One of the downsides to transshipping material from one ship to another is that for every instance in which a material is handled there will be a certain risk of damaging the shipment. So if you have to handle the same cargo twice between two points the percentage of the cargo at risk for damage will be roughly double that than if the same amount of payload was carried aboard ships from the origin to the intended destination without the need for transfer. In addition, a shipping company would have to absorb the cost of the time lost by multiple loadings rather than the same amount of cargo being loaded once into ships capable of carrying the cargo through the Seaway. That is not the say that there would not be a significant cost savings on shipping an ore cargo aboard a 1000 foot vessel between Lake Superior and the western terminus of the Welland Canal compared to utilizing 730 foot vessels for this stretch. It would be interesting to see how the numbers would add up on this idea. It seems like the only way it could be viable is the construction of a transfer facility somewhere on the eastern end of Lake Ontario for this to work for the ore trade down the Seaway. Since there appears to be no such project in the works, I doubt the predictions of any 1000 footer going into Canadian registry any time soon. In my experience in manufacturing and logistics, any additional step added to a process increases the chance of it becoming inefficient.Guest wrote:I could see value in a Canadian fleet buying some footers and using them to run cargo from Lake Superior to somewhere on Lake Erie and then reloading the ore into seaway capable vessel. They could go from running 27k-28k tons of cargo all the way from Lake Superior to Quebec to running 70k tons of cargo for half the trip then transloading onto the seaway capable vessels from Lake Erie to Quebec.
Naturally Ore is the easiest cargo to see this happening with however, is there any reason this couldn’t occur with grain? Could the footers handle grain out of Thunder Bay, unload somewhere like Nanticoke, then reload on seaway vessels? Whether or not this could be done with grain I think this will absolutely happen with Ore.
I think this is the future of some of the thousand footers once the coal trade wraps up.
This is not to say transshipments on the lakes have not had some success. Perhaps the best example was the construction of the pellet facility at Lorain, Ohio. In this case, however, this was to reap the benefits of bringing ore down the lakes aboard large vessels to be put aboard smaller ones for delivery to the steel mills located up the Cuyahoga River at nearby Cleveland, Ohio.
Wasn't there an issue several years back when Algoma Steel switched some of their inbound ore cargoes to rail to decrease the damage to the pellets?
As for the movement of grain aboard thousand footers, it seems that the grain terminals would require significant upgrades to handle such ships on a regular basis. That may be possible at the loading facilities at Thunder Bay but you once again run into the transshipment issue at the Welland Canal.
Just a few observations I have on this subject.