss" Panamax Canal builders neglected to build the reservoirs and chose to flush the receding locks into the ocean. Now they are scrambling to build the additional reservoirs.
That would have been the smarter option to do, trick would have to be that they only pump in fresh water from the sea level locations.
I was wonder why they didn't just reuse the water! Lol ty
Thank you. I was wondering the same thing as to why they didn’t reuse the water. Short- sightedness at its finest
I wouldn't say it's a bad design idea to not pump it back into the reservoir. It's a engineering design issue. Pumps require energy, gravity doesn't.
Of course this design choice didn't account for changes in weather.
So yeah they will need to correct it now.
Climate, not weather.
As a Panamanian, the government is planning to dam other rivers to supply water to the canal. We have a lot of water, it's just not distributed efficiently.
I wonder what ecological ramifications are in store for that decision
we don't care bout no stinking facts.....we have our alarmism
Because the PRD Sucks
@@connerschupp4543 Definitely some impact, loss of natural habitat, deforestation, etc. per usual.
@@tnekkc that is talked about in the video,
Just some shop talk: I appreciate that you put the sponsorship at the end. I think this makes it more effective - your whole video gets watched without losing as many viewers, and we're left with the sponsorship in mind at the end. It looks like a good service too. Nice production!
Keep your shop talk to yourself
Quick correction… As someone who has actually been through the Panama Canal… The water is not pumped. There are not any pumps involved, unless there are pumps in the new section. The original locks use gravity only. I do not know if that is the case for the new locks, but I would imagine so.
The solution to this problem would be to install pumps and feed back the water into the system then?
Kinda. It would "fix" the mechanical problem but I imagine operating costs of pumping so much water around all the time would be big and it would take very long to shift that amount of water around unless you built some gigantic pumps...
@@MatherfuckingKing virtually every hydro-storage dam handles large volumes of water
@@vdozsa77the new locks have reservoirs that can recover some of the water before it’s lost out to sea.
This video is junk, so I quit watching a third of the way through. Panama isn't getting the same rainfall in all parts. My in-laws are Panamanian, and while there was a drought in Panama City, my mother-in-law said it was pouring rain in her city nearer to Costa Rica. Climate change has zilch to do with the Canal, although this is what the officials are saying. What they are not saying is that a former president had the hardwood trees cut down and sold, and of course the money went into her pockets. The American's planted those trees to stabilize the water supply and ecosystem. Once again, corrupt government is partly to blame.
I never connected the idea that raising those water gates would have a fresh water cost. Crazy that theyre just dumping drinking water by the millions of gallons for every single ship that goes through.
the system like this wouldn't necessarily need to dump the water into the ocean, just make side-reservoirs in both entrances to keep a closed loop of water through the canal. regardless, american engineering is know for one thing in particular, making extreme things that waste as much resources as possible with the lowest quality and the highest price tag. so there's why the panama canal is doomed, they didn't account for basic stuff or any mildly extreme scenario. it just works(tm).
Just as a side note, fresh =/= potable. Fresh means it isn't salt water or ocean water. Potable or drinkable water means it's safe for human consumption
That water would still run into the ocean without the panama canal. That's just how the water cycle works. The only difference is that instead of continuously flowing out to the ocean in a river, it gets dammed into reservoirs and released in bursts whenever the locks let ships in and out.
@@toshley6192 thats the whole point, the panama canal disrupts the water cycle by throwing way too much fresh water into the ocean.
@@nyft3352 It's actually really brilliant engineering that doesn't consume any resources at all. Water evaporates from the ocean, falls as rain, forms into rivers that flow back into the ocean. That's just what water does. All the canal builders did essentially was built a few dams and sluice gates they can open and close to control the natural flow of rivers to raise and lower the water levels in small reservoirs (i.e locks).
In order to have a closed loop they would have to pump an entire river back up to the top of the mountain, which would consume quite a lot of electricity. Currently it's actually generating hydroelectricity in addition to the shipping lanes, since the entire system is gravity-fed.
The panama canal could be re-built to double the number of ships passing through using the same amount of water. Currently, the locks can only be run in one direction at a time so when ships are going up, the level of the locks are changed with no ship in the lock when the level is lowered. If the locks were separated by a small lake, big enough for two ships to pass they could run ships in both directions simultaneously so that the locks never changed level without a ship in the lock, doubling the throughput without using any more water.
BTW, the reason they are limiting the cargo on the ships has nothing to do with the amount of water used, the same amount of water is used to change the level of the locks when a fully loaded ship is in the locks, or completely empty. The reason for reducing the cargo is to prevent the ships from running aground. The lower level of the lake means the channel is shallower, and the ships must have a shallower draft.
They have been rebuilding it…mainly so they can lock ships bigger than Panamax.
I think rebuilding the locks that way would only save half the water since you're just equalizing the water level between the up and down locks before raising the up lock to the reservoir level. The 3 basins on the new locks save more water (3/4 instead of 1/2). I think the only way to save more water in the locks is to either use more basins, which has diminishing returns or using some combination of low head turbines with pumps to pump water into the lock from downstream using the energy in the water coming in from upstream. both have pretty serious diminishing returns, so it's hard to do much better than 3 basins like the new locks have.
@@thamiordragonheart8682 No, it would double the throughput using the same amount of water. For example, if you put the intermediate lake at the same level as the water when the gate between the existing locks is open, you could pipe the water around the lake from the upper lock to the lower lock and have the locks behave exactly as they are, and it would work without any water flowing into or out of the intermediate lake. But the pipe is unnecessary, you could just use the intermediate lake as the pipe.
@@douglaspeale9727 duh. you're right. I was thinking two separate lanes. admitadely, your probably also right with separate lanes as long as there's enough space to cross over. I think you could design it on the Atlantic side, but the pacific side is too steep.
actually, now that I think about it, it should work that way as long as each lock never goes up or down without a ship in it, so as long as you alternate transit directions it should work, so I would assume the Panama Canal already does that.
I’m Panamanian and I got to tell you, they did teach me about the canal when I was in middle school, matter of facts I went on a school trip to the canal and I got to tell you first 9 min of this video I learn more about the canal than I did all 14 years I lived there, all I knew about it was how the boats pass through it.
that mightve been the education before, I'm currently in HS and i knew all this already. Apart from being taught in school you see it on the news.
Porque el sistema educativo enseña a tener un fuerte sentido nacionalista, más no la habilidad de pensar de manera crítica respecto a obras de estado
If you didn’t know how significant the canal by now, that would be your fault.
@fazmarsffect7108 public school? ... just acheck what was the Monroe doctrine? and what was the purpose of the Marshall plan ?
Les get to the root of the problem causing les rain........
The selling off of the Amerzon to foriegn developers.cattle farmers.loggers.The pumping of ground water for bottling by some of the worse offerders chased out of many states in América.
Devlopents go in with swimming pools and not ONE but 2 & 3 golf courses thats require millions of gallions of Walter per day.
Nobody wants to talk about the REAL cause because both the goverment and forigners make money.
I toured South América last year so im speaking with authority.
TO HELL WITH THE CONSIQUENCES!!!!!!
Fun fact, Costa Rica had a trans-oceanic railway network connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic via trains, but it was discontinued in the 90´s for "financial" reasons and now the train only runs in the central valley area where 60% of Costa Rica´s population lives, leaving the rest of the line in disrepair.
To be honest, its shocking that the government is not seriously proposing fixing the rail line as a possible proyect, specially with the current events :(
A similar problem here in the USA, we have the rail infrastructure in order the move these huge containers between the East Coast and West Coast. Sure, it requires some upgrading, but I don't understand why these companies don't consider using trains more. Takes about 3-5 days to get across country. Creates jobs, takes less time now with the 18+ day loop around South America and is also much greener than using large container ships and probably costs a whole lot less.
Panama does have one and it is used as well, so does Mexico and the USA but regardless of where the train is, a canal is more efficient than a train regardless of where it is
@@mathgamer8787I don't think you understand just how many containers a container ship holds...it's immense, and it would take dozens of trains to even carry a single load of such a ship; then you count the fact that there's many hundreds of these ships just for North America alone and the equivalent in trains to replace them would be in the THOUSANDS. There's absolutely no way to build enough rail to accommodate that type of traffic even considering that a train could do about 2 trips AND UNLOAD/OFFLOAD in the time it would take a cargo ship to just get to its location; the US certainly does need more rail, but it's never going to replace container ships. The only thing that will eventually replace container ships in the future (and even then it probably won't do so entirely) are massive jumbo jets and huge, modernised cargo blimps.
Note: the latter above is indeed in serious development by many companies, while blimps have been plagued with issues...modern technology is solving most of them, and we'll likely see massive cargo blimps in the skies in the next several decades at minimum
@@mathgamer8787Because it does not cost a whole lot less. Trains are much less efficient than cargo ships.
@@mathgamer8787cargo ships are both less carbon-intensive and cheaper than trains
Was just reading recently that the El Niño is actually in the process of already transitioning back to a La Niña, which is definitely much quicker than people were expecting for how strong this El Niño seemed to be
How many of us are old enough to remember back when weather was attributed to El Nino and La Nina?
It already has. Australia and New Zealand experience the opposite system to the Americas, and it’s definitely a El Niño summer.
Just more climate alarmism from NOAA.
Ain’t Mother Nature a great comedian!!! 😂
Panama canal pack 🚬
In my opinion the easiest thing to do is just to build reservoirs along the locks. This is what the (admittedly smaller) locks on the Rhein-Main-Donau Kanal in Germany do. Since they don't have much water entering the canal at its highest point when a ship wants to go down through a lock they simply pump all the water into a concrete tank. When a ship wants to go back up they pump the water back up into the lock. It uses basically zero water and solves the problem.
They can’t do that because they can’t pollute the freshwater in Lake Gatun.
Nobody said pump the water back into the lake. Pump it into a reservoir and then back to the top lock
Thats what I was thinking, just build additional reservoirs along the locks to minimize freshwater loss. The water from the last lock is currently just being pumped into the ocean, so why not save and reuse it?
Panamanian here we need actual politicians running the government instead of the corrupt monkeys that are inside of it. They don’t care shit about deforestation around the canal or doing something about it they just want the dividends of it to fund their stupidity and corruption
@@MamboGimbobilithat was exactly what I was thinking aswell I wonder why this isn't being done, maybe the amount of water is too grand for our modern tech or it requires really expensive pumps
Really great information and excellent delivery. I feel like I definitely know a lot more about today's world..economy trade and international current affairs as well as geography and climate. Thanks so much!
Not to mention Cape Horn is one of the most dangerous passages that exists
"I want to spend a year going to and fro around The Horn" said no seafarer ever.
Is it? The straight of Magellan avoids those imaginary dangers.
The narrowest part is two miles, visit Punta Arenas, right on El Estrecho de Magallanes 🇦🇷
@@relwaretep "Do you take the Panama Canal like a Democrat, or do you go around the Horn?"
"Uhh, the canal?"
"No damn it! You take the Horn like God intended!"
You don't necessarily need to sail through Drake's Passage. The Beagle Channel and Strait of Magellan lie just north of it and have much calmer waters. It's what ships used to do before the Panama Canal was opened.
@@zddxddyddw thank you, eso yo no sabía.
Pasando por Ushuaia.
Interesting that the Mexican canal proposal also includes industrial parks along the route. Instantly sounds like "set up your new vehicle assembly plant here" to me, which is a pretty genius position to take, especially compared to the other alternatives proposed.
I think turning the rio grand into a new canal would solve the border issue create jobs n secure easy travel for the U.S. navy n prolly take the same amount of time to sail down to Panama n then cross
It is exactly as you imagine it, it's the ace in the hole to attract investment in the area, along with tax breaks and part ownership of the land after a set amount of time in use. It's meant to increase development in the area as well as solidify the project by injection of capital from mega corps. They're also building oil, and gas pipes along the corridor.
The rio grande isnt wide or shallow enough to allow maritime traffic, you can literally swim across it in seconds
Noy a canal, but a railroad
@@jassidom.. MEXICO is also building a canal .
Worth mentioning that the canal is useful and can save millions of $ (and many, many lives of crew members) because Cape Horn is the most dangerous and vioent stretch of ocean on the planet. Many ships that go through there face unreal waves (sometimes surpassing 15-20 meters of height) that travel very fast and are incredibly steep that badly damage the ships and their cargo if they are container carriers, without mentioning the enormous weight that the ice adds to them, as water is sprayed by the waves and immediately frozen all throughout the ships, making them very unstable and prone to sinking.
The clash of the currents from the Southern Ocean with the South Atlantic combined with the immensely powerful winds create some of the most unique and destructive waves on the planet.
Once you go in, you can't turn around, you simply have to proceed. The weather can go from extremely bad and dangerous to straight up deadly in a matter of minutes with no warnings.
The horrific stories that many seafarers have to tell about that passage are heart wrenching to say the least, many of them thought they wouldn't make it out alive because the conditions were just SO bad.
So yeah, it is a very dangerous place to go through, you really do NOT want to go through that passage unless you absolutely have to.
During the age of sail a ship sailing around cape horn could count on losing about 10% of their rigging crew.
That's why they used Magellan strait
Agulhas current?
@@gmikecstein that's... insane, I didn't know that. Thanks for the information, it's always good to learn something new.
@@gmikecstein yeesh how awful. I wouldn't sail that route in a modern ship today. No thanks. Waves. Big waves.
why is the audio so bad for this video in particular?
Yes ! Less than a minute in, & had to bail.
When you are describing how the locks work there are no pumps, only valves. The valves are opened from the higher lock and water flows due to gravity to the lower chamber and stops itself when they reach equilibrium.
But that wouldn't be enough, right? It'll work for the bulk, but the weight of the ship with cargo will leave too much height difference between the two locks, I'd assume.
@@erik2602 only gravity. I lived there from 66-81. My dad was a canal pilot. I've actually operated the controls for the valves once.
@@erik2602 No, the water level simply becomes the same and the sluice doors can be opened.
@@erik2602Bulk doesn't matter - all that matters for these calculations is the ship's displacement.
Can pumps be installed to move the water back into the Lake?
Interesting Fact about the Panama Canal. During WW2 when Countries like Japan were building the largest Battleship of all time (Yamato) the United States largest Battleship designs were limited by the width of the Panama Canal. So the United States largest battleship was the (Iowa Class Battleship) instead of building wider was built longer. The Iowa Class Battleship was a full 24 feet longer than the Yamato. This extra length made the Iowa Class much faster than the Yamoto. Iowa's could travel up to 37 MPH meanwhile the Yamoto top speed was 31 MPH.
Another key difference is that the USS Iowa and her class are still in commissioned service, albeit not active duty; meanwhile the Yamato is a coral reef.
@@Lusa_Iceheart minor nitpick, the Iowa's ahve been fully struck from the naval register, they are not ever expected to return to service. And Yamato is too deep underwater to be a reef.
Necessity is the mother of badass!
Yeah but the longer Hull also meant it was less manuverable. The iowa class has a turning diamter of 760m, the yamoto has only 585m (175m smaller diameter), this is extremely important in the age of torpedos.
As it means for a given speed the yamato can turn better meaning it can maintain higher speeds in combat without risking it's ability to turn out of the path of torpedos.
Is it just me or does the audio sound slightly off this video?
No the gain or something is turned up too high
And he talks too fast.
No but he talks way too fast. I generally like quick talkers and when people don't beat around the bush but I'm having a difficult time with this
No but sometimes that happens to me on my phone and when I restart the app it fixed it
It sounds like this was recorded on his phone or something
What's really cool about Suez canal, that it doesn't have any locks and it's also wide enough for ships to move on their own. It's basically straight connection of two seas.
Going through the Drake Passage is not only longer, its way, way more likely to sink your ship. There's a reason it was feared by mariners of past.
That is also why the Pacific ocean is called like that, due to the ships leaving the tumultuous Drake Passage and suddenly encountering a way more peaceful stretch of sea... Hence, Pacific ocean
Perhaps in the days of sailing ships. Modern ships don't sink.
What about the Strait of Magellan?
@@happilyham6769 Yeah they basically redefine physics and hydrodynamic laws.
@@happilyham6769 Between 2013-2022 807 ships sunk and around 300 were (generally) modern cargo ships, Yknow' back in April of 1912 some other people thought their modern (for the time) ship was unsinkable.
I remember in 2013 I lived in Colombia for a while, one of my favorite conversations was about how Colombia has been planning to connect some of those rivers to create a second inter-oceanic path, one that would be less convenient than the Panama canal, but with a much higher capacity for ships.
2024 and nowhere to be seen. Something like that is not chicha de piña or as simple as making pineapple juice
No way in hell man, I live pretty near one of the country's most prominent rivers and that would require absurd ammounts of engineering to work, let alone connecting ALL the rivers, and the time ships would have to spend is ludicrous compared to Panama's Canal, and not to mention the incredible ammounts of corruption and malpractices common in the government of this beautiful cesspool of a country
In 1901, the United States government's Isthmian Canal Commission determined that the Atrato River was not suitable for a canal, due to the length of the route (over 100 miles) and the large amount of silt carried by the river, and recommended Nicaragua and Panama as preferable sites.
Both Nicaragua and Mexico have seriously proposed a second canal in the past, as well as Colombia. The Chinese-funded Nicaraguan one even got as far as some digging started - which was a major motivation for the widening of the Panama canal (ie the wider Panama canal able to take bigger ships made the Nicaraguan one uneconomic). But the cheapest and easiest way to give much needed redundancy for trade is a railway and a couple of large container ports. Then of course there is also the Northwest passage which is now becoming open most summers ...
@@kenoliver8913 That timeline is not quite right. In Panama we had a national referendum in 2006 that approved the expansion of the canal. The project began the same year. It was inaugurated in 2016.
The Nicaragua canal started doing their façade digging in 2014. The reason was that Panama was having a major economic boom (10-15% YoY) due to all the money invested and the Chinese and Nicaraguans wanted a slice of that
As commented above, no water is pumped in the Panama Canal, it's all gravity fed.
The new set of locks are hugely larger that the original set, to take much larger ships, but they use 7% less water. 60% of the water in the new locks is reutilized and never leaves the system.
When talking about all of the different projects in other countries, what you didn't mention in the video is that Panama has two Canals; one wet and one dry. The Dry Canal is a very efficient container cargo train that joins the ports on the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea (there is no Atlantic in Central America).
The Dry Canal train transports goods across the 80 km isthmus much faster than any of the options in other countries, and has been running for many years, so all the logistics and other issues are well-proven.
To increase the water capacity of the lakes, Panama is looking at options for more reservoirs.
As mentioned in the video, the vast majority of the population of Panama is near the Canal, and the sites of proposed dams and lakes are in low population density areas.
I was exactly wondering why not repump lots of the same water back up to fill up intermediate locks. thanks
Mexico is beginning to develop port facilities that will handle some of this traffic.
I also thought this same thing, the thinness of the country means that any form of land transport would be worth it maybe just to avoid the extra 18 days
@@mxandrew For powers that can have multiple ships on either side that's a possibility. For groups that rely on the ship itself making the entire journey, a land porterage isn't exactly possible. If the US Navy to Taiwan example occurs, they're kind of sending the ships full of guns, men, supplies, ammunition, medical, equipment, etc., which means the whole ship goes or naught at all.
You know most people don't read all the information just the thumbnail header
Thanks!
You didn't mention that Panama recently completed the Panamax locks which are much larger than the old locks, big enough to accommodate the larger container ships and supertankers. Larger locks mean greater water consumption. The dams and reservoirs built for the old Panama Canal didn't have the volume to run the new locks. The Panama government will have to build some new dams to supply enough water to overcome a drought.
Those larger ones are actually more efficient. They use quite a bit less water for significantly more cargo being let through.
Panamax is a size of ship referencing the maximum size the old locks. The new size is Neopanamax. And these new locks are more efficient, ad mentioned.
@@vanityplates_sewhat about the post-Panamax size, where does that fall in the scale
@@juaneer They really need to stop naming and start numbering at this point.
@@sirkanabut Panamax works so well tho as a word
I work in logistics and we pretty much never ship through the Panama Canal…. All products from Asia heading to the east coast just disembark at LA or Sea/Tac and rail across the US to the east coast. Doesn’t make sense to use the canal these days since most of the ships coming out of Asia can’t even fit through the canal…
But isn't rail transport like 100x more expensive?
@@rcl5555 not really. A few large carriers have rail as apart of their transport portfolio and intermodal transport is quite common in the industry. It’s very common to have something shipped to a port, loaded onto rail to a distribution center and then trucked to an end consumer. V
@@leewald733 Interesting! I'd think that for a long distance transportation (e.g. across the continent) a single container ship taking 5000 TEU would be more economical than ~20 trains that would carry the same load, especially taking into account not just fuel but also loading/unloading...
@@rcl5555 the problem is the canal’s width hasn’t been updated to accommodate those size vessels. Hence why 40% of the US imports come through LA. It can still accommodate Naval size vessels and small container ships but the massive vessels that are used in most mega ports these days are just way too wide.
Instead the traffic in the pacific usually takes a circular approach where they just go from port to port around the pacific dropping and picking up loads. That’s vastly more efficient for the fuel costs. With rail there is SO many trains coming out of LA it’s insane, you can usually get a pretty solid rate for overland transit of the same TEU or FEU (i usually work in FEU’s).
The other nice aspect to this model is if you have to throw some air into the mix it doesn’t completely change the distribution strategy. You just fly it into the same entry port city instead of ship it.
😂😂😂 los barcos que no pueden pasar por el canal de Panamá es una mínima parte de la flota mundial.. Y es así porque no tiene sentido construirlos más grandes y que no puedan pasar por el canal NO SERÍA RENTABLE.. Hablas sin saber y sin tener algo de lógica por lo menos..
Un contenedor sólo paga de 30 a 40 dólares por atravesar el canal..
Es tan importante el canal.. que cuando lo amplíen se construirán barcos más grandes.. En pocas palabras los tamaños de los barcos dependen del canal de Panamá..
25:00 to add up to the Colombian alternative:
- In the past, Colombia had overcomed the geographical difficulties of the mountains and had a respectable railroad system. Due to various issues, like lobbying by the trucker guilds, most of the lines have been abandoned. The current government is pushing to revive them, and popular opinion wants the trains back.
- The US had also proposed a canal through the Darien Gap in the Colombian part, but it was discarded for environmental concerns.
I say that Mexico is the only one right now that can get profit out of the situation, as it already has a transoceanic train.
As a Oaxacan, the Transistmus is set to make big moves starting this year thanks to the current government taking very good advantage of the area to set up the trains, however the biggest problems are currently the rampant corruption that will inevitably bog down this project like it has done to the Toluca High Speed Rail Network and also that the Transistmus is servicing both freight and passenger trains as a concession to the villages which were affected by the construction or whose homes were expropriated illegally by the government without compensation.
Like they care about the environment LMFAO 😂. The USA at that!! even more hilarious LMFAO 🤣
@@dmbfannh well... the US said they need to use nuclear explotions to dig the cannal there...
And it's also necesary to disrupt the flow of a major river in he region
@@caballeroarepa9223 hey that's what the soviet union did back in the day!
Over a century later, is it still impossible to build a sea level crossing canal in Panama? 26 m doesn’t seem prohibitively high to overcome. This would not only eliminate the need for rain water to fill the canal but vastly increase the size of ships able to transit, leading to more revenue.
Not to mention that traveling around Cape Horn takes you through some of the most turbulent ocean on the planet.
It's known as Drakes passage, it's a fun adventure for the whole family 😂
Ships down there travel through the Straits of Magellan in Tierra Del Fuego which is much less turbulent and sheltered
One of the main reasons for the war in the M.E. is the Suez Canal lot trying to stop competing routes being dug by Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon that would take ships from the Persian Gulf to the Med. Russia wants routes the Caspian and Black Sea to the Med too.
A bit easier for ships now than in the age of sail, at least
@@PrivateSione of the dumbest comments I've ever seen
For the love of god fix your audio levels! Love this channel keep it up!
Adjust your volume.😩
It sounds super blown out
@@jackb1997 probably over compressed or improper use of normalization or limiting. Usually the audio is better than this but it's very noticeable here.
@@rachelredden6682sorry try to ask why he’s posting that before you come up with some silly response
My ears are bleeding
As a seasoned Civilization 6 player, whenever I play the Earth map as one of the American Civs, I always try and build a city where Panama is because your ships can just easily slip through the city. It's absolutely vital for controlling the seas around that part of the world!
That's exactly what the US did, Panama was a Colombian province, the Americans pushed for their independence to cut Colombia out of the canal deal.
I never really seem to use ships in civilization
One more turn
@@trevortimmreckSadly you don't need to. Land combat is all you really need even on Deity.
@@NONO-hz4vo That depends. If you're playing as Australia on the True Start Earth map, ships is all you need. As long as you can control the seas around you, no-one will ever land on your island.
Obviously though, that's good if you want to play defensively. If you're going for a domination victory, you do need land combat units, although ships can still take most coastal cities.
Just one word: Zeppelins.
Now THAT would be COOL! 😎
Sage
*EXPLOSION*
One word. Hindenburg
@@stereo-soulsoundsystem5070We've learned a lot since then...
4:30 You should have mentioned that Panama would not even exist as a country if it wasn't for the canal. It used to be part of Colombia. When separatists declared the isthmus independent, Teddy Roosevelt immediately officially recognized them as an independent state because of his interest in building a US canal through that land.
Edit: Roosevelt also sent US warships to blockade both Panamanian coasts so that Colombia couldn't send in their troops to restore control; and southern Panama's impassable Darien Gap prevented the Colombian army from driving up there, too. The new Panamanian government was naturally grateful to the US and granted the US a perpetual lease for control of what would become the Canal Zone.
Colombia should take it back.
US will take it back.
Waiting 18 days is still significantly cheaper than traveling 18 days,
though at some point it might be cheaper to unload it onto land transport over land and load onto another ship - that is though requires a lot of infrastructure change to streamline something like this
You have to consider that the Drake Passage is free. So the alternatives are:
1) Cost of waiting 18 days + Panama Canal fare
2) Cost of sailing 18 days (additional fuel cost)
If the situation becomes critical enough, going around Cape Horn could become an alternative for some ships.
That's what they used to do for centuries prior to the US building the Panama Canal.
Also have to take into account how punishing sailing around the southern tip of South America is. That is one hostile stretch of water
It's interesting that you have overlooked the Panama Railway which has been operational for decades carrying containers between the two ports of the canal. Expansion and upgrade could also increase the carrying capacity of the "fifth" alternative.
Yeah, that's true. In fact, part of the cargo of the crossing ship is actually moved with the Railway as the ship is passing through the Canal.
So, improving this Railway can actually open another Railway Route and even allow the transfer of cargo in the same way that would be done with both the Paraguayan-led Transoceánico Highway, Colombian Railway and Mexican Railway Alternatives
Of course this should also come with other measures in respect of Oceanic Trade such as an standardization of Cargo Ship Sizes (which is also important to consider after what happened a few days ago in Baltimore or when the Mega Cargo Ship got stuck in the Suez Canal a few years ago) as well as preparation for dealing with trouble makers (such as the Somali Pirates (which they do still exist) and the Houthis) without heavily relying on having Military Ships escorting them all the time
While that definitely helps, it is far less efficient in both in terms of total volume of cargo and emissions created. A cargo ship can haul a ton of cargo 2000 mi per gallon whereas rail [per ton] is typically 500 mi per gallon
Meaning you need two ships, one at each end of the canal…
In 67, 68, and 69 the I was on the USS Boston and we’re transitioned the canal both ways. The US hired many Panamanian to maintain the entire canal. I went thru the canal three years ago on a cruise ship and the canal is in terrible shape with rust and lack of painting. When jimmy peanuts gave the canal to Panama this is not surprising due to the lack of maintenance.
There is also the land bridge in existence between the US Pacific NW & the US East Coast. The Ports of Tacoma & New York have been operating together for years.
Um ... are you referring to the north american continent as a land bridge? Just double checking
And how do you move a ship across a "land bridge"?
@@CanMav You don't, but most of the alternatives mentioned in the video are also land transport. In many cases it's only the cargo that needs to be transported, not the ships.
@@ETophaleshow many days compared to say the 118 mile railway in Mexico???
@@ETophales thing is, a long train, and I mean a really long train can have around 130 train cars (personally, longest I´ve seen was 112 cars long, but I know there are longer ones). They can go nuts and go 200 cars on a single train but rail intersections would become much more dangerous. While a single container ship can carry up to 15,000 containers, each around twice the capacity of a train car. That´s why a water canal is many times more efficient that a train line.
However, given that Panama Canal will not be operating at full capacity, the shortest land route by train becomes the second best aternative. This is because a ship takes 8-10 hours to cross the canal, but a train would take a bit less than 5 hours to cross those 118 mile railway, meaning they can load cargo on the Pacific, unload it in the Gulf, then loading cargo on the Gulf and unload it in the Pacific on its way back and be done about the same time a ship would take to make it just one way. So, by doing this non-stop and adding several parallel railway lines, you can indeed reach numbers similar to the Canal.
Now, while there is a rail line between NY and Tacoma, that takes 3 days on train (at least for passengers, not sure for cargo trains). Sure, it is there, but you can´t compare the time it takes to go between both coasts to what it takes on Mexico or Central America.
Correction: most ships will use the Magellian channel and not Drake’s passage. It doesn’t makes much difference in distance but less hazardous.
i just do not understand how you guys are able to put out two 30-50 minute videos of this quality twice a week. insane. for free.
He’s getting paid more to post on youtube than he would if you had to pay for it
Shhhhh don't talk just enjoy
I don't know either. I'm just grateful for this channel
Views+advertisements+patroen
Especially when he can just explain it in 30 seconds
What are the draft restrictions for? Shallower draft means more water is used to lift the boat. A rowboat uses the most water and the largest Neo-Panamax uses the least.
Just a tip, you're making the name Tehuantepec harder than it needs to be: it's only four syllables, te-wan-te-pek. The digraph "hu" before another vowel is always a W sound in Spanish, and languages spelled according to Spanish rules, like Nahuatl ("Na-watl"), which is the source of many Mexican place names.
The "hu" is easy to explain, but good luck getting people to understand that final "tl" 😅The word Nahuatl has two syllables, but I think the average person trying to sound it out would probably pronounce it with four.
Obviously, it would be expensive, but does anyone know if Panama has considered pumping the water back to the lake when draining the lower locks instead of dumping the fresh water into the ocean?
Polluting the lake with salt water would have huge impacts to people and wildlife that depend on the lake.
Directly it’s a bad idea as the other comentes said it’s pretty much polluted water it could costly but it’s is possible to retrofit the reservoir pools which are used on the new locks
But again we need a real administration not corrupt monkeys
Water from the lower lock mixes with the higher lock every time they're opened, which is why the strategy is to always have the water flow towards the ocean as much as possible so that minimal amounts of salt water can make its way all the way to the top being diluted at each step. (Also means gravity is doing the work so you don't need to be burning fuel so much.) Pulling the water back up to any higher lock counteracts this and gets into the lake, and the more water is reused the more poluted it becomes. It does feel like there should be a way to help reduce how much water it costs but they have designed it to be pretty efficient already (while avoiding poisoning themselves too much), with ships going up and down at the same time to cut the usage in half. (And actually, I just realized that they actually do a bit of this, each of the locks in the newer systen has a reuse basin already that is designed to catch as much as it can while minimizing pollution into the lake)
I also saw some other commenters wondering about a nuclear powered desalination plant to help produce more fresh water from the oceans, but I suspect that can't produce enough to meet demand.
with water treatment and desalination, you could put clean water into the locks without it having to come from the lake.
@@theevermind It's already expensive, most often prohibitive to desalinate water for human consumption. Forget trying to make enough for a billion dollar canal to operate.
If that tech was available, the owners would be trillionaires.
“Work’s completely differently to how other canals work” then explains how a normal canal works…
As far as I understand, the difference between the Panama Canal and others is that it has a canal between two lock systems. And this canal is not connected to other water systems, so it can dry out.
@BestHakase it's just geographical
It's a lock system , nothing technical.
what do you expect from UA-cam? Too many people with keyboards posting their thoughts without much knowledge.
@@BenLapke, it's free speech,
Up to you what you make of it.
12:50 is wrong. The load restrictions (actually draft/depth restrictions) are due to the water levels in the lake. In fact, the amount of water required to raise the level of the ship is fixed at the loch surface area multiplied by the total elevation difference and entirely independent of the ships size and weight. It's not intuitive but if you have a measuring cup that holds 2 cups and you want to raise it from the 1 cup line to the 2 cup line you have to add 1 cup of water, it doesn't matter if you have rubber duck in it or if you fill the bottom half with sand first, you still have to add 1 cup of water to move the water level up.
I'm glad you point this out. I sat here thinking about it for 15 min. "Lighter ships displace less water and thus require less water to move through the locks" intuitively sounds so correct and yet is so wrong.
Real Life Love doesn’t understand but when u post u brighten up people day I just want to say thanks for that CD
2 RealLifeLore videos in 1 week is just comfy man.
We eatin' good.
One of the best and most informative channels on UA-cam!
Well duh, he's changed his voice to AI now.
The draft restrictions aren’t to reduce water usage per transit. It actually increases water consumption per transit. The deeper a ships draft, the less water needed to be added to each lock. The draft restrictions were added (really reduced from what they are normally) because ships would otherwise potentially run aground given the lower lake levels
That makes more sense! I wondered why they'd limit the load on ships given that carrying as many containers as possible is the whole purpose of the ships' existence.
Thank you. That one was doing my head in! Also, I know they can't pump sea water into the locks because you don't want that in the lake right... But why does the fresh water they use not get reused? Surely it could be pumped into holding tanks or something. Why does it all just get flushed?
Actually you're both incorrect, it uses the same amount of water regardless of the ships displacement therefore if you wanted to maximise tonnage transferred per litre of water used you'd only allow the biggest ships possible (fully loaded) through. But as you rightly say the draft limit is due lower lake levels.
The best way to think about it is that say the ship rises by 6m when the water equalizes in locks 1 & 2 then you effectively take 6m of water out of lock 2 and put it in lock 1 but that's undisplaced water from 'under' the ship as the ship is still displacing the same amount of water before and after the lock equalizes.
@@SteepSixif you pump the lock dry to stop the fresh water from escaping into the sea you would essentially leave the ship scraping the bottom, damaging the ships keel. I would love to be a fly on that rooms wall when the Panamanian reps try to explain to shipping companies that their multi million dollar cargo carriers are going to be consumables unce they go through the locks. Because those things are definitely not designed to sit on their own keel while fully laden with cargo and fuel.
@@Hileeeee Displacement, by definition is the volume of water a ship takes up. A larger ship has a larger displacement than a smaller ship or the same ship but with more cargo onboard vs less cargo on board. The lock needs to be filled or lowered to the same level no matter what for ships to pass to the next lock. If your ship is displacing more water, less water is required to be added or removed from the lock to bring it to the correct height.
Lets say the locks require 4 million gallons of volume to be raised / lowered to the next lock's level. If your ship displaces a million gallons of water, you only need to add / remove 3 million gallons of water. By raising the draft restrictions, and given the locks only allow a set width and length ship through, ships have to displace a lower volume. So if your ship can now only displace 800,000 gallons. You need an extra 200,000 gallons of water added or removed.
It is amazing how much fresh water is used for the Panama Canal. Thank you for explaining this.
Another option is to connect the Alaska Railroad to the rest of the North America rail network. Freight could go from Asia to Anchorage and then be shipped by rail faster to the East Coast than coming through the Panama Canal.
If I were Canada I would push this and charge a small fee for each container
Y el precio? Optimizas la logística que a funcionado por más de 50 años de una manera rápida y espectacular..😂
Deja las drogas..
that’s a good idea, i’ve been advocating connecting the Alaska railroad to Canada for a long time. seems like a no brainer. They could also catch about 20% of the fresh water in the streams that flow into the ocean in Alaska, Canada and pipe it south to the southwest. but no! they let it go in the ocean and waste it.
That barely deals with the US supply chain. What about the rest of the world?
Theres no way this would save money
This february in Los Angeles, it was one of the wettest ever recorded. I live in the deserts of Southern California, and we received two and a half times our normal february rainfall. And it's not done raining.
el niño doesnt regularly go through LA tho
@@sarafraga2801 It absolutely has an effect on the LA area.
I wonder if the LA River is actually flowing with water now 😂
@@loislewis5229 good question I don't know
@@loislewis5229no. Not really
None of the water used in the Panama Canal is pumped. The ships are raised by water flowing from an upper lock chamber to a lower chamber. Ships are lowered by lowering the water level in the upper chamber were the ship is to the upper level of the next lower chamber.
Well it wouldn't be that hard to install pumps in the future now would it
@vejet why would you want to install pumps and have to maintain when they work or fix them when they fail when the water has been flowing from the level of the lake down to sea-level for free for over a century?
@@thomasetchberger8678 Because without it the system could cease to function in severe droughts? I mean did you even watch the video, that is exactly what is happening.
Yes I understand adding pumps will result in some significant upfront capital and installation costs as well as ongoing maintenance costs, even if they are not continuously used. But I think it's a just wee bit better than the alternative solution i.e. the "hope and pray method", that the rains come back. I mean how is that even a viable option when your entire economy literally depends on normal canal functionality? It's sheer incomitance that they haven't installed pumps already if only as a contingency to deal with exactly this type of problem.
@@vejet the Panama canal uses 2.6 million megalitres of water each year. That's 2.6 billion tonnes to send 26 metres uphill and several kilometres inland. Pumping just a fraction of that would cost more than the canal is worth. Ships would stop using the canal because it would be cheaper to take the 18 extra days to go all the way around South America, or they'd just stop carrying those routes altogether.
@@vindik8or 1300 GWh is the yearly energy needed in the absolute worst case scenario which equates to about 300 Million EUR per year at the absolute worst price for kWh .. so it can be done, and it can be done economically. Build a nuclear reactor and the problem is solved.
I live in Panama City, and can see the machines for unloading ships at Puerto de Balboa, when I look west from my balcony, and the pacific (Bay of Panama) when I look south. This rainy season has been one of the wettest. So, whilst last year was very dry, this year we have had to deal with excess rain, and the effect it has on our small country. The lakes which feed the canal are at capacity.
go back 2 years and the narration's quality is waaaay better in every way...
He has a massive US bias, maybe it's different on Nebula but his UA-cam content has so much good information and so many bad conclusions
It's possible this new way faster version is AI generated. Wouldn't be surprised tbh. The scripts for all these videos are all already written by AI
@@Rando_Shyte wouldn't be surprised but do you have some evidence to back this claim up?
Mic gain is set like a cod streamer..
@@Rando_Shyte Yes, it's likely that the scripts are at least partially AI written given the speed at which he puts out 50-minute videos on all sorts of geopolitical topics.
What happened to your mic it sounds off lately
The sound was a bit tinny for this video compared to usual videos.
Plus unnecessary, distracting background "music..."
Apologies if this is a dumb question... Why wouldn't they invest in a water recycling plant for the used canal water?
It's crazy both the Suez canal and Panama canal are both suffering rn. It's actually terrifying for the global economy :(
not the suez canal
dont worry with modern ship and technology it only will consume more oil to move things around world and country that have oil will decrease prices for that companies because at end of day they need rich countris to buy things.
@@t.n.h.ptheneohumanpatterna8334 Are you not up to date on the whole "Red Sea" incidents occurring right now? Last time I checked, the Suez canal is there to provide quicker access through the red sea rather than having to navigate the continent of Africa
@@AnEntityBrowsingYT the crisis in middle east mostly impacts asia and oceania not europe or the americans
@@t.n.h.ptheneohumanpatterna8334 I don't think you realize that europe also imports things from asia and relies on the suez for it
Im sure they can modify the canals to be a closed (or mostly closed) loop that dose not need to dump water as much. There just has not been enough incentive to do it until recently
The pumps required for that would be absolutely enormous, and require an absolutely huge amount of energy to run. Its easy to underestimate how much water is being moved and how much energy that requires. If you think about the largest bulk fuel tankers, they generally can pump about 2000kL per hour, which is an incredible amount due to the need to pump the ship empty in the minimum amount of time to reduce the costly time spent in port. At that rate, it would take 96 hours PER LOCK.
@@tasquizztaylor1698 If it was profitable enough, they could build the infrastructure to support it. The real problem is not allowing the fresh water to mix with the salt water beforehand. If all of the water could be pumped into a separate reservoir and desalinated it could just be returned to the lake. It's also only 25% salt water so this would be cheaper than if you were trying to desalinate 100% salt water.
The fact that they want to flood thousands of acres instead of attempting an engineering fix for the problem blows my mind.
They could just use pumps with the already existing side ponds and forget about desalination@@andruestafford
@@tasquizztaylor1698 lol at using boats with pumps on them as your point of reference. You may as well have said to compare to the world's largest datacenters, they generally can pump about x kL per hour, which is an incredible amount due to the need to keep the CPUs cool and reduce the costly burnout of NVDIA H100s. At the end of the day, neither stupid reference point application actually requires truly large pumps. You can have much larger pumps when needed if they aren't on a boat, powered by a boat, etc. Did you just go there because the panama canal reminds you of boats? A smarter reference would be the edmonston pumping plant.
@@tasquizztaylor1698the worlds largest pump as of 2019 can do 60,000 liters a second. If it’s 200,000,000 L per crossing (wiki) that’d be a hair under an hour. ((( I’m bad at math and this is hypothetical)))
I love how even with all the confusing war and politics, mother nature is somehow a harder thing to understand and handle 😭
damn even nature can't handle politics
Mother nature doesn't care about your race, genetics or nationality; it will kill everything that you love and own.
Incidentally, humanity can deal with mother nature like how we literally slowed down the rotation of the Earth by damming.
That's because we can't control it. We are completely powerless against it
Not so much, this year El Niño was pretty weak compared to decades ago.
poison ivy was right
Not only is the Panama Canal not the only lock system it’s also not the first. The lock system between Lake Superior and Lake Huron works the same way and it’s older.
First off is it just me or is the audio distorted and low quality for this video?
Anyway I'm half Panamanian and got a lot of family there. it's kinda sad the effects of such a vital part of the economy and world economy, but it's resource usage harms the citizens so much. i've often been down there in the dry season and it's usually pretty bad and there's water rations and stuff going on. I can't imagine how much worse it could get.
I'm curious what would happen if we just started investing in local small businesses instead of transporting everything around the world.
I think it's just you on the audio, it sounded fine to me.
As far as the local business investment goes, that won't happen in the US at least, until the flurry of cheap crap from China drys up. Once the big boxes like Walmart collapse, then it will have to go back to small business by default.
But there will be a whole lot of pain before that happens.
The Panamax addition should have been designed to reuse more of that water instead of ejecting it into the ocean.
But with the contractors they used, I'll be amazed to see it last twenty years.
This may be a dumb question/impossible solution but why not either:
A. Instead of dumping the last section of water into the ocean, pump it either back into the canal or back into the reservoir using something similar to an oil pipeline. Or
B. Set up desalination plants along the coast to pump sea water (that is converted into freshwater) into the freshwater reservoirs?
I know both would be expensive but I have to imagine that if this is one of the single most important trade routes, it probably generates enough wealth to do so, or maybe multiple countries that depend on this trade route would all contribute to such projects considering the need for quicker shipping and route access.
in response to solution A: (not an engineer, just an internet idiot lol) I would have to assume it has something to do with the unavoidable mixture of salt and fresh water being dumped back into the lake itself. We'd have to remove the salt from the water before dumping it back in the lake and vice versa.
I would suspect a desalination plant would be far less expensive to build at each end, then digging whole new waterways to connect extra reservoirs to the main lake. And require a lot less land as well.
The operational costs long term of a desalination plant would far exceed the short term costs of the resevoir extensions though. Like, once the waterways are built, there's not a whole lot of maintenance or upkeep to them.@@Krahazik
@@PA_Sword Yeah they would have to make somekind of storage separate from the lake. A closed system. The lakes would be there to 'refill' the closed system as it inevitably losses some water with each passage since no closed system that I can imagine would be 100% perfect. Still if it ends up recycling even 2/3 of the water each time that would be huge for them. The problem is. I am not sure how they would pull that off without a complete rebuild and redesign. It was designed in a different era(like some cities) and to fix it is no small project at all. Almost to the level of tear it down and start over.
I think they would need to desalinate something close to 1.872 Billion gallons a day (via the numbers presented in this video) to be fully reliant on them, and that doesn’t sound exactly feasible. Plus you still need to distribute it away from the coasts back to the center of the canal for usage.
What this really shows is how accustomed we've become to the luxuries, comforts, and conveniences afforded to us by uninterrupted international trade. Going back is unthinkable.
Imo it rather shows how much short term profit matters. There are alternative projects to both Panama and Suez canal, but it costs money and who needs redundancy when there is already one built? Our global economy has gotten so reliant on the easiest solutions built decades ago that innovation is mostly limited to how to conduct trade itself. Just recall how much we were scared of a global economic crisis when Ever Given got stuck in Suez Canal. One damn ship. And anyone who defends this line of thought with costs and time, just think that both Panama and Suez were built in 10 YEARS, with technology wastly inferior to what we have today.
Management is about always going for low hanging fruit. Ex of a typical grocery chain. They will maintain and "fix" a constantly breaking refrigeration system that keeps malfunctioning, rather than repair it... because "the upfront cost is lower". Thereby proving it's not IQ that makes you smart...it's how you use it.
Sidenote: how is a pattern recognition test an indication of intelligence. Once you learn the pattern it's easily replicated. 😒🙄
Panama thought they were being handed a gold mine, but they failed to understand how much of a loss it was being operated at. The US was subsidizing it the entire time it was operating under their control.
Ive been saying for a while that a country depending on international trade is a very bad idea. Because if something goes wrong, everything falls apart. Trade is fine, but there also needs to be a robust system in place for self sufficiency. Nothing can top being able to take care of yourself, especially when an emergency happens.
@@SvendleBerries
I get what you're saying, but almost every modernized country is now dependent on international trade and business.
During the mid-1960s the U.S. was researching a plan to blast a sea level shipping canal across the isthmus of Nicaragua using dozens of thermonuclear explosives. One of the reasons that plan was abandoned was a study indicated much of the massive amount of radioactive fallout would likely impact surrounding residents.
Can’t help but think that shipping by road/rail from Houston to LA would be cheaper than the Bi-Oceanic Corridor through Paraguay and three other countries.
Rail is a way to go for freight.
Oh nonono LA is for modern citizens.
It's not about sending freights, it's about sending the message.
@@goose_clues29% of US container trade comes through the port of LA/Long Beach.
The LA/Long Beach ports could probably absorb additional traffic in a few years, but the main constraint is the freight routes into the ports. Because they’re surrounded by the fully built out LA and Orange County, it’s hard to build additional transport infrastructure (e.g. new rail lines/wider freeways) quickly or cheaply.
Mexico is considering building deep ocean ports on their Pacific Coast to unload container ships onto rail lines running up to the US and their Caribbean Coast ports for loading on shorter draft vessels that can be unloaded at ports along the US Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. UP wants to run an additional rail line or two west along the border to handle more intermodal freight but are being stymied by New Mexico and Arizona.
Retrofit, at enormous cost, so that the first two chambers on either side of the canal are pumping water from the ocean up and then filtering back down
Might pollute the ground water not a good idea
It would help lot to not flush the freshwater into the last chamber when driving down the locks
After spending 6 weeks in South Africa right now, I can say their ports cannot handle this. Father in law works in Durban Ports and its already a 3 month wait time because 1/4 cranes are even working.
South Africa? What has that country to do with this?
@johnburns4017 right near the start the video mentioned that ships are rerouting around Africa due to the Suez being so dangerous right now. When this was the norm south Africa was a common port that ships would stop at.
@@TripleBarrel06
They only need to bunker, if they have the need of course.
Very vew ships use the Drake passage. Most go through the Magellan strait, which goes through an area of fjords and is deep enough to allow even larger ships to go through.
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec train in Mexico has been in operation for at least one month, not in 2030 as the video says. The train takes approximately 6 hours to travel from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico.
Just bribe the oaxacans who stop the trains with rocks and you are good to go.....
The video said there has been a great link for over 100 years but hasn't always been well maintained. And that the current project would add more links
A poco te tragaste esa mentira?
@@billypilgrim1 Aguna fuente para decir que es mentira. O solo escribes con el estómago?
@@israelugalde8658 Pues es bastante obvio, no? Agarró las vías que ya existían desde el siglo pasado, le puso un tren medio nuevo, "comprobó" que si servía la ruta y se colgó otro logro. Realmente crees que acabaron un proyecto de ese tamaño en un par de meses? Un proyecto que ha sido famoso a lo largo de la historia de México por nunca realizarse al 100%. Crees que la infraestructura puesta a principios del siglo XX es suficiente para soportar la carga de una ruta comercial de este tamaño. No necesito darte fuentes para algo que es obvio.
Your mic is a bit high (almost peaking). Turn down the gain by 5%
Great video as always :)
That compression is a bit rough.
Great content but the audio is rough
Glad I wasn't the only one to notice the drop of audio
Audio scratchy
I'm guessing it's because it just went live, that or they recorded this on a 2005 Motorola razr
Sounds like he accidentally recorded through a laptop microphone
Sounds like AI
There have to be additional options, albeit expensive.
Example: Raise rates and build additional reservoirs at each end. Then pump fresh water to/from recycling reservoirs instead of just emptying it into the ocean.
Simple f* solution... - pump water back into the sweet water containers (not to the sea) - cause originally you're not really "pumping" water from the higher reservoir to the lower, you're just using a natural pressure (at cheap) for levels to equalise;
Pumping back up with actually mean an expenditure of energy (so money); but hey...
thats the way. They will just start doing that if needet. will increase pasage cost by a bit, but that will still be cheaper compared to using even more energy to sail around SA.
There's actually a good reason why. It takes about 1.02 kilowatts to move a foot acre (a lot, The Panama canal uses 160 per day for 36 ships) of water up one foot. That doesn't sound like a lot until you realize the Panama canal is 312 ft above sea level. This would require 1.8 gigawatts of energy to move every single day, bare minimum. Now let's say they only need to pump half of their water back up that way they can save on energy. About .9 GW. This would require a nuclear power plant to power or three or four natural gas or coal power plants running constantly just to provide power to one purpose. It would be a solution and could even be cost-effective potentially. It would cost roughly 22,500 to make enough energy from gas, which actually isn't too much considering the toll prices. It would take about 400 million to make each of those gas power plants though, though that is much cheaper than coal or nuclear to start out with. This is not including the prices of installing all those pumps, that could also be really expensive. These are all just estimates based on online searching, the real cost could be lower or much much higher if they have to do a lot of importing themselves of things. It would also take years to implement so it's one of those things where it's actually kind of difficult of a decision to make if potentially all you have to do is wait for the next rainy season. Hopefully this helps explain things
Right!!! That was my first thought
The only problem I could see would be any pollution brought by the ships themselves.
@@merrillmilner8717 It would also increase the salinity of the lake.
Hevely loaded ships displace more water which actually causes less wastage when passing through the locks.
The problem is that the lake is now so low if a ships draft is too deep it wouldn't pass over the sill in the lock to get into the lake
That makes more sense
Yes you are correct. Larger ships with heavy loads displace more water, meaning less water needs to be pumped into the lock, saving water. At 12:52 I had to stop because "lighter load displace less water and require less water to move through..." Is wrong and does not science.
Simple although costly solution: Install a few powerful gas turbine generators connected to massive pumps. Run them when needed to pump the water back up. Charge ships extra when pumping is needed.
@GM_Steelhaven keep in mind the water at the bottom is contaminated with salt water, you'll over time, increase the salt contents of the lake drastically, so just pumping it back might not be feasable. What I don't get is: this is a region near teh equator, it should have plenty of sunlight: why not use some solar energy to desalinate and pump the water back up to replenish the lake, also using it to supply freshwater to the people? obviously its expensive
@@AstralJaeger Solar panels aren't magic, and most people aren't aware that solar panels are consumables with a limited operation period. You spend over a decade of electricity needs all at once when installing solar panels, and by the time you break even, the solar panels start to break. You're better off just building another coal powered power plant, and in poor south American countries, that's the only option.
Also, desalinating water is one of the most power demanding things you can do, and it's more economical to literally just truck in cheap fresh water from across the country than to make it from salt water.
Exactly: nothing dramatic normal engineering cannot solve.
The best part is when they are not pumping water between the locks is they can be making power for the cities.
@@shippo72 tf are you talking about? solar panels are guaranteed for ~20 years and can be pushed to 50
The water level is back up as of this month from what I read.
Yep
Much of the canal traffic can be bridged by US and Canadian railroads that routinely run stack trains with ship's containers from coast to coast. It'll keep our east and west coast ports busy too.
Yeah let's move 1/10th the stuff ten times slower at the most extortionate costs in the continent.
@@Stroggoii i didnt think a cargo train moved slower than a cargo boat but i had to google it anyway. cargo train in the us is limited to 49mph while a cargo ship max speed is 24knots or 27mph.... distance between both coasts is roughly 2500miles while from LA to panama in a straight line is 3500m - a cargo ship will take minimum 4 days at sea for that alone. of course, 240 containers from a cargo train to the 14k in a ship (max at panama canal) is a big difference. Is it possible? yes. with current third world railroad system the US have? hell no.
@@xbadjokerx, do you realize that it would take 58 entire trains of 240 containers to move 14,000 containers? It’s not the land speed of the individual trains that is important. It is the time between sending the first train and the last train reaching its destination that matters.
Fuck no, too many long ass freight trains getting in the way of passenger trains and cars.
Oh, trains across Panama. That would save the water.
4:46 Panama Canal locks' freshwater supply problem 5:27 canal lock animation 7:11 each ship passage consumes 52 million gallons of increasingly scarce fresh water 10:39 Lake Gatun the main drinking water source for Panama 11:58 dramatic reduction in # of ships allowed through 17:55 23:20 four Panama alternative proposals, none of which will address current predicament 24:21 Colombia transoceanic train network connection through Andes 25:17 potential Nicaragua canal revisited. HKND failure, Ortega oppression, corruption 29:45 Mexico Isthmus of Tehuantepec 30:46 2020 AMLO rail renewal announcement 31:33 could start shipping in 2028, fully open 2033 33:00 potential Panama Canal fixes
Thx
Good time edit bro I was looking for Panama Canal alternative proposals
You’re doing gods work
33:19 reservoir 🤫
Wrong
He never talked about Columbia, he only talked about Colombia
One minor detail. You mention that they pump water into the fist lock from the second. Only this is not how it works. It is all operated by gravity. At the beginning of this century I was working for a firm that was building a rail and shipping facility that would take containers by rail from one end to the other to accommodate super max ships. Perhaps they will have to move ahead with this.
neat, seen more colour and detail of south america through your video than other resources i seen.
edit
i also remember seeing a project for a helium balloon in the sky gaining water onto dimples on the plastic.
the water downfall could be used for electricity. i wonder if these could be used to help refill the lake, reducing water rations. i doubt it could work fast enough for replacing all of the water used, just adding more to the lake.
for cargo shipping, the obvious solution is to use rail to transport containers from one coast to the other - sure, have to unload and load the containers, but it's doable and the ports could expand to add more cranes
and it means coordinating shipping routes to have vessels operating in both oceans that participate in the overall delivery of containers, so more effort there
but that all would probably still be preferable to 18 days of a longer ocean only route
This is my idea as well . I figured surely somebody has brought rail transport up as a better alternative. You did ! Although massive and loaded up, I'm sure a rail car could be designed to have the entire ship and it contents loaded onto it from the water and secured for the crossing till it is released on the carts downward decent into the open waters at the end. Constant movements , throughout and no time losses consuming unloading and reloading to still be transported on something separate. Not practical. Any new procedure to get through the gauntlet passage must have a very high number of benefits and better results. Especially when water is becoming increasingly less available or sacrifices something important from its sources. I hope to see this Panarailama Canal idea become a must do project. If we can rail over Chynobl, I'd bet a cargoship rail system like this can be quickly engineered. Darryl Johnson Panco 2/¹⁰/24
Trains need flat, Panama is hilly.
Hills could be a problem of course but like the locks stair stepping as they are , may I suggest a a couple of lift systems using less elongated flat graded sections Then.... at the proper end place of the rail design that section will lift the entire ship up to meet the next connecting section. Sections made as long as possible considering hills and inclines that are made to acend let's say a 2% grade over a optimized distance. Cargo is capable of high pitching and rolling in stormy seas so a small grade can be maximized without balance issues occurring. Lift could be hydraulic or even better counter weighted. Their are the bridges that lift via counter weights for passing frieght that are great feats of modern simplicity still working today , plus a huge task that wouldn't require electricity . A funicular? Sorry if i called it wrong,, it Uses a a counter balanced system to clime steep terrain and is quiet.. the sections how ever made will then repeat till the end and the cargoship is slowly released by the rail cars hold and dives down into the open waters letting the ship separate launch and continue to its ultimate destination. Thats my added two cents to this improvement. Please add your thoughts or improvements to this idea. I know a think tank of creative engineers hacking out a solution would evolve into another wonder of the world . Darryl Johnson Panco (product development and design concepts)
The problem is that a big part of ocean transport cost is actually the loading and unloading. Not to mention the absolute insane scale of ships means they will take days to load and unload. Let alone the cost of operating the trains themselves. It might actually be cheaper to just install juge pumps from the ocean. But they would probably be an ecological disaster (salt fresh water).
@@snoomtrebhuge pumps + closed system to minimise the salt cross over. That's one benefit of doing it the current way, no salt ingress into the lakes.
That’s why a sea level canal through Nicaragua has been revived as a possibility. It has been surveyed extensively and the route is well known.
Did you watch the whole video about why Nicaragua will never build it?
I'm curious about your thoughts after finishing the video?
Really the Nicaragua one seems like a project to give people jobs and spread out money so people come to their nation to buy stuff. The reason for trucks instead of rail is rail cuts straight though without need for stops most trucks use human drivers so they need to stop for rest and food. They will require support businesses along the way bringing business to their country if it happens. The problem is until it is complete almost no one has a reason to use it. There are already other ways to get to where people live so it isn't a good road except for a shipping line that will cost a lot and barely be used but by shipping businesses. So it isn't a good road as to pay for maintenance most likely toll booths will be set up some where along it increasing the price to use it or the road will fall into disrepair which will decrease use of it.
Seems like they could pump the water for the first lock into a water tank, instead of into the ocean. Then draw it back out of the tank to raise the lock up again. This would save a huge amount of fresh water. They could even use a water tank for each lock if they wanted. The first one is the most important though.
The problem is: they don't pump the water into the ocean; they let it drain down and out for free. The narration keeps using "pump" where they should say "drain down"
How are they gonna continue their bribery racket?! 🤣😂🤣😂
@@johnmorriss5308 I understood that, but there's nothing stopping them from either pumping it or draining it down into a side tank, rather than into the ocean. They'll have to pump it back in, but that's certainly not a technical hurdle.
should be fairly easy to accomplish!? Even powered by sustainable energy to some extent. Turbines/solar and wind if possible. The lake is also a battery - Noone thought about that, apparently. We are doomed
That was my thought when I saw the animation...instead of using the water from the lake, just "suck it" in huge tanks and then release it when you have to fill it up. I don't see anything dramatic.
But of course, we need to blame me travelling by car for the fact that Panama canal is not working.
P.S: I have watched up to 9.40 when writing this comment, and will carry on later.
It's kind of funny how he's sort of talking about El nino like it's an abnormal event even though it's been going on for a really really long time and that regular intervals.
thanks lore, find your vids very informative and insightful, from Colorado
what do you have to do with anything
What part of Colorado? I lived in Brighton for 7 years
Even today, shipping by sea is still the most efficient. I can't imagine a land route Rivaling the Panama Canal.
If the Panama Canal can only handle 10-12 ships per day then the land route doesn't have to compete with the canal, it just has to compete with the Drake Passage.
@@billhutchinson6318 the issue I'm picturing is the fact that it's a single giant highway from one end to the other. In most countries, a truck bottleneck is rarely a problem because the trucks go all different ways. In order to stay competitive you'd need essentially a truck leaving the dock every few minutes. Now add millions of people who have access to places they never have before and you could have traffic jams literally dozens of miles long
@skeetsmcgrew3282 I'm not saying that it necessarily will be a solution that makes economic sense. I don't know enough about the situation and all the relevant factors.
The only point I'm making is that the alternative land routes are competing with the economics of going around the Drake pass, not the Panama Canal.
trains are more efficent than 20 ships a day @@billhutchinson6318
@@skeetsmcgrew3282the best solution will build and upgrade both train and road infrastructure.
Yeah, the shipping company I'm using for the move to Japan has warned me that it now could be up to 6 months from when they pick my stuff up at the end of the month in Virginia.
One correction though, is that most of the ships which use the Canal now, use the more modern locks series on either side, given the original set of locks were never built with modern super cargo ships in mind. So while the older sets are still there, Germany and the US Army Corps of Engineers built new sets on either end back in the 2000s (Germany on the Pacific side, US on the Atlantic).
Pretty sure it was actually just Panama that built the new locks. They loaned a bunch of money for it though.
Safe travels to Japan. I was stationed in Norfolk area for 14 years; 1989-2003. Spent 4 months in Yokosuka Japan in 1986 while deployed on USS Cape Cod AD 43.
And the new bigger locks use more water.
@@MartijnArtsthe actual locks were built in germany and the US, he's correct. I remember watching the locks arriving here
well to be fair the modern super cargo ships weren't even conceived at the time of the original locks construction.
A very interesting and well put together vid, but unless i missed it, the problem with the Panama Canal, is more to do with the mix of sea water that is an endless tap, and freshwater that is not, perhaps all the lower locks on both sides should be pumped from the sea to fill?
The Bi-oceanic corridor is a terrible idea, you'd need THOUSANDS of trucks just to service one cargo ship. It's crazy that they didn't use rail for that since rail already can support containers and you need significantly less crew and fuel using a railway. Additionally the Northwest Passage also exists as an alternative.
It is a good idea for south America though, if they can build it before anyone else. And once they do, it won't really matter how little time and money it saves compared to sailing around cape Horn as long as it saves at least some.
no it's not, and it's excellent for Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Chile products.
AFAIK it also includes rail
it already exist. Check google maps.
If the goal is to get shipping containers from coast to coast, why would you build roads for trucks instead of rails for trains? Each truck can only move 1 or two containers where the trains can move hundreds.
Trucks are for distribution from arteries not the arteries of travel themselves.
Plus, since there would be very few stops for the train, it would be one of the best candidates for high speed rail.
Auto and oil industry ruins everything they touch
exactly
From my understanding, limiting the amount of cargo that each ship is able to carry decreases the displacement of the ship. This means that more water is actually needed to move the ship through the system (each lock has a finite volume and with lower displacement, more of that volume would need to be filled with water). The decreased displacement helps with the ship traversing the lake which is shallow. When there is a water shortage, ships are more likely to get stuck which would cause major delays and expenses.
Ships sit lower in the water when they're heavier. This means you need more water to get their elevation up to make it into the next lock.
@@CRneu yes but the video is missleading in the sense that it emphasises the ships weight in place of its draft. a havier boxier cargo ship might have less draft than say a light sailboat with a deep keel.
@@CRneu Locks don't operate from where the bottom of the ship is but where the top of the water is. That level has to be the same no matter how deep the vessel is sitting in the water. Lower displacement means that more water has to go under the ship to lift it to the same level.
@@GloriousSimplicity What happens here is the switching of locks which is the Problem. Inside a Lock the amount of water stays the same, regardless of displacement. But when entering and exiting the Lock you will get different effects. If you exit the lock low to high, you push the displaced water to the ocean from the lock. Then add the fixed volume to increase. After that if you exit the lock the displaced water from you has to be replenished from the lake.
However, if you were to use a singular massive lock and alternate the up and down direction you will remove this effect mostly.
Since from top to bottom:
You displace water from the lock to the lake, take the fixed amount out, displace Water from the ocean to the lock.
The amount of water here is propo
Ah. That makes more sense. I was thinking the same thing. That higher displacement would actually reduce the amount of water needed as each chamber has fixed volume. But, lake levels makes sense.
Question. How much has the boat traffic increased? Did the widening of the canal increase how much water is needed for the locks?
Amazing video. Glad I watched all of it before commenting
uploaded 12 min ago, ur comment 7 min ago. why lie?
viedo
yeah, that's what i wrote@@thefrey9588
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec crossing is being considerably improved; not only does it provide a way to transfer goods between the Pacific and Caribbean, it connects with the North American railway network, and multiple large industrial parks are under construction. It will make a good alternative to Panama for many sorts of traffic.
It' s easily one of the most important projects worldwide.
That means we gonna be rich
Ninguna vía de tren puede reemplazar a los barcos, no creas toda la propaganda que ponen
Competition is GOOD! 👍👍👍👍👍👍
@@Mitaka.Kotsuka Somebody will, anyway. Ain't gonna be you!!!🤣😂🤣😂
You’re wrong about the reduced amount of cargo reducing the amount of water used. The draft (the ships depth in the water) restricts the amount of cargo/ depth. If a ship were perfectly square, the same size of a lock,, minus an inch or two, it would require mere tonnes of water to lower or raise it. If the draft/weight is reduced, it requires an equivalent amount of water on top of the reduced cargo to lift or lower the ship. Reduced cargo is increased amount of lake water used.
I was hoping someone said it. The ship displaces the water. Therefore the ship takes the place of the water that is displaced. Instead of lowering a full lock lock of water, the canal lowers a lock of water, minus the water that would have been in the space the ship occupies.
Moving up through the locks is the opposite, however. When the ship moves through the lock gates, it displaces the water in the higher lock, moving it into the lower lock around the hull of the ship. Using your example, moving that ship out of the highest lock moves almost an entire lock of water out of the lake, where a lock with no ship (or a sail boat) would not draw any water from the lake when the highest gates are opened, only the fixed amount of water “pumped” from the lake into the lock to equalize the highest lock with the lake to raise a ship of any displacement.
Moving a ship of any displacement from one ocean to the other uses similar amounts of water, as a greater amount of water used going up towards the lake, would be offset by the lesser amount of water used going down towards the ocean.
Right?
Your “lock sized ship” helped me visualize the water flow when raising a ship.
ya that stood out and i came to comments to see who else had noticed. wonder where he got the information from?@@maybeafterlunch
Some of the solutions to the Panama Canal problem include: (1) Build a new, sea-level canal nearby. Nicaragua is looking at this. (2) Increase the water in Lake Gatun by pumping from a lower elevation. This latter solution would probably require desalination of seawater, since Lake Gatun is a freshwater lake, but this would also assist in providing more drinking water to the nearby population. Both solutions are horribly expensive, but may have to be addressed before too long.
You failed to mention a fifth alternative to the Panama canal. The Panama Canal Railway. Opened in 1855, this is an already well-established cargo trade route linking ports on both sides of the canal. Most shipping companies are just choosing not to use it. Because of this I don't see how many of these other road and rail projects will be able to succeed without a drastic and permanent reduction of cargo capacity through the canal or significant increase in cargo moving between the Atlantic and Pacific.
I recently read that at least one shipping company has started using the Panama Railway to transport containers to ships at each end of the canal.
Correct MAERSK decided to use Panama railway system instead of the Canal to move some containers@@stuartaaron613
Also, the Panama Canal Railway is currently owned by CPKC. In theory, cargo could travel by rail from basically anywhere within the US, Canada, and Mexico to ships waiting in Panama.
The major issue with that solution is most trains carry 200 40’ containers whereas the Ever Max which passes through the canal carries 7,800 40’ containers. It would take 39 train trips for just one ship.
You're not properly visualizing how big these container ships are. Thousands and thousands of containers. The process of unloading the ships onto numerous trains sending them across, unloading the trains onto another ship, sending the trains back and repeating several times would take longer (and produce more pollution) than just going around the continent.
The Bi-Oceanic Corridor is going to need to become a rail route as well if it's going to be to be a truly serious high-volume route. I'm also a little surprised the Panama Canal Railway was never mentioned, though it does need some significant expansion to become a bigger player.
It's in the plans. Connecting various existing roads firts was way easier financially and politically. Building the railroad will take time, unfortunately.
12:50 Restricting load sizes makes no sense and actually makes the situation worse. The locks only hold a fixed volume of water and have to lift/lower the same height regardless. The most water they would consume would be to cycle them with no ship in the lock at all. To minimize water use, they should want the largest, heaviest ship, displacing the most water possible.
My thought aswell lol 😂 like it doesn’t make sense to lighten the ships lol
I noticed that too. I'm guessing the requirement to lighten ships is due to concern that they will run aground crossing Lake Gatun.
It just shows that some people have a talent for speaking confidently even though they completely lack understanding. The theory about ships possibly running aground makes a little more sense to me, but that risk would depend on the draft of the individual ship, not exactly on the tonnage loaded.
On the plus side, rising sea levels will mean they need to expend less water to lift the boats up to Lake Gatun.
I think Greta said by 2027 we won't need a canal any longer. And she was really mad when she said it!!