No guarantees on post-expansion traffic

However, some analysts point to the lack of distribution capabilities for many of these ports, limiting their capacity to be truly attractive alternatives.
And then there’s the fact that a large proportion of container ships on order for the East-West trades are 16,000 teu upwards – too big for the Panama Canal, even after the expansion.

The people that matter, in this case the carriers, have been unnervingly silent on their post expansion routing plans. With a 2015 completion date they do have over a year before they have to make any actual amendments to their strings so perhaps we can forgive them for their lack of voice. Although as shrewd consultant Drewry points out carriers must be talking to ports as “no port developer will build or expand without some certainty”.

That said, there’s still no guarantee that US East Coast ports will win from the expansion, and even if they do triumph there certainly won’t be enough traffic to warrant all the works being undertaken at East Coast ports. Florida alone has spent $425m on ports over the past three years to prepare for the expansion of the Panama Canal, including deepening the Port of Miami to 50 ft.

New York & New Jersey is going so far as to raise a bridge at an estimated cost of $743m to welcome the big boys. The cash injection story is the same at Baltimore, Jacksonville, Charleston and at other ports up and down the East Coast.

Rather than championing this fervent development, Drewry believes that the existing main hub ports and terminals in Central America and the Caribbean will likely be the biggest beneficiaries of the growth in post-expansion transhipment traffic.

So, yes, the Panama Canal expansion will be a game-changer, but where those changes are most keenly felt remains to be seen. And despite the very persuasive arguments they make, US East Coast ports can’t all be winners.

Nothing in life, as they say, is guaranteed.