What Does the Largest Container Ship Mean?

In November 2021 the largest container ship, the Cruise Ship Pacific left San Diego with an undetermined destination for port calls in Asia and the Middle East. It was supposed to be one of the largest and most powerful ships ever built for that purpose. Unfortunately, the ship ran into a local law limit and never came back. One wonders if it was caught by the ship yards or was it simply out of the jurisdiction of San Diego based ports.

The ship was supposed to call at nine ports and return with a cargo of CMA CMG refrigerated containers for South Korea, India, China, and Taiwan. These are all nations with nuclear ambitions. It is also interesting that it was transporting beef and pork in crates rather than the normal containers. Something indeed.

Perhaps the cruise operator should have asked the US Federal Maritime Commission to allow for a higher tonnage or more containers on board because the ship was trying to ship extremely heavy items in very large containers in violation of United States law. Now that the ship is defunct there will be no investigation. I believe they were instructed by their lawyers not to do such a thing. However, I honestly do not know what the laws say and it may be well known that they are very vague as well. So let us suppose that the largest container ship in the world tried to ship ultra-large items in crates, as the law specifies.

What would that actually be? I propose the ships use twenty,120 meters long containers for that journey and only be able to move at a speed of nine knots. That is a pretty fast ship and it could get to the port in less than a week at most. That is assuming no trouble with the local governments and that all the proper paperwork is in order. There are no accidents or damage of any kind and the liner can go into the water without further delay or expense. In fact, if this is the biggest cruise ship in the world, it could be moving into the area in less than two weeks.

Now then the question is why are we even considering these mega-ships if they are not needed anymore? Well for starters the world simply does not need another super-ship, as we already have too many. The problem is if we continue to add to our “unoccupied storage space” then how are we going to make room for them? They will simply sit there and rot space until they are moved or destroyed.

Now then why do we not build a much bigger ship that will have a capacity that meets the demand? It simply makes no sense. The reason is that there is a ceiling on the maximum number of containers that can be shipped each month and with the current global population of over seven billion people it simply does not make sense to build a shipping capacity that will let the current demands go unmet. That is to say that if the current demand goes up by only 200 containers then the cargo capacity would have to increase by another 400 containers.

So the logical solution then is to build a much larger ship with a greater cargo capacity and allow the current demand of my codes or DWT to go up. This way everyone wins as higher DWTs mean better profit margins for the shippers and the terminal operators and most importantly it means better ocean freight rates for consumers. Is that not a very good idea indeed? And it seems to me that the US navy would be interested in this concept of doubling their yearly my codes shipments. Perhaps you will please consider all this in advance.

Indeed I hope you will please consider this issue and think on it. If you have any comments, questions or concerns please shoot me an e-mail. I’d love to hear from you. The biggest ships have never been built by humans so why should we allow Chinese or Korean ships to haul our stuff around the world? Think on this.

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