Feature: The World's Largest Container Ships

The MSC Oscar, named after MSC CEO Diego Aponte's son, beat out the CSCL Globe for the title of world's largest container vessel in 2014. She can carry nearly 20,000 TEU, and along with her sister ships Oliver, Zoe, Maya and Sveva, she may well take the title of most fuel efficient ULCV.

The Oscar’s efficiency is advantageous on eastern trade routes, but she is too large to fit in American ports. While they may technically accommodate smaller ULCVs like the 18,000 TEU CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin – docked at the Port of Los Angeles as of December 29 – U.S. ports do not currently have the capacity to handle Oscar's size and cargo volume.

“The question keeps coming back on whether U.S. port infrastructure is actually ready for this size of vessels,” CMA CGM America president Marc Bourdon said, referring to the smaller Franklin. “Well, they are not exactly quite ready yet. Some ports are ready. The reality is a ship like this will not be able to get deployed on a permanent basis until more ports are ready to accommodate them.”

Truck chassis shortages, labor disputes, draft and air draft restrictions limit the ability of most American ports to handle the large ships and their massive, sudden cargo discharge. Some U.S. port authorities have begun planning for the new ships, with projects like the Port of Seattle’s Terminal 5 upgrade, but most will not be ready for several years. 

“Shipowners are definitely taking advantage of reducing their per-cost slot to move a container as they steadily increase the size of vessels,” said Richard M. Larrabee, director of port commerce for the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, speaking to media in late 2014. “Our system now has to adjust to not necessarily more cargo but more cargo coming all at once.”

European, Middle Eastern and Asian ports have invested large sums in the infrastructure required to handle the Oscar and similar vessels, spending hundreds of millions on automated transfer cranes, channel dredging and berth expansions. The ships are a key component of the high annual volumes at large ports from Colombo to Rotterdam.  

Can the ships get bigger? Maersk CEO Soren Skou thinks not. “If you get bigger ships, you will have to sail less frequently to fill them, and that won’t meet our customers’ needs,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Unless we start to see massive [economic] growth, it is going to be at least 10 years before bigger ships are seriously considered.”

Video of the Oscar berthing at Felixstowe, U.K. is available here.