A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
westerninvestor.com
westerninvestor.com
> solutions [...] include water-saving sluices that would collect freshwater in basins so it can be reused. To this end, possibilities are being examined to develop and exploit other water sources near the canal. The construction of reservoirs and saltwater desalination plants are also being considered.
There's also:
> The transport route from Asia through the Panama Canal to the US' east coast can be partially rerouted through the Suez Canal
whoops.
I'm enjoying that sentiment very much. I wonder if there's a mileage breakdown of China -> US (around South America) versus China -> US (through the Suez Canal).
In 2023, among key trading partners, exports to the U.S. led the decline, down 13% from the previous year.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade/China-s-annual-exports...
Like if one raises transit tolls the ships can immediately chose to go through the other.
But to directly answer your wish, this site does exactly what you want https://sea-distances.org/
With Nicaragua, beyond the corruption and the instability of the government there, many had concerns about the ecological impact of it.
(Also cloud seeding = more rain, drought = less rain)
You don't think weather patterns could shift? It's not black-and-white as "clouds = more rain" - as there's obviously the question of distribution.
Likewise, water vapour in the atmosphere traps more heat - warming the planet; locally of course where there's cloud cover, at least initially, it will be cooler.
Rain 'seeding' can be thought of as offering water already in the atmosphere an excuse to form rain and drop out of the atmosphere. It's about controlling where it rains rather than if it rains.
Maybe title should be insane wastes of water forces authorities…. :)
I’ve always assumed the energy cost to pump the water would make it cost prohibitive, but I wonder how it compares to rerouting ships or moving containers over land.
This makes recovering water from the locks problematic, since you can't feed it seawater.
Raising water on the low side to the level on the high side simply requires joining the two sides together.
If sea level is their high side, I don't understand why they can't use this supply forever.
The obvious solution is a sea-level tunnel a hundred miles long. Probably cheap. ;)
Chinese company got concession to build decade ago, but didn't do anything and then went out of business.
The original excavation was done mostly dry and massive by any standards: 27kt of dynamite were used.
I'm also not a digger, but 26 meters of dredging over a 13km distance sounds crazy expensive. You would have to also widen the valley to prevent landslides into the canal.
The British locks depend on a source of water at the top of the canal. I watched a video recently about Canal Trust rebuilding lock reservoir. The water levels definitely can limit if locks and canals are usable.
The Panama Canal has a reservoir at the top, Gatan Lake, but the water is low. Sea level is never the high side, it is always the low side.
Some days we're just dumb, even if most days we're pretty smart.
Suez is (was? lets ignore geopolitics instead of physics for now) so successful because it's lock free (ha! tech joke on HN, I'm rocking this :D). The Panama canal was made by creating a massive artificial lake above "sea level" rather than digging a path down to sea level through mountains. Historically this worked, but alas enough corporations profit enough by offloading the costs of their industries onto everyone else as a form of socialism we call subsidized global warming.
- "The hydraulic cylinders enable the water used by the locks to be pumped back. Up to 48,000 cubic metres of water are displaced in a single lockage operation. In periods of low discharge on the Meuse, the screws can pump back the water lost due to the passage of a ship through the lock to the upper canal reach."
To start with, there is a difference in the water levels - and this can be put through a generator to generate electricity as the water flows from one lock to the other.
When the water has moved half way, the levels are equal. You can now use electricity to pump the rest of the way - and theoretically, assuming lossless pumps and generators, you use the same amount you generated earlier.
Unfortunately, low-head generators tend to be inefficient and expensive. Variable head generators are even harder to design to be efficient.
Water power efficency is about 80-90%
Big bucket high up is basically a battery. The question then becomes about the details of, like, using the power when the water gets pumped down (if you had two canals, you could probably time filling one with draining the other?). There's a lot of practical things to consider
Reminds me of this lesson in gravity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFUj6LH4FSI
My ship had two jet turbine engines that did 31 MW of propulsion, which was a small ship compared to most freighters, so energy wise it would be very efficient still.
40 M gallons is ~150 K*m^3. Modern bulk desalination turns seawater into potable fresh water at ~0.40 $/m^3, so only ~60 K$. The cost of filtering out any incidental saltwater mixing should be a tiny fraction of that cost.
Even at full desalination it would only constitute ~30% cost increase. Given the minimal amount of filtering that should be required for incidental mixture, it is hard to call that a great expense except in relation to rainwater.
And again, that is the cost of desalinating 100% seawater, not the proportionally cheaper cost of desalinating whatever single-digit to maybe low double-digit percent you would actually get from incidental mixture during reclamation.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax
[2] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2022_en...
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Path-Between-Seas-Creation-1870-1914/... - it's one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. It covers engineering, geography, 19th century stock market investing, medical advances, and the birth of US state capacity to run projects. Highly recommended!
I.e., the goods still need to get where they're going, but it's going to cost more, either through longer routes or more expensive means (rail/truck).
You’ll find that many of those are already made in the USA, especially if they can be made by robots.
Here’s one now! https://www.walmart.com/ip/Hyper-Tough-32-Gallon-Heavy-Duty-...
China will end up making high value items where shipping is a small fraction of the cost (Apple already flies most of their products via jet) whereas cheap items that are not labor intensive will move back to near their destination. Other things will move to Mexico and further south.
Medium value parts actually (eg. OEM).
And it's the same specialization that Mexico has had since the late 1990s and early 2000s when their factories left for China [0][1][2]. That's why Mexican manufacturing has started growing again - costs have equalized between CN and MX manufacturing for intermediate parts.
For example, take apart a Sony PS2, Compaq workstation, or a Toshiba DVD Player from the early 2000s - all the electronics parts in it will say Made in "Mexico/Malaysia/Thailand", and the plastic molding was 50% Mexico and China. China didn't enter the fray until after 2008 when Steve Jobs tasked Tim Cook with exploring manufacturing in China, and Samsung began opening OLED factories there as well.
Low cost gizmos and gadgets have been manufactured in Vietnam and India for a decade now, and within 10 years they'll both also climb up the value chain manufacturing wise. Nhat Tao in Saigon and Sector 63 in Noida have a similar feel as Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen 10-15 years ago.
History doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes.
Mexico also saw economic and political instability 20-30 years ago when its factories began leaving for China. Same thing happened to Thailand in the 1990s, Malaysia in the 2000s, Turkiye in the 2010s, and Phillipines in the 1990s-2000s.
[0] - http://international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf
[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2003/BUSINESS/12/13/china.mexico.reut/
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/03/world/as-china-gallops-me...
China has started running into the problems that South Korea and Japan have, where they produce a large amount of university graduates not willing to do blue collar work.
China's annual exports drop for first time in seven years.
Among key trading partners, exports to the U.S. led the decline, down 13% from the previous year. Demand from the European Union and Southeast Asian countries also shrank.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade/China-s-annual-exports...
What they need to do, and probably won’t, is stop devaluing the yuan and relax capital controls so that Chinese consumers can invest and spend in something that isn’t housing, and finally fuel consumption growth. The current situation essentially results in Chinese being underpaid.
China Tries To Censor Data About Nearly 1 Billion People in Poverty
In his article for the business outlet Yicai, Li cited data from a 2021 research paper by the China Institute of Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University, which placed the number of people living on less than 2,000 yuan ($300) a month at 964 million, or nearly 70 percent of the population.
https://www.newsweek.com/china-article-censorship-1-billion-...
China's population drops for second year, with record low birth rate
The National Bureau of Statistics said the total number of people in China dropped by 2.08 million, or 0.15%, to 1.409 billion in 2023. New births fell 5.7% to 9.02 million and the birth rate was a record low 6.39 births per 1,000 people, down from a rate of 6.77 births in 2022.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-population-drops-...
Manufacturing is not disappearing in China yet. Or at least not skilled manufacturing.
Any deindustrialization that is happening is in the low margins space like Textiles, plastic crap, and the likes, which have begun moving to Vietnam, Bangladesh and India - but that was always going to happen. There's a reason why those textile factories in Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez in the 1980s shut down by the early 2000s.
For higher value intermediate parts, the manufacturing base continues to exist in China, but is now competing at the same price point as an OEM in Thailand, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Russia before the war, etc.
The same thing happened in Mexico, Thailand, Turkiye, Malaysia etc.
Skilled manufacturing continues to grow within China and these countries, but skilled manufacturing requires a high amount of human capital, which means your average Joe ain't getting retrained.
Imo, now is the best time for China to expand it's horrible social safety net. Thailand, Turkey, and Malaysia all did a similar expansion of their social safety net when they were at China's level decades ago.
There's a reason why Turkey today has living standards comparable to Central Europe versus in 1990 when it was comparable to Algeria and Phillipines. And why China didn't catch up to Mexico's HDI until COVID happened, which contracted the Mexican economy to a level unseen anywhere else other than India.
> graduates not willing to do blue collar work
People are willing if you pay them enough. The issue is the pay is relatively low, but CoL has gotten very high.
This happens to all countries. Go read older news articles about Turkiye in the 2000s, Malaysia/Thailand in the 1990s, Mexico in the 1990s, etc.
They all developed rapidly and then stagnated.
The connection is that aggregate supply and aggregate demand intersect at the current price and output levels of the economy. If aggregate supply contracts, this shifts the output level lower, and the price level higher to compensate. Basically, there is a shortage of basic goods & services needed for the economy to function, so the market price mechanism is trying to incentivize people to work on those sectors that are in shortage.
Drilling in a level, these aggregates are divided into consumption (current needs) + investment (production in expectation of future needs). A supply shock in a basic service like transportation means resources need to be reallocated to cover the increased cost. That means decreased investment, and all of the potential investment opportunities competing for a smaller pool of savings (which is just the excess of current production over current consumption). This drives up the "natural interest rate", the cost of capital in the absence of central bank interventions.
The central bank has a choice between feeling the impact as inflation (where prices rise) or recession (where output drops). If it holds policy rates below the natural interest rate, the money supply increases, and you get inflation. The economy remains out of balance; the market is trying to shift resources from investment to consumption, but if rates are artificially low, investment will be artificially cheap and too many people will be writing software we don't need while we don't have enough truck drivers. If it holds policy rates above the natural interest rate, the money supply shrinks, and you get recession. This is letting the economy come back into equilibrium, but it means that all those software engineers will be laid off and have to get jobs as truck drivers.
The Fed's choice is one of these. They can influence whether we feel the supply shock as a painful recession where lots of people lose their job and have to retrain, or whether we feel it as higher prices as the market tries to correct. But because a supply shock is a real drop in output, it means worsened standards of living regardless.
Not that the CEOs needed much of an excuse anyway in the last couple of quarters.
Is traffic still going the southern way towards the Red Sea from the Mediterranean?
The Falkirk wheel in Scotland can move boats with minimal electricity usage. Could a bigger one be built?
That's the beauty of the whole design.
To service the Panama Canal, you'd need basins 370m long and 50m wide. The new Panamax ships are apparently capable of carrying 120,000 tonnes of weight (no idea what they weigh themselves), but we're talking about swinging around half a millions tonnes of weight. My brain can't comprehend that... are there _any_ moving structures of that size in the world?
But salt water doesn't mix well with things not intended for salt water.
No matter what there is some amount of mixing with the sea. The question is at which lock should that happen. Currently it's at lock 1, everyone here is arguing it'd be absolutely impossible for it to happen at any other lock, without providing any justification.
Graphs at page 32 and onward shows that you could (in theory) pump salt water in one more lock upward in both sides. It will make the last lock before lake at 0.5ppt (Atlantic) and 1.32ppt (Pacific). Fresh water is 0-0.5ppt.
Making the amounts of water that drains out from there move up requires massive amounts of energy. We're not talking a few little pipes here and there. The pumps and energy generation infrastructure project needed to get that done would probably rival or surpass the Panama canal in complexity, scale, and scope. It would be expensive and take a long time to build. Add to that the complexity of doing that while not shutting down the canal for a few years.
Basically the amount of water needed for the locks is a function of the amount of tonnage that ships through the canal and the altitude that ships needs to rise to. We're talking about pumping millions of tonnes of water up by 26 meters. Think something in the order of hundreds of gwh per day at least. Of course you could continue to rely on rivers for part of that. But still, it might be doable but it wouldn't be cheap.
That and the fact that pumping a lot of salt water would destroy large parts of the ecosystem in Panama is a reason that will likely never happen. The locals might object a bit to that. And they probably also rely on that water for drinking and agriculture.
The salt water would be largely contained so I'm not sure why it would be so bad for the ecosystem.
I don't doubt it would be very expensive, everything about that canal has been. But if this turns out to be the new normal, rather than just a weather abberation, it will be cheaper than re-reouting all of those ships, whether the pumping is done with fresh or salt water.
See: https://www.tvn-2.com/de-frente/canal-panama-administrador-a...
But it can vary, and unfortunately, January is the beginning of the dry season, which ends in May.
It's probably a multi track system going all the way through China, Russia (with maybe Kazakhstan or Mongolia in between if they care about shortcuts), Belarus and finally to Poland. Then maybe upgrades to the European railways too to handle the excess traffic coming from the wrong direction (EU harbors are not in the East.) It's not something they can do in a short time and it takes a lot of political collaboration. I think that it's easier for them to win the war, if they can win it, and start buying Western Europe politicians again. Or just start buying them again while the war goes on.
You have to unload the ship eventually anyway, so you instead have it load into rail and disperse to final destination more directly.
You’d need a heat map of where everything ends up that is going through Panama, but if you’re dumping to rail many of those ships would unload elsewhere.
Or in other words, Europe will be hit much harder by this than the USA will.
What's the mistake? It's a normal distribution; the average is equal to the median.