Savannah saw its largest-ever container ship July 13, the first to call on the port after passing through the recently expanded Panama Canal.
Though it plans to offload just 3,000 containers in Savannah, the MOL Benefactor has a capacity of 10,100 twenty-foot equivalent units, or TEUs. That’s more than double the 4,300-TEU capacity of the largest ships that could pass through the canal before its new locks opened in June.
The Benefactor is deployed on a new service that starts in Qingdao, China, heads down the Chinese coast, across the Pacific, through the canal and eventually up to the ports of New York/New Jersey before turning back East and stopping in Savannah. It’s operated by the G6 Alliance, a vessel-sharing arrangement of six major shipping firms.
The Benefactor’s next stop is the Manzanillo International Terminal, a key port on Panama’s Atlantic side.
Savannah is deepening its harbors to prepare for these larger ships, a task the Georgia Ports Authority says is about 15 percent complete. As of now, the harbor’s 42-foot depth is only enough to accommodate the huge boats after they’ve offloaded some of their cargo.
Larger ships bring greater scale for shippers and lower costs that the port says will help drive economic growth for Georgia and the Southeast.
“Over the next six months to a year, we expect a higher ratio of 8,000- to 10,000- TEU container ships among our vessels calls. Within two years, we expect market shifts to send 12,000-TEU vessels to the U.S. East Coast,” Griffith Lynch, the executive director of the authority, said in a news release.
The 12,000 figure references the largest of the so-called “post-Panamax” vessels.
Savannah maintains close cooperation with the Panama Canal through knowledge-sharing arrangements and frequent visits by Georgia officials.
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