"Great is not necessarily good"
Soon, container ships of more than 10,000 teu on the Asia-Europe route will no longer be a rare thing.
Maersk's "Emma Maersk" has been put into operation on the Asia-Europe route last year. Later, her four sister ships were also deployed on the route. In addition, many liner companies have ordered a new generation of container ships that can compete with Maersk. It is reported that all these ships will be put into the route west of Asia to Europe.
However, some major ports on the US Pacific coast have recently announced that they are ready to accept a new generation of container ships. Don Snyder, Marketing Manager at Port of Long Beach, said: "The Emma Maersk will have no problems if it is to call Long Beach." At the same time, Timothy Farrell, CEO of Tacoma Port, said at a recent meeting on trans-Pacific trade: " We have the ability to accept the Emma Maersk.†Currently, the largest ship accepted by Tacoma Port is Evergreen's 7,200 teu container ship, while the highest record for Long Beach Port is the 8,500 teu container ship of China Shipping.
Although the world's largest container ship can greatly enhance the reputation of the port, not every port operator is very convinced that the big ship will be able to bring practical significance to the port. Although the Los Angeles port does not have a large ship like the Long Beach Port, the former container throughput exceeded the latter last year. The Pier 400 terminal of APM Terminals is located in Los Angeles. Evergreen also has its own terminal here, but the largest ship arriving at the port has just exceeded 7,000 teu. The Maersk Container Terminal Company stated that the Pier 400 terminal is fully capable of escaping a wheel such as Emma Maersk, but there is currently no such large ship on the Pacific route. In fact, the 6,600 teu (declared container) ship is already the largest ship on the Pacific route. However, this does not seem to affect the benign development of the Port of Los Angeles. Last year, its container volume increased by 13% to 8.5 million teu. In contrast, Long Beach has a container capacity of 7.3 million teu, an increase of 8.6%. Both ports have large enough lifting equipment, long enough berths and enough deep drafts, but these are not the keys.
The port authorities in Los Angeles believe that it is because of the relatively small size of the ships that rely on the port that benefit the development of the port, so that the inland supply system can provide stronger support for the port. They think that two 6,000 teu ships a week are better than a 8,000 teu or larger ship. "The ship that is anchored in Long Beach is bigger, but the volume is not comparable to us," said Jim MacLellan, president of the Port of Los Angeles. With inland transportation systems near saturation, the pressure on containers transported from relatively small container ships to the North American public and rail network is certainly much smaller than that from a super giant wheel. The experience of Los Angeles may give some inspiration to those who believe that the super container ship will soon appear on the trans-Pacific route.
(Compile: Liu Shengqi)
Changhong Machinery Manufacture Co., Ltd. , http://www.dzpumpfluid.com