Newsroom Blog
Gigantic risks
By Lloyds List Comment
Thursday 30 April 2009
GIGANTISM – a condition of excessive growth – has taken a grip of maritime imaginations in France.
The supersizing of the world fleet is unstoppable, so industry delegates heard this week on the French Riviera. It is a natural evolution, so the argument runs, to offer more capacity in a world that wants the cost-effective and efficient dispatch of goods by sea.
Anglo-Saxons might be alert here to a whiff of Gallic enthusiasm for ‘le grand projet’. And there is something Swiftian in the image of the best minds of France’s maritime industries feverishly dreaming of ever-larger boats and the mesh of infrastructure and administration needed to rig these schemes in place.
Heavyweights such as Bureau Veritas, CMA CGM and the French ports, though, are quite clear that the future will bring larger vessels. This growth in size is not just evident in container shipping.
Gigantism is at large in segments from dry bulkers to car carriers and passenger cruise ships. The matter of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s is incidental, the gigantists argue. When world trade picks up it will need big ships to fill.
The growth in vessel sizes is, of course, nothing new. Naval architects and shipyards have since the nineteenth-century steadily turned out larger and larger cargo and passenger ships.
The supersized tanker was a reality as far back as the 1970s. In recent years boxship and dry bulk tonnage growth has accelerated. And gigantism as a term was coined more than 18-months ago in this paper in the wake of the Emma Maersk’s arrival on the world’s sea lanes.
Larger vessels clearly offer advantages of economy of scale and the prospect of more efficient industrial transport and logistical systems. Select ports have served very large tankers for decades. Boxship growth is catchup.
Aside from the availability of capital, it is the insurance and risk implications that will vex these grand visions. The loss of the MSC Napoli and its cargo, a relative minnow compared to the new generation of boxships, is now the second most costly insurance incident after the Exxon Valdez. Marine insurers, for now, have only difficult questions about the exposures gigantism brings, rather than answers.
Comments (1)
Comment by
Captain Doctor Ivica Tijardovic, PhD
- Thursday 30 April 2009
BUILDING bigger ships is fine if naval architects can ensure they are safe. But what are the limits to the ship size? Are ports ready to accommodate such ships? Who guarantees that there will be enough cargo for them? We shouldn’t rush with increasing the size of ships, particularly not with containers. Given the current shipping and shipbuilding markets, we have time to get more information and more experience.
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