Egypt appears to be on the verge of starting its own shipping line

[jmowreader]

https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/1/100830/MV-EVER-GIVEN-is-officially-confiscated-Suez-Canal-chairman

On March 23, Evergreen Line got one of their massive container ships stuck in the Suez Canal. It took until March 28 to dig it out.

Apparently Evergreen’s insurance company was not pleased to be presented with a bill for $900 million for freeing their $120 million boat, so they’ve walked away from it.

[lagomorph777]

2. They'd need a railroad. And two gigantic ports.

Non-trivial.

[jmowreader]

3. They'd also need gantry cranes that'll reach all the way across the canal

[jmowreader]

6. What would be the point? Seriously?

Let's say it cost $250 million to build one set of gantry cranes - you need three because you've got to unload the front, middle and back of the ship at the same time - that'll reach all the way across the Suez Canal. The Port of Houston recently bought a set of cranes for $35 million, but those will only reach across a 20-container-wide ship and not a 700-foot-wide canal.

But now you need THREE sets because part of the canal system is a big lake (no problem if you get stuck there, the rest of the ships in your convoy will just drive around you) and part of it is two parallel cuts.

Now you've got $750 million (plus the cost of roads, rail lines etc to remove the containers from the area because you can't just stick the equivalent of 20,000 20-foot containers in the middle of the street...oh, let's just round it up to $2 billion) tied up in equipment to help solve a problem that hardly ever happens, and has never happened to this extent.

You'd probably be better off building a fleet of really big-ass tugboats and tying one to every ship over a certain size that wanted to transit the canal. If a windstorm came up the tug would just drag the ship's nose out into the middle of the canal.

[edhopper]

4. Egypt should demand a billion dollar bond

from International shipping to cover this in case it happens again.