The Two Greatest Canals in the World Are Getting Even Bigger

The Panama and the Suez must grow to accommodate the super-ships that now ply the world's ocean. This is how they'll do it.

Tom Fowlks

In 1984 about a million tons of cargo passed through the Suez Canal every day. Last year that number was up to 2.6 million. Over the same period, the number of ships traversing the canal every year dropped, from more than 21,000 to about 17,000. How? The ships got bigger. The highest-capacity container ship at sea today holds more than four times as much cargo as the record holder in 1984. With global demand for imported goods increasing, companies employ the cost-effective strategy of cramming everything on large vessels and making fewer trips.

Problem is, the Suez Canal and its Western Hemisphere counterpart, the Panama Canal, were not designed to accommodate enormous ships, which have grown in three measurements: length, width (called beam), and depth in the water (draft). Both canals are scrambling to accommodate the deeper drafts of megaships, which can reach more than 50 feet. The Suez's main canal can move behemoth container ships, with beams up to 164 feet, but only in one direction at a time. Panama's famed lock system is too small in all three dimensions. Built in 1869 and 1914, respectively, both waterways require updates if they're to remain competitive with each other. And with a new canal scheduled to open in Nicaragua within the next five years, they need to act quickly. Lucrative shipments from Southeast Asia to American ports on the Gulf and the East Coast could travel on any of the three routes. 

The Panama Canal has aged more poorly because of its dependence on locks, which raise ships 85 feet on entry and lower them back to sea level at the exit. The current locks can handle ships with capacities of up to 5,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs, each about the size of a half-length semitrailer). The world's largest container ship, the MSC Oscar, carries nearly 20,000 TEUs. To expand the canal, workers are deepening and widening the existing route and constructing new locks from 16 rolling metal gates. When completed in April 2016, the new Panama Canal will be able to handle ships of up to 13,000 TEUs—ships longer than a Manhattan city block, with an eight-story building of containers piled on deck.

Suez is simpler, lock-free, and large enough to handle oversize ships, but only if they transit in convoys, with bypasses allowing the convoys to pass one another. To allow more room, workers are digging a new canal parallel to 22 miles of the existing one and expanding the current bypasses. The result will be a new 45-mile lane, expected to open this fall, that should reduce ships' journeys by at least 12 hours.

Tom Fowlks

Even when the revisions are complete, however, both Suez and Panama will still be limited. Panama's new locks won't be able to handle ships the size of the Oscar, and Suez will still be mostly one-way. This is what makes the Nicaragua contender so potentially world-changing. In December 2014 a Chinese company, HKND Group, announced a design for a canal that could handle all of today's megaships. A route has already been selected—about 300 miles north of the canal in Panama. The Nicaraguan government has given its blessing.

Plenty of people, including Eric Farnsworth, vice president at the Council of the Americas, an organization that supports business development in the Western Hemisphere, are dubious that the Nicaragua Canal will actually be completed, freighted as it is with economic and political baggage. But grant that it's up and running in five years, as HKND Group claims, and suddenly the Panama Canal would have to compete directly with a canal built using an additional century's worth of technology. 

Last September Egypt commemorated its Suez Canal project with a set of stamps. One depicted the Panama Canal. To Egyptians it was an honest mistake. To Panamanians, a laugh. To the Chinese, prescient. Consumers don't care. To most of us, canals, like stamps, are just a means to get stuff. To the countries that design and maintain the mighty canals of the world, a single waterway can contribute between 2 percent (Egypt) and 6 percent (Panama) to the economy. Their demise could destabilize a nation. You can be sure the race to improve their technology will be heated.

This story appears in the September 2015 issue of Popular Mechanics.

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