When the canal opened, every ship then afloat could fit through its locks and shallowest sections. Today, the jungle passage can still accommodate 92% of the world's ships, but that figure will shrink over the next decade as shipping giants like Maersk Sealand and China Ocean Shipping Co. replace canal-size ships with post-Panamax vessels.
Panamax ships -- those that can fit thought the canal's smallest-point 106-foot breadth and 39-foot draft -- carry up to 2,200 containers, while dozens under construction and already in service can move 3,300.
Maersk Sealand, the canal's biggest corporate customer, already has 24 ships in service that are too big for the canal and takes delivery of a new vessel every three months.
"Panama would without doubt benefit greatly from the expansion, as would the facilitation of world commerce," said Hans Stig Moller, Maersk's Panama director, noting that container cargo is projected to grow 9% to 11% annually for at least the next decade.
The 9-mile-long Culebra Cut was, is and always will be the crux of the matter. To accommodate post-Panamax vessels, the cut will have to be deepened to allow the behemoths whose keels reach 50 feet below the water's surface, Salerno said.
Expansion could influence world trade almost as dramatically as did the original construction. Chilean shippers have to limit dry bulk loads to about 70% of vessel capacity to avoid running aground in the cut, according to Aleman of the Canal Authority. Colombian coal can't be delivered to Asia at a competitive price if shipped in canal-size vessels, so the neighboring country ships its coal to Europe. Brazilian iron ore and soybeans likewise can't make Pacific inroads because of the prohibitive per-load costs of transporting them on canal-size ships.
Going around Cape Horn is expensive for post-Panamax vessels because of crew and fuel costs. The cruise ship Coral Princess last year paid the highest toll ever levied to transit the canal, $226,000, but that's still only one-tenth what it would have cost to take the ship around South America, said Dazzell Marshall of the Canal Authority information office.
Even with the canal's expansion, daily transits are unlikely to grow much beyond 50 from the current average of 35. But tonnage could go up significantly as shipping lines rely more on the post-Panamax giants, and tonnage is the basis on which tolls are determined.
