What happened in the Suez Canal this week sounds like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster. Ever Given, a freight transport ship, has run aground this week in the middle of the infrastructure, due to a sandstorm and strong wind, blocking the passage of any other vessel from side to side, and creating a queue of kilometers, with hundreds of ships waiting to cross the Canal, through which 12% of all world trade passes.
The tasks to refloat the ship and to be able to untangle this marine knot that has become entangled in Egypt will require days, or even weeks. The dimensions of the ship, built in Japan three years ago, are enough to get an idea of the difficulty involved in this task: Ever Given is 400 meters long, twice the length of the Santiago Bernabéu building (nearly four times the size of the playing field of the Madrid stadium), and weighs 200,000 tons without load, with the capacity to transport 20,000 containers of six meters long each.
Now, the ship is stranded five meters against the wall of the channel, and the tasks to relocate it may take longer than initially planned. So much so, that there are cargo ships that are considering avoiding the shortcut of the Suez Canal and making a detour around the entire African continent.
A millionaire jam
Moller-Maersk, one of the most important companies in the maritime transport sector, acknowledged this Thursday that it is evaluating this possibility, with seven large ships of the company being affected by the blockade in Suez. The German Hapag-Lloyd would also be considering taking this measure, if the tasks to solve the problem take much longer.
The traffic jam in the Canal zone continues to grow: on Wednesday there was a queue of 185 ships waiting to transit, and on Thursday it grew to 237 ships. Every day that the Canal remains blocked, close to 10,000 million dollars in trade remain paralyzed in the area, according to Lloyds calculations, which indicate that daily westbound traffic accounts for 5,100 million dollars each day, and another 4,500 million euros in goods traveling east.
At this time, around 13 million barrels of oil are waiting to cross the Canal, according to Bloomberg sources, in addition to other ships that transport oil derivatives, such as biodiesel. Another of the raw material markets that seems to be affected by the problem is that of copper. In China there is already a situation of supply deficit, which could worsen in the coming days due to this situation.
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