A steel cutting ceremony took place in China last week on the hulls of the first two ships of CMA CGM’s order for nine 22,500 teu LNG-powered ULCVs, featuring a potentially game-changing bow design.

Alongside similar ULCVs being constructed for MSC in South Korea, these behemoths will be the largest containerships afloat, and the first to extend to 24 containers across the weather deck. The French carrier’s new flagships will also be the first constructed with a “bulbless” bow, as the container line commits its future to slow-steaming.

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Posted on - 2018-08-05

Neil Davidson, Drewry’s senior analyst for ports and terminals, told The Loadstar:  “The rising regional utilisation levels will put more pressure on existing facilities, especially those already intensively utilised of course. The increased volume peaks created by bigger ships and bigger alliances have had the effect of reducing effective capacity, so any worsening of the peaks due to the market growth will result in a need to build more capacity than would otherwise have been needed.”

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Posted on - 2018-08-05

A new State of the Climate report confirmed that 2017 was one of the three warmest years in records dating to the mid-1800s.

Last year was one of the warmest years on record despite the lack of a short-term warming El Niño influence. The report found that the major indicators of climate change continued to reflect trends consistent with a warming planet. Several markers such as greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and sea level broke records set just one year prior.

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Posted on - 2018-08-04