Expansion!

  In 2006, the Panamanian electorate voted in favor of a plan to expand the Panama Canal.  The reason was not that the Canal had reached full capacity:  in fact, by a back-of-envelop calculation done by myself and a fellow named Andrew Baldwin, the Panama Canal is at roughly half its maximum throughput in terms of the number of ships.  (The ACP, I should add, does not agree with us.)  Rather, the reason is that 35% of the planet’s commercial shipping consists of ships too large to fit through the current locks, and Panama wants a piece of that business.

The current locks measure 1,050 feet by 110 feet.  They can accomodate ships meausring up to 965 and 106 feet.  An expansion project started by the Americans in 1939 and abandoned in 1942 would have built a third set of locks measuring 1,200 feet by 140 feet, with 45 feet of depth.  The abandonment turns out to have been a great thing for the Panamanian economy:  the new project will build locks measuring 1,400 × 180 × 60, capable of accomodating ships up to 1,200 × 160.  (And to be honest, I suspect that will eventually be pushed up to 1,315 × 176.) 

How large is that?  Pretty f----n’ large.  The new notional Panamax will be 1,200 × 160.  The real new Panamax will be closer to 1,315 × 176.  Well, Malaccamax is 1,543 × 197.  Still not big enough for supertankers, but big enough to capture a lot of the new traffic.  (And Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, should it ever come to that.)  The plan is for the expansion to be finished by 2014.  (Uh huh.) 

The abandonment of the American project also turns out to be a great thing for the Panamanian ecology.  Every time one of the current lock chambers is filled, it drains 26.7 million gallons of fresh water from Lake Gatún.  The problem is that rainfall has been falling in Panama.  The American new locks would have increased that number to 40.8 million gallons for every ship to head through the new passages. 

So the new locks will recycle the water, pumping it out of the locks into reservoirs.  It should allow the Canal to use only 10.7 million gallons per lock crossing, despite the larger size of the locks.  

  

Questions or comments? 

Comments

[Peter]

Would it be possible to build a lock-less (and size-unlimited) canal through Panama, or does the terrain make that impossible?

[Dennis Brennan]

Peter, with enough Irishmen and enough shovels, you can build a canal of any arbitrary size (limited only to the size of the largest available landmass).

This is a corollary to Brennan's Law of the Workshop (you can fit anything into anything else if you have a big enough hammer).

[Dennis Brennan]

Peter, with enough Irishmen and enough dynamite, you can build a lock-less canal of any arbitrary size, limited only by the size of the landmass that you're digging through. This is a corollary to Brennan's Law of the Workshop (you can fit anything into anything else if you have a big enough hammer).

More seriously, a large portion of the waterway consists of Lake Gatun, which is something like 85 feet above sea level. Lockless means, in addition to the need to dig deeper (we're already dealing with a continental divide here), that you're basically emptying the country's freshwater reservoirs into the ocean.

Also, for some reason that I don't understand, sea level isn't really level-- it's higher on the Pacific side.

[Noel Maurer]

Hi, Peter. Dennis is right, a sea-level canal is technically feasible. But there are a lot of buts.

Let me go for another post on this one.