Giant Next-Gen Container Ships Will Make Ever Given Look Like Toy
The mishap in the Suez Canal might make you think vessels are bound to shrink in the future. But there’s a good economic case for precisely the opposite.
We’re gonna need a bigger boat.
Photographer: Susanne Kronholm/Getty Images
If you think the ultimate reason the Suez Canal got blocked last week is because container ships are getting too big, get ready for the future. The next few generations of cargo vessels are going to make the Ever Given look like a bath toy.
Big enough to carry 20,124 twenty-foot equivalent units, or TEUs — the standard measure for cargo, representing a single shipping container — the Ever Given was one of the world’s largest such vessels when it was launched in 2018. The first container ship to break the 20,000 TEU mark had been at sea for less than a year. One famed 1999 study, written at a time when the largest boats carried less than 8,000 TEUs, argued it would prove impossible to build craft bigger than 18,000 TEUs.