Panama Canal Channels Jobs

Big Ships heading to the East Coast, Energy Heads out to the World.

- Garland L.Thompson

Cocoli Locks, PANAMA CITY —With a blazing crescendo of multi-colored fireworks, the Chinese-owned container ship Cosco Shipping Panama slowly nosed through the long-heralded “Third Set of Locks” on the Pacific side of the expanded Panama Canal.

Cosco Shipping Panama’s 984-foot length, far too big for the century-old canal’s original lock system, makes it the first “Neo-Panamax” vessel to transit the canal, opening a new era in world commerce. The big cargo ships from Asia that before now only could dock in Long Beach, CA, now can begin heading to the U.S. East and Gulf Coast ports, not only to deliver Pacific Rim cargoes but, in increasingly large quantities, to move American-produced energy supplies out to world markets.

It’s a big thing because as U.S. Ambassador John Feely said in a press briefing, most of the canal’s ship traffic, coming from and going to ports all over the word, either ends up in a U.S. port or leaves from one.

Materials supplied by the Canal Authority, an independent government agency authorized by an amendment (Title XIV) to the Panamanian Constitution, back him up: Cargo from 1,700 ports in 160 countries reaches the canal from over 144 ocean routes, and Ambassador Feely said that two out of every three ships transiting the canal either head to a U.S. port or have just left from one.

But after 102 years of service, the old lock system—even after improvements that replaced mechanical gate actuators with hydraulics, renovated and upgraded the railway over which the famous GE “donkey engines” moved to haul ships through the locks, and replaced the donkey engines themselves with more sophisticated models—simply could not suffice for the vastly bigger vessels being built to move cargo in the 21st century.