It looks like that might have been a massive boondoggle ??? Proposed many times, then put through as an election promise, with “doubling revenue” and “doubling movements” as benefits, but no subsequent increase in revenue or ship movements ???. Proposed to allow two-way traffic, but they’re still doing half-duplex operations ???
They only widened the canal in part of its length. The section the Ever Given is stuck in is still single direction.
But apparently by-passed by the old canal, which was supposed to provide bi-directional traffic for the narrow sections, but apparently, under normal conditions, is not dong so???
From what I’ve read, only smaller vessels can use the bypass through the old canal. I’m going to guess that they didn’t deepen the old canal, so it’s shallower than the new part and lots of large ships can’t take it. Or possibly it’s too narrow for large ships. Or even both. So in the normal course of operation, they just don’t use the old canal.
Containers like that do exist; the downside is that in order to engineer a collapsible container strong enough (it’s a box that may have a dozen other boxes stacked on it), it has to be heavier, and I suppose it is less likely to be properly sealed against ingress of water etc.
Maybe they should just offload all the containers from the ships waiting to pass through and load them onto the ships on the other side, which could then go back the way they came. Swapsies!
(Yes, I know this would be a logistical nightmare even if the infrastructure was in place. But it’s a fun idea.)
“In co-operation with local authorities and Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, a vessel management company, we are trying to refloat (the ship), but we are facing extreme difficulty,” Shoei Kisen Kaisha said on Thursday (Mar 25) in a statement on its website.
“We sincerely apologise for causing a great deal of worry to ships in the Suez Canal and those planning to go through the canal.”
Peter Berdowski, CEO of Dutch company Boskalis, which is trying to free the ship, said it was too early to say how long the job might take.
“We can’t exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation,” Berdowski told the Dutch television programme Nieuwsuur.
He said the ship’s bow and stern had been lifted up against either side of the canal.
“It is like an enormous beached whale. It’s an enormous weight on the sand. We might have to work with a combination of reducing the weight by removing containers, oil and water from the ship, tug boats and dredging of sand.”
Somehow I don’t think an apology for causing a great deal of worry will be enough. 
Stranded Suez ship’s owner, insurers face millions in claims
It might be easier to lighten it by pumping out the fuel - there will be a few thousand tonnes on there.
Generally speaking it’s not an enormous issue. Every vessel that goes from, say, Asia to the US East Coast brings X containers filled with goods, can go back to Asia with X containers either filled or empty. The supply of empties can vary naturally and cause shortages or over supply, but overall a container should just go back and forth using the available space on vessels.
Empties are also easier to manage as they’re interchangeable. Filling a vessel with actual cargo means carefully managing customers, to ensure you have a paying client lined up for every one of the vessel’s 20,000 slots at the time it sails. Filling it with empties means telling your terminal operator at the last US port (like the company I work for) to fully profile the vessel. The terminal operator creates the stowage plan, and just adds empty containers for any available open space once the cargo is accounted for.
Still, the shipping lines do charter vessels to transport empties, but they’re infrequent in the grand scheme.
He worked on bulk ore carriers, mostly Australia to Germany and not through Suez (too deep draft?). He also worked on gas tankers but they were nowhere near as big.
Inspired by @Mangetout :
Zeus’s guts! Er, eh…tub’s yawed, is made dam sideways, but here’s tugs: Suez!
Damn, that’s good! Magnificent!
Thanks! It’s an odd process - it seems impossible, then suddenly something clicks and big chunks fall into place.
…then you realise that doesn’t quite work either, but in pulling it apart you find something else that does.
It’s not just the construction of the palindrome itself, but the relevance of the sentence that’s impressive: inclusion of ‘yawed’, ‘dam’, ‘sideways’, ‘tugs’ just makes it a masterpiece
I got curious about this route - eyeballing it, it looks to me like the distance between (say) Hamburg, Germany and Perth, Australia is not that different whether you go through the Suez Canal, or round the Cape of Good Hope. And indeed, according to this site I found (SEA-DISTANCES.ORG - Routelist Distances), the former is apparently 9,828 (statute) miles, while the latter is 11,112. At 10 knots, that only equates to 5 extra days at sea. And I guess that’s without factoring in any delays waiting for a slot to pass through the canal, even assuming it’s operating normally (then again, maybe you’re more likely to run into weather-induced delays with the southerly route?). On that basis, I wonder if any ships using that route are diverting around the cape as we speak? Of course, it’s a different calculus for the ships that are already waiting at either end of the canal.
Do ships actually use the SuezCanal just to transit through the Mediterranean? I assumed all those ships had ports of call in the Med.
The Ever Given is bound for Rotterdam.
Sure, maybe from Australia it’s not much further to go around Africa. But I’ll bet that a lot more traffic is coming from China or elsewhere in Asia, and in those cases the difference in transit time is probably a lot larger.
What are the operating costs for five days at sea, and how do they compare to the cost of fees for using the canal?
Yes, my company services 3 routes from Asia to NY, and one comes through the Suez, without calling on any Mediterranean or nearby ports.