Chairman of the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) Ossama Rabiee announced on 13 March that navigation through the waterway had recorded its highest ever daily transit rate, with 107 ships crossing in both directions with no waiting time, with a net tonnage of 6.3. million tons. From north to south, 56 vessels crossed with a net tonnage of 3.4 million tons, whereas 51 vessels headed from south to north through the new waterway with a net tonnage of 2.9 million tons.
Admiral Rabiee said the Canal navigation traffic witnessed the transit of various types of mega vessels: 25 container ships, 28 bulk carriers, 33 tankers, six car carriers, and 15 other vessels that ranged from multi-purpose vessels to general cargo.
The southbound convoy, the Admiral said, included the mega vessel EVER GIFTED, one of the biggest container vessels in the world, which transited the Canal heading from Greece to Malaysia with 223,000 tons of cargo on board. The northbound convoy boasted the the container ship COSCO SHIPPING UNIVERSE which sailed under the Hong Kong flag, heading from Singapore to Greece, carrying 232 thousand tons of cargo.
Admiral Rabiee said that the big leap in the number of transiting vessels would not have been possible without the New Suez Canal project which has succeeded in leveraging the Canal’s capacity and its capacity to accommodate current and future generations of mega vessels with mega drafts.
In the same context, he drew attention to continuing work to achieve an aspiring strategy to develop the waterway by executing the Canal’s Southern Sector Development Project which would allow increasing the navigational safety by 28 per cent, in addition to increasing navigational capacity by six extra vessels.
In February 2022, Admiral Rabiee had said that work was underway to extend the two-way segment of the Suez Canal by ten kilometres, as part of the country’s plan to constantly improve the international waterway. The two-way traffic segment which had been dug in 2015 in the project termed the New Suez Canal, to create a parallel path to part of the original 193km-waterway, allowing thus two-way traffic, would be extended from the current 72 kilometres to 82 kilometres. Work on this extension has been ongoing since 2021.
Worth noting is that the statistics announced in 2015 to denote the expected benefits of the New Suez Canal Project had cited an expected “increase in the daily average of transiting vessels to 97 ships by the year 2023, up from 49 ships at present … and direct unstopped transit for 45 ships in the two directions”. The figures declared by Admiral Rabiee on 13 March 2023: The transit of 107 vessels that day, among which 56 were northbound and 51 southbound, indicate that the project has obviously outdone its expectations.
https://www.suezcanal.gov.eg/English/About/SuezCanal/Pages/NewSuezCanal.aspx
Watani International
14 March 2023
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