The Valemax Ships: A Mammoth Solution, or an Even Bigger Problem?

their ships so massive they would put an aircraft carrier to shame so entirely so totally gargantuan that not a single civilian port in the United States can accommodate them a 68 ship Fleet with a carrying capacity of up to 400,000 tons each the viamax class of ships is so powerful that it would take them just two Journeys to transport the entire Great Wall of China but for nearly their entire history the bamax ships have been highly controversial from being outright banned in China to being lampooned by much of the sea shipping industry to a series of accidents that have tarnished the bamax name in today's episode of Mega projects we're going to be digging into the massive vessels and their groundbreaking complex history all trying to answer one very important question was building the viamax class even actually worth it at all so in early August of 2008 the Chinese company Janu Rong Shang heavy Industries or rsh IES received a pretty massive order for construction it was placed by a Brazilian mining company called vley they were requesting a series of 12 ships of a classification known as very large or carriers so named if you're curious because they're very large and carry or barley was willing to throw down $1.6 billion on the 12 ships about $135 million per vessel with an expectation that each vessel would have a dead weight tonnage of 400,000 tons in regards to just how much carrying capacity Valley wanted it was the biggest ship building contract ever signed now a ship of this size would have immediately shattered the record for the world's largest or Carrier as soon as it came onto the scene but Valley's reasons for requesting them went a whole lot further than just just chasing clout you see as a major export company for iron or the Brazilian Corporation was contending with exporters like Australia South Africa and India who could offer the same product to the East Asian market much more cheaply the problem you see was the Pacific Ocean where a ship carrying the same amount of product would have far higher Fuel and crew costs if it had to Traverse the 20,000 km Journey Brazilian iron or is typically higher quality than those produced elsewhere yet at a certain point those improvements just aren't worth the shipping costs but by consolidating more or into fewer ships thus requiring fewer Journeys across the sea Valley could become much more competitive in China South Korea and elsewhere in order to build a ship of that size Valley had more than a few design constraints to consider on the one hand they wouldn't have to worry about any of the engineering requirements that would allow their ships to pass through the Panama Canal or other similarly narrow passages the viamax class was so damn big that no amount of over engineering could have made that possible but what the ships did need was a reinforced hole that would allow it to carry an enormous amount of ore to give you an idea of what they were contending with here imagine how hard it is to stop a moving freight train in a case of an emergency but then multiply the weight of that Freight Train by about 100 take away its brakes and force it to operate with just a propeller and a Rudder with that sort of inertia at Play There Are No Light bumps into the side of a dock at absolute best there is a catastrophic Collision that will cost Millions upon millions of dollarss the solution was to split the hull into a series of seven cargo holds Each of which could be strengthened in order to make the hull itself difficult to compromise and when these holds were engineered it was also with an eye to the truly insane amounts of time it would take to load and unload a ship of viamax size just to put it in perspective a single crane would have to operate for just over 160 hours in order to unload a ship if it were at capacity so that's about a week's work just before we dive back into to today's video I've got something exciting to share with you and that's that this video 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accounts it would seem that vley was confident in the ship's potential and their value is an investment within a year of their contract they issued another for seven vessels to be built by South Korea a year later they requested 12 more of them Valley's official goal was to build a full hundred of the ships which according to the company would be just enough to handle the or exports Viet felt that they could offer 200 million tons of iron ore per year requiring each ship to perform four year round trips in a near continuous shuttle to the Far East this would allow them to defrate cost of just 17 to $18 per ton vastly more appealing than what Brazil to East Asia transport cost c s had been before they arrived by 2011 the first Val Max ship appropriately dubbed the valy Brazil was delivered from South Korea a few months later the valley China was launched from China's nantong Shipyard and two other ships would be delivered before the end of the year seven more would hit the Open Water by the end of 2012 and before long that steady flow turned into a Cascade despite early construction delays on the Chinese site the entire first series of ships would be finished by 2016 and in the same year three Chinese companies and one from Japan would Place their own orders for a total of 33 more of the vessels in next to no time the viax had gone from just taking off to mounting a full takeover of the shipping industry when we dig into the specifications for the V Mar class one thing should be clear Above All Else these things are big a typical valamar ship is built at 360 M long or about 1,181 ft that's longer than a nimit class aircraft carrier about the same length as the biggest cruise ship in the world and almost four times the length of Big Ben in London if it were laid on its side its beam that is to say its width is 65 M 213 ft and when it's fully loaded it has a draft of 23 M or 75 ft that means at full carrying capacity the bottom of the ship's Hull is 75 ft under the surface of the water just barely shallow enough to pass through the sez canal with without literally scraping the bottom this also makes them unable to dock at the vast majority of the world's ports the only reason they weren't built even bigger is so that they could fit into the biggest ports in China the ships are powered by a single diesel engine rated at about 39,000 horsepower by the way that's more horsepower than there are horses in the entire Czech Republic a lot of horses the ship's propeller is 10 m tall that's 33 ft and gives the valax a service speed of about 28 km per hour that's 17 mph in exchange it consumes about 100 tons of heavy fuel every single day but for what it's worth that's actually a fairly impressive efficiency rate compared to most long-distance bulk carriers you see because of how large the ships are they've brought down Val's emissions rate by 35% in comparison to older ships that they've been operating later model VX ships have more powerful engines but ones that are built with emissions in mind cutting them down by another 20% a typical ship requires a crew of 22 Personnel to operate but they've often got space for as many as 30 people on board and then there's the size of the ship's interior which deserves its own consideration each of their cargo holds can hold nearly as much ore as an entire panamax carrier that is a ship that is of the maximum size that can fit through the Panama Canal and at seven cargo holds per alamax the ships are gamechanging for companies who now don't need to bother with the canal in order to do business on its inaugural Voyage the first valax class ship Vala Brazil completed its Journey from sou Lewis to Toronto Italy even as early as this first voyage though there was already speculation that Brazil's new ships were Making Waves elsewhere the ship had been intended to arrive at dalan in China but had been forced to turn back after rounding the tip of South Africa at the time rumors abounded that Valley had been barred from bringing the ship to China perhaps because Chinese officials had hoped that the first valx ship to arrive there would have been the one that China built but regardless Val insisted that the ship was rerouted for commercial reasons and before long the incident became just a mere footnote soon afterwards Val's ship had visited most of the major global Shipping destinations that could handle a vessel of their size from Japan to Oman to the Philippines to the Netherlands the volx era was truly underway all right so now we're going to ask everyone watching this to join us in a bit of a thought experiment take off your mega projects appreciator hat and put on your iron or exporter Tycoon hat specifically from the perspective of one of many Australian Chinese South African Indian or other companies that have been very happily running their businesses before the viamax class came along from their perspective the valax ships could be as impressive as they wanted in reality that didn't really matter though What mattered was that the valax was a threat to their bottom line bringing in higher quality ore at competitive prices and basically undercutting the rest of the entire market so when the alamax class was announced to the world it was immediately met with frustration and criticism across the heavy shipping industry if they were to went to service the ships were all but guaranteed to drive down freight rates for everyone in an industry that was already struggling to fill its existing ships with enough cargo to turn a profits when the ships first set sail it was in a world that was still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and between the drop in freight costs and the amount of all the valax ships would take off the market they risked putting hundreds of smaller ships permanently out of work of course from Val's perspective none of this sounded like an issue but the rest of the shipping World they saw things different and the company raised serious concerns in China as well by this time Valley had shown their willingness to try and control the price of war in the country and with their new ships it seemed as if they wanted to exert the same sort of control around the Freight Market itself when fully loaded the VX ships also violated Chinese safety and environmental laws but Valley's Executives remained insistent that their ships would go to China regardless demands that China struggled to say no to because of how critical vet's supply of ore was at that time China's response to the valax in 12 was to ban them from all Chinese ports even despite the fact that many of the ships still had yet to be delivered from China to Valley although the ship deliveries went uninterrupted the entire class of ship was pushed out of China basically freezing billions of dollars that valy had dedicated to their operation in response V completely refused to work with ships provided by Costco China's largest shipping conglomerate in the intervening years V relied on a center that they built in the Philippines in anticipation of such a problem allowing them to unload alamax ships close to China and do the rest of the journey with smaller vessels it wasn't until 2015 when an oversupply of iron ore drove prices unsustainably low that both sides were able to work past their differences since then though China's had a clear change of heart with several more ports being expanded to fit VX class ships when they couldn't have been fit there before the valax class has prompted a massive shift in China's shipping industry with those prior rules limiting ships of that size basically just being thrown out the wind Zone but even before the valax class ships were banned in China they also received another black eye and that was a structural failure in one of their ships the valet Beijing in 2011 this ship was in the process of being loaded with 300,000 metric tons of ore for what should have been its first Revenue generating trip across the ocean but during the loading process cracks began to develop in the ships Hall spreading to the Ballas tanks and causing them to rupture this is the kind of known issue that's among shipping company's worst fears in truly catastrophic scenarios old raw transport have been known to snap apart while being unloaded import and sink along with their cargo because of how much stress the heavy iron or puts on the hull fearing the worst the ship was drained of its Fuel and towed out into open water with about 250,000 tons of ore already on board that way if it did sink at least it wouldn't put Port Personnel at risk the ship was unloaded in a hurry with its cargo transferred to any other bolt carrier that could get to it and luckily it was able to avoid a complete rupture of the hull moreover it was able to be cleared without completely halting operations at its Home Port which at that time time oversaw 10% of all the iron or production of the entire world later inspections would find that the ship was still structurally sound even during the accident meaning that it was highly unlikely that it would have broken apart nonetheless it was cited as a major reason for China not allowing the farax ships import whether this was the entire truth of the matter or if China had already been planning to prohibit them we obviously can't say but the design not to have such a massive ship split in half while import is honestly pretty understandable in 2013 another ship the valley Indonesia would run a ground and in 2020 the NSU caras also a valax ship smashed into two other Bol carriers while at a port in Brazil luckily no Personnel have ever been harmed in an accident involving a bamax class vessel but the ship's list of mishaps in a few short years of operation is perhaps not an encouraging sign in fact so beleaguered was the valax class that at certain points the valley company even discussed the idea of just selling them off but with beijing's ban on the ships finally lift the valax class has been able to reach its full potential in 2016 Valley did sell three of its ships to the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China but this time the conversations around a sale were done on Valley's terms you see now it was a ship that was finally proving its worth to the world in the years since conversations around the valx have moved to topics like how to make them more fuel efficient how to integrate cloud data infrastructure onto the vessels and how more and more ports are being upgraded in order to receive them by all accounts the valley company's perseverance with a ship has paid off as we write this in 2023 the viamax class still sails the high seas and now they operate basically unimpeded by trade regulations safety banss or International controversies despite their disruptive effect on the iron or trade the market has flexed to accommodate them and despite their size and insane levels of fuel consumption they are a more fuele efficient option to transport their cargo than a bigger Fleet of smaller ships would ever have been the structural failure of the valet Beijing has proven proven to be an isolated incident and they've avoided the sort of everg given star buffoonery that might have lowered their stock today do they come with caveats yeah absolutely but all things considered the biggest B carrier ever built has turned out to be well pretty good after all don't click away just yet just a quick reminder that if you go to play. l/ meegar projects 2023 or check the description below you can start playing enlisted today and you'll snag that free Bonus Pack so what are you waiting for dive into the action with' enlisted today and thank you for [Music] watching

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 639,076

Keywords: extinct species, mammoth, science, science news

Id: X-YnID3WdlY

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023