To clarify, the future of the ocean
liner industry isn’t here per se, at least not yet, but we may have
gotten a glimpse of it at the end of 2015. French ocean carrier CMA
CGM recently deployed the largest ship ever to call a U.S. port for
test stops at the California ports of Los Angeles and Oakland.
Although by no means the world’s
biggest containership currently in use today, the CMA CGM Benjamin
Franklin is, for lack of a better word, enormous. At 1,306-feet
long, the ship dwarfs the famously “unsinkable” RMS Titanic
(882-feet long) and makes the Antonov 225 Mriya (275-feet long),
which is generally accepted as the largest aircraft ever built, look
like a tinker toy by comparison. Turned upright on its end, the
vessel is longer than the Empire State Building is tall.
In terms of cargo capacity, the
Benjamin Franklin can carry as many as 18,000 standard
shipping containers, also referred to as twenty-foot equivalent units
or TEUs. To put that in perspective, the average vessel size for
services in the transpacific trade is currently around 6,700 TEUs,
while services with direct connections between Asia, North Europe and
the Mediterranean operate with vessels that average more than 11,000
TEUs in capacity, according to data from BlueWater Reporting’s
Capacity Report.
Average vessel size is much larger
in the Asia-Europe trade lane despite the transpacific being the
largest trade by volume, because U.S. port infrastructure hasn’t
kept pace with the demands of these ever-increasingly large
containerships. As a result, carriers are able to deploy far fewer
loops overall in the Asia-Europe trade—only 37 direct liner
services compared to 57 between Asia and North America.
Although CMA CGM said the test calls
at Los Angeles and Oakland were a resounding success, the company was
quick to point out it has no immediate plans to deploy such large
ships to the U.S. West Coast on any kind of regular basis. That
decision “will be reviewed based on the outcome of the trials and
the readiness of terminals,” a CMA CGM spokeswoman told American
Shipper.
The Port of Los Angeles reported
smooth, seamless operations, while a total of 11,200 containers of
all sizes were unloaded from and loaded onto the Benjamin Franklin
at APM Terminal’s Pier 400 facility. But many analysts are
skeptical that even Los Angeles/Long Beach, the largest port complex
in the United States, would be able to handle regular calls from
these behemoth vessels.
To start, the vessel was nowhere
near full capacity, meaning that the test call didn’t actually
require all of the loading and discharging of containers that would
come with a more heavily-laden ship. Further, handling a vessel of
that size once poses considerably fewer challenges than doing so on a
daily basis as other vessel berths and terminal and drayage
operations could be scheduled and planned around this special
one-time arrival.
And, as this column has discussed
previously (See American Shipper’s December 2015 issue, “How
big are the big ships calling U.S. ports?,” p. 31), the economics
of these so-called “mega-vessels”—those with capacities of more
than 10,000 TEUs—are highly favorable for carriers, but don’t do
much for shippers, who may end up subsidizing some of the cost
associated with bringing U.S. ports and intermodal connectivity up to
speed to handle them.
On the U.S. East Coast, for example,
ports are experiencing a similar situation in preparing for the
completion of the expanded Panama Canal, which will allow ships as
large as 13,000 TEUs to transit this important Central American
gateway.
Miami, Norfolk and Baltimore are the
only Atlantic U.S. ports that are “big-ship ready,” while others
like New York/New Jersey, Savannah, Charleston and Jacksonville still
have work to do before mega-vessels are able to call there. All that
being said, no carriers have announced plans to regularly send such
vessels to any East Coast ports due to challenges that remain with
landside infrastructure, drayage and intermodal connectivity, not to
mention a fundamental lack of sufficient demand to fill them.
The future, and more specifically “a future that resides in ultra-large
vessels,” as CMA CGM America President Marc Bourdon put it at a
press conference welcoming the Benjamin Franklin to the Port
of Los Angeles, is coming. The only real questions then are how soon
will it get here, and whether port and inland infrastructure will we
be ready for it.
The Port of Oakland, for one, says
it would certainly like to see the gigantic containership return to
its terminals in the near future. “So long, ‘Big Ben,’” the
port said in a statement following the vessel’s departure, “hurry
back.”
Meyer is web editor of American Shipper and a research
analyst with BlueWater Reporting. He can be reached by email at
bmeyer@shippers.com.
