Panama Canal toll - How much do you think?

[red]

LNG is the future maritime fuel for big ships . Mostly for clean burn emissions. Plus there is plenty of it .

[Kbeitz]

The Emma Maersk Running at her rated 80 Mw, her main engines burn 14 tons
of residual fuel each hour. Annually, that's 97,400 tons of fuel.
This yields a total annual usage of 143,400 tons or about $64.5 million in
annual fuel costs. Burning 20.6 tons/hour = 6724 gals/hour. At 31 kts/hour,
this equals .0046 nautical miles/gallon. At 6076 ft/nautical mile, that's 28
feet/gallon of fuel burned.

[Hiway40frank]

I wonder if anyone ever considered building a nuclear shipping vessel. Im not sure how the numbers would work out over say 20 years but nuclear feul is kinda expensive.

[Al_Smith]

I think it's been tried,unsuccessfully .Cost doesn't justify means .Politics being what they are there are some or maybe most ports they could no pull into .

Things like  Three Mile Island and Chernobyl pretty much killed nuclear power in this country .Besides that who could afford it lest it be some government .

[Ron Wenrich]

I would think the nuclear waste would be quite the issue. 

[repmma]

You need to take into consideration  the fact that big ships use bunker c oil measured in tonnage per mile not miles per gallon and they run about 20 knots per hour .I have no idea what a container ship uses but a liner it's something like 2800 gallon per mile .That plus the time involved to round the horn and get back to position as if they had transversed the canal .

And even still tanker companies are sending ships around instead of thru the Suez to save money. 

2800gal per mile is a bit high even for a container ship.  At only 200 nm per day that works out to 2,100 Mt of HFO, and a container ship is doing more like double that distance.  Most of the coastal product tankers you'll see burn only 30mt to 60mt on avg.  One steam ship I know of burns around 70mt I belive, but her advantage is she can still burn HFO coast wise while everyone else has switched to diesel, so it's almost a 50% savings in fuel costs.

LNG is cheap and clean, the problem with it is its storage requirements on a ship.  The amount of room it requires to store a sufficient quantity to have any decent range is excessive when compared to diesel or hfo.  They are making advancements for it on coast wise operations and yes some ships are coming out LNG equipped, most recently TOTE who is a coast wise container company, they owned the El Faro which was I believe to be replaced by these new ships they are coming out with.

[repmma]

I wonder if anyone ever considered building a nuclear shipping vessel. Im not sure how the numbers would work out over say 20 years but nuclear feul is kinda expensive.

Google NS Savannah, one of my cruise instructor's in college was the Chief Engineer on it.  As we say in Maine he was "wicked smaart", it was like he was a nuclear engineer or something!

No way it's viable obviously.  We can barely get new nuclear plants in the country on land.  They aren't going to let a bunch of merchant sailors roam around with nuclear reactors!  Heck they barely let us off the ships even when in US ports, I've gotten searched at the gate after LEAVING ExxonMobil refineries, and their driver picked me up at the gangway!

[repmma]

According to this article http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Oil-Tankers-Shun-Suez-Canal-In-Search-of-Cheaper-Route.html

It's an avg $465,000 to go thru Suez.  Plus you better have a pallet of Marlboro's on hand for bribes for everyone from the pilots to the line handlers or your going to be delayed! 

[ozarkgem]

I wonder if anyone ever considered building a nuclear shipping vessel. Im not sure how the numbers would work out over say 20 years but nuclear feul is kinda expensive.

One nuclear commercial ship was built. I took a tour of it years ago. I can't remember where it is. There was a battleship and that ship best I recall.

[Ianab]

One nuclear commercial ship was built. I took a tour of it years ago. I can't remember where it is. There was a battleship and that ship best I recall.

That would be the Savannah, which is moored on display in Baltimore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah

Wikipedia lists 3 other nuclear ships built by Japan, Germany and Russia. The Russian ship is apparently still in service.

Big issue is insurance. If something did go wrong it could go REALLY wrong, so no normal insurance company would risk covering it.