Watchkeeper: How big can containerships grow? BIMCO
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- Category: General
- Published on Saturday, 29 March 2014 10:12
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Salvors were meeting in London last week, at the International Salvage Union Associate Members’ day, with giant containerships and the difficulties of salvaging them a topic for consideration. The extraordinary explosion in ship size over the past ten years has been an amazing feature of modern shipping, with salvors, like ports and pretty well everyone else, struggling to keep up with the technology. “Whatever we think about containerships will probably happen and sooner than you think”, commented David Tozer of Lloyd’s Register, whose job was to bring the salvors completely up to date.
He suggested that there was no sign that ship sizes had reached the end of their extrapolation, with the economic justification for bigger ships taking more boxes more cheaply an unarguable rationale. But he also pointed out that there were no fundamental changes in these giant ships, or any basic differences to the containerships half, or a quarter of their capacity. “About time there was a revolution”, he commented.
There were the constraints of ports, or course, with a limited number of terminals able to take the very biggest ships and even those “cascading” into feeder or secondary roles having been displaced by the giants were causing problems for ports used to far smaller vessels. It was not just port investment – a complete intermodal update was required as an accompaniment to the ship size expansion.
Was there a limit to ship size? Certainly the size of the stack – now nine or ten high ¬– was the limit of container strength and there was already a problem with too much stability on those monster ships requiring cargo on top to keep the metacentric height manageable. Mr. Tozer also suggested that the lashing systems needed something of an update and overhaul, as they had barely changed in forty years. Worse still, there were some 50 people losing their lives in lashing accidents, being forced to do dangerous things at great heights. There were many more injuries.
He believed that the size limit for containerships (and vessels of over 20,000 TEU were on the drawing board) was 450 metres length if there were not to be diminishing returns. Twin screws and power plants that would provide for flexible speeds were obvious requirements for the new generation.
Could salvors cope with such giants, if they were called upon to deal with them? Svitzer Salvage CEO, Peter Pietke, spoke about the need for forward preparedness, with owners willing to consider the “what if” scenario and have plans in place. He also revealed that Svitzer have been developing a design for an air portable container discharging system that could be deployed in a very reasonable time, rather than having to source large floating crane barges from possibly the other side of the world.
Salvors, it seems, when faced with these giant ships and the challenges they offer, are “thinking outside the box.
26.03.14