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Nicaragua Canal “closer than ever,” and will cut sailing time for mega-ships: official

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This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the Nicaragua Canal project.  Click here for more.

WASHINGTON DC, September 22nd, 2015 (EFE) Building an inter-oceanic canal crossing Nicaragua “is closer than ever” and will markedly reduce travel time and costs for mega-ships, a Nicaraguan senior official said here Tuesday.

“The aim is to convert Nicaragua into an international maritime transport center for mega-ships that will be mainly responsible for maritime transport in the near future,” Paul Oquist, executive director of the Nicaragua Grand Canal Commission, said during an event at the Council of the Americas in Washington.

Once completed, he emphasized, the time needed for one of these ships to sail from New Jersey to Shanghai will be reduced to two weeks, given that mega-ships are too big to transit the Panama Canal and currently have to sail around the southern tip of South America.

In his speech, Oquist emphasized Nicaragua’s solid macroeconomic situation with annual economic growth averaging 5 percent since 2011.

The $50 billion canal project is being handled by China’s HKND Group, which received a 50-year concession to build and operate the waterway.

Oquist said that there has been much disinformation regarding the project, especially concerning the environmental impact, adding that HKND had shown great interest in emphasizing “quality and cost reduction.”

He said the project will displace 28,000 people living in the zone and that they will not be relocated “more than 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from their original communities.”

In addition, he said that HKND had made a commitment that half the labor force participating in the construction will be locals.

The project is enormous, Oquist said, with the investment representing more than four times Nicaragua’s annual GDP, and it is estimated that during the construction phase it will employ 50,000 people.

This week, Nicaragua announced that Australia-based geological consultancy CSA Global will collaborate in defining the seismic risks to the canal as part of the feasibility studies.

The Nicaraguan canal will be three times larger than the one operating in Panama, winding 278 kilometers (173 miles) from the Pacific coastal town of Brito to the mouth of the Punta Gorda River on Nicaragua’s Atlantic shore.

A significant portion of the canal route – 105 kilometers – runs through Lake Nicaragua.

The project is to include two deepwater ports, an airport, an artificial lake, two sets of locks, a tourist complex, a free-trade zone, roads and cement and steel factories, HKND Group says.

This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the Nicaragua Canal project.  Click here for more.

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  • Bruce D Sherman

    This is an expensive boondoggle that will be an environmental and business disaster. I work in the shipping industry on big container ships, and in my opinion, few will use this route. Especially with the costs associated with the transit. There are lots of technical reasons why companies won’t want to tie up their vessels for the longer voyages too. This is going to be a giant money hole, and I doubt that it will be completed, and if it is, it will not be likely to make money.

    • Anthony

      The costs can’t be much more using a Nica canal than the Panama Canal. The large Maersk container ships quit transiting the P.C. because of the high cost of transit and are now using the Suez Canal from Asia to East Coast U.S.

  • Mark Nelson

    be careful of the Chinese! their lack of concern of the environment will effect beautiful Costa Rica.

  • disgsted

    Tim, I would like to see some recent pictures of the progress and how many kilometers of the canal has been dug. Plus all the material being shipped in for this canal.

    • toolman78

      I was in Nicaragua last month and according to my taxi driver, there hasn’t been much progress yet. The first stage will be to build the deep water port on the Pacific coast to start bringing equipment and supplies over from China. And supposedly they haven’t done much more than survey work.

      • Mike Wise

        Better than CR. Here, even the surveying wouldn’t be done for another 40 years, and then they’d discover that someone forgot to purchase the right-of-way!

      • disgsted

        I was there last October after the ground breaking… Went over to the beach area and small town. Saw a few dump trucks and a couple heavy machines just sitting there.. Told they had no fuel and no money paid. Had and area off limits. I guess that is all be done since then? Locals said this was a land grab by the Chinese and Oretga sold them out . Sad situation.

  • Peter Walker

    “He said the project will displace 28,000 people living in the zone and that they will not be relocated “more than 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from their original communities.” Not mentioned is the fact that most of these 28,000 people are fishermen and are going to lose their ability to feed their families. Maybe that’s why the government finds the vast majority of Nicaraguans being against this ecologically disastrous project.

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