Inside the ambitious plan to triple Suez Canal income after the 'Ever Given' incident

The container ship saga has highlighted the urgent need for Egyptian authority to revamp its operations and purchase more effective rescue equipment.

A six-day blockage of the Suez Canal by an enormous container ship in March has prompted the waterway's management to accelerate and update plans to expand and modernise the canal, maritime experts say.

Although the Suez Canal Authority announced a less comprehensive version of the expansion plans as far back as 2019, with some of the work taking place in 2020, the Ever Given incident speeded up the process and highlighted areas that needed more work, former ship captain Mohamed El Wakeel told The National.

Mr El Wakeel has over a decade of experience navigating the Suez Canal.

He is the vice dean of the College of Maritime Transport and Technology at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Transport, one of Egypt’s foremost educational institutions.

The focus of the old renovation plan was simply to increase revenue by increasing ship traffic through the waterway, said Mr El Wakeel.

But the Ever Given blockage highlighted the importance of vital changes to reduce the response time of rescue missions should any ships face difficulties.

"With the Suez Canal, time is literally money. Why the Ever Given incident was such a big deal was the sheer amount of revenue that the canal and international shipping companies lost during the blockage. And it was only blocked for six days," Mr El Wakeel said.

The canal’s five mooring stations are set to undergo renovations that will strengthen their structural integrity and better equip them to handle the weight of container ships, which are being built larger than ever before to accommodate more cargo, said SCA spokesman George Safwat.

Five more mooring stations will be built along the length of the 193km waterway, to allow authorities to respond faster to any vessels that malfunction on the canal.

Sixteen new piloting bases are also currently being built along the length of the canal. Each unit will be equipped with state-of-the-art technology that will provide pilots with more accurate readings on weather, ship speeds and currents within the canal.

The Suez Canal Authority expansion in numbers

"The Ever Given incident highlighted the authority's need to purchase and own its own state-of-the-art rescue equipment, from more powerful digging equipment to more effective tugboats," SCA chairman Admiral Osama Rabie said in July.

In May, the SCA unveiled a brand new dredger purchased from Belgium and named after Admiral Rabie’s predecessor Vice Admiral Mohab Mamish. On July 27, another new dredger, lauded as the most powerful in the Middle East, arrived at Port Said from Rotterdam.

The new dredger named "Hussein Tantawy", the largest in the Middle East, arrives in the Suez Canal, onboard the "Tai An Kou" vessel, coming from Rotterdam port in Netherlands, July 27, 2021.

In the event of a blockage, the SCA has historically hired rescue equipment from other countries, which increases the time it takes to deal with any problems, said Mr El Wakeel.

"If the SCA has its own high-tech equipment on hand, it will take a fraction of the current time to rescue any malfunctioning vessels," adds Mr El Wakeel.

Mooring stations for giant container vessels are also being built near the east and west banks of the Great Bitter Lake - a part of the canal near the city of Ismailia.

The Isthmus of Suez with the plan of the Canal of two Seas and of the diverted auxiliary canal of the Nile. From the pilot study of Misters Linant Bey and Mougel Bey, engineers of viceroy of Egypt, 1855. In 1809 topographical data on the Suez Canal was published by French academics in Description de l'Égypte. Contained one of the first maps of the Suez Canal, and formed the basis for an early French plan to construct a canal, later abandoned. Fieldwork was conducted during Napoleon's 1798 – 1801 military campaign in Egypt. Napoleon's surveyers incorrectly believed that the Red Sea was 9 metres higher than the Mediterranean sea, making construction impossible. Roger Viollet Collection / Getty Images

The inaugural ceremony of the Suez Canal in 1869. Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi pitched the Suez Canal Company on a large copper statue, modelled after the Colossus of Rhodes, of an 80 foot woman wearing Egyptian peasant robes and bearing a torch which would double as a lighthouse. The Suez Canal Company wasn't interested – but the French government and New York state were. Bartholdi's project became the Statue of Liberty. Getty Images

English statesman and novelist, Benjamin Disraeli, (1804 - 1881) created Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876. In 1876, Ismail Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, declared bankruptcy, and put his controlling stake in the Suez Canal Company up for sale. Disareli, the British prime minister, bought the Khedive's stake. The canal became a major trade route and strategic waterway for Britain, and helped to facilitate the British Empire's conquest and rule over its colonies in India and East Asia. Jabez Hughes / Getty Images

A picture dated 1869 shows machinery during the construction of the Suez Canal in Egypt. AFP

An aerial view of the Suez Canal zone near Ismailia, Egypt taken in May 1953. Jim Pringle / AP Photo

The Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announcing the nationalisation of the Suez Canal to a crowd of 250,000 people during a celebration of the fourth anniversary of the July 26, 1956 revolution. He also announced that the property of the Universal Suez Canal Company would be sequestrated. Britain, France and Israel launched a combined assault on the Suez Canal and Sinai in a bid to return the waterway to Western control and force Nasser to resign. The invasion was successful, but US pressure leads the three countries to withdraw. Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

An aerial view of the southern entrance of Egypt's Suez Canal taken in 2007. Jack Guez / AFP

In August 2014, the Government of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi ordered the beginning of construction of the New Suez Canal – which adds a parallel route to part of the canal's length, and widens and deepens some of the existing canal. The $8 billion project, funded by bonds issued to Egyptian citizens, was to be completed in a year, and would see traffic through the canal increase to 97 ships per day by 2023 – up from 49 ships per day currently. Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters

The first container ship to use the New Suez Canal. The opening of the New Suez Canal, after exactly 12 months of construction work "was an epic," said Admiral Mohab Mamish, chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, in reports. "It was a very hard job. We invited experts of dredging and we had no time to waste and we feel that we have succeeded.” Courtesy NMDC

A dredger at work on the New Suez Canal. Courtesy NMDC

A dredger at work on the New Suez Canal. Courtesy NMDC

Work on the New Suez Canal continues. Courtesy NMDC

Yasser Zaghloul, CEO of NMDC. The company worked alongside Belgium’s Jan De Nul and Dutch companies Boskalis and Van Oord on the dredging works. Courtesy NMDC

Bulldozers and trucks work on a new section of the New Suez Canal in Ismailia, Egypt. Hassan Ammar / AP Photo

A dredger works on a section of the New Suez Canal during a media tour in Ismailia, Egypt. Hassan Ammar / AP Photo

The lake is where the 400-metre Ever Given was detained for three months before the SCA and the ship's owners resolved a claim for damages caused by the canal’s blockage.

While the greater part of the canal’s length consists of a single traffic lane, which ships have to take turns navigating, two bypasses exist along the canal that allow ships to move in both directions simultaneously.

One bypass is located in the north running to the east of the Mediterranean city of Port Said.

The other was created by President Abdel Fattah El Sisi during his first term in office. Completed in 2015, the dredging of the second bypass was one of Egypt's largest national projects in the last decade.

The SCA intends to create another 10km bypass in the southern stretch of the canal by 2023, said Mr Safwat.

That will turn 25 per cent of the canal’s single-lane portions into a double lane area to allow more ships to pass through at any one time.

The Ever Given ran aground in the southern stretch of the waterway, the longest single-lane portion, highlighting the need for more two-lane portions on the canal.

The fourth bypass, when completed, will allow three ships to pass in either direction at the same time, according to a promotional video released by the SCA in July. More ships passing through the canal will in turn increase the SCA's revenue, said Mr El Wakeel.

The planned expansion is expected to almost triple the SCA's annual revenue from $5.84 billion this year to $13.2 billion in 2023. Double the number of ships are also expected to navigate the canal by then, said Mr Safwat.

"Above all else, the Ever Given incident proved that as long as there is one lane for ship traffic, no amount of high-tech rescue equipment is going to stop one ship from halting traffic through the whole canal and causing millions in losses.

"I think the most important part of any future expansion will be to dredge as many double lane sections as possible," said Mr El Wakeel.

The expansions are expected to cost approximately $10 billion.