I’m doing some research into questions surrounding the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906, and thought I’d experiment by throwing this out there.
For context, the 31 biggest dredging vessels were not built in America, and thus cannot be used in America by law. We only have a small number of less capable vessels, and they often get redirected to short-term emergency tasks. This is preventing us from doing a bunch of very valuable things, like repairing or expanding ports, which end up taking much more time and money or not happening at all.
This podcast is recommended. You can find a transcript here. They claim that there’s no way America will be able to have such capacity for at least decades. I want to verify that (and also check if any other claims here don’t ring true)?
As an alternative to repealing the Dredge Act (which I’m exploring and planning to write about) another alternate would be to build world-class dredging vehicles here in America, such that they could be used. Before assuming that this is impossible, and to have a straight answer, what would happen if someone with deep pockets tried to commission a world-class dredging ship that would qualify? Could be done? Are there other impossible barriers to solve? How much would it cost and how much more would that be than building it elsewhere? How long would it take?
The largest dredgers in the world were built by a Spanish company, Construcciones Navales del Norte (CNdN), but the company has apparently been dissolved as of a few years ago. This source claims they had sub-250 employees. Their shipyard was purchased last year by an industrial real estate firm.
So here’s an idea. The US-based Manson Construction Co., is currently building a 15,000 cubic yard dredger which will be the biggest in the USA. It’s about 25% the size of the biggest dredgers. They hire some of the former employees from CNdN, so that they can get green cards. This gives MCC the expertise to build even bigger dredgers. It’s an employee-owned company, so it can’t be purchased outright and made to do this, but perhaps they can be convinced by the prospect of a big dredger commission?
Another large dredger, the Vasco da Gama, has about 80% of the capacity of the record-setting Leif Eiriksson and cost around $120 million. So if we use that as a ballpark, perhaps we can get a world-class dredger built in America for around $200 million?
It’s a good data point—we can pin the Vasco de Gama at $120mm. The question is how we get from there to $200mm for a similar USA-made product, and how long that would take—presumably a lot longer than it took to build the Gama since you’d have to bring the talent together and also build the construction capacity. Can we narrow this down more?
I do like the idea of hiring the former employees of CNdN if they’re available, and there’d presumably be enough support to get them visas.
Also, there’s this obscure podcast episode (“How We Can Fix American Shipyards”) that seems thematically relevant. No transcript available unfortunately. Here’s my paraphrase of Captain John Konrad’s list of problems and solutions. Perhaps it’s worth reaching out to him?
Segmentation in the industry. All the different ship-building types, regulators, and financial players are geographically separated and professionally overspecialized. He thinks the industry needs more resources for cross-pollination, including things like his own podcast. He encourages his American colleagues to go to more different conferences, more going to international conferences, more travel. He’s startled to hear that the director of a major US shipyard has never even been to Korea, the biggest, where the most productive shipyards are located. He recommends the book “Let There Be A Shipyard.” This book appears to be out of print. Maybe the rights to it could be purchased and it could be released as a free ebook?
Wrong assumptions. People think Korean labor is cheaper, that they work longer, that US unions are to blame, or that steel’s cheaper in Korea. The podcaster denies that Koreans are paid more or work longer, and that Korean unions are stronger than American unions. He thinks US management is worse at dealing with unions in the USA. He says steel’s only cheaper in Korea because they buy more, which is because they build more ships.
Quality issues. He says Korea does build some badly-built ships, but that they also build great ships. It just depends on what the buyer demands. Same as in the USA.
Management styles. He says the USA could still go a long ways in terms of adopting good management practices. He suggests that US shipyards should hire management experts from the US marines, who he thinks have excellent management practices.
Space. He says that both Korea and the USA have challenges with waterfront real estate, but that Korea does a better job managing it.
Export incentives. Korea subsidizes Korean shipyard exports. He thinks that the USA is going to produce for domestic use, not export, so this doesn’t matter.
Design and equipment advantages. He says that Korea’s rumored to have secret designs that make their process and equipment better. He says anything they have they will sell. Maybe this is something to look into as well. Maybe American shipyards are underinvesting in capital?
Skill. He points out that we make some incredible ships (nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers). No reason we can’t build other types.
Zero tolerance for wasting time and delays. He thinks that Korean shipyards are much more focused work environments, and that American shipyards have a lot more goofing around. Korean shipyards are willing to fire employees, contractors, and clients who repeatedly waste time. Korean shipyards charge high prices to make changes once they’ve started building, or they’ll give your ship to another client and make you wait in the back of the line to have your ship built (Korean shipyards own the ship until it’s finished and then sold to the client). He thinks this is really important: US shipyards should be much less accommodating for changes once ship construction has begun. He thinks this is a feedback loop, in which delays cause people to come to work with nothing to do, which normalizes a culture of idleness.
Bad incentives. Everybody from the workers to the CEOs get paid whether or not the ship gets built.
Interesting podcast, I reached out to him since there’s no downside to trying. Your summary seems accurate.
The biggest dredger, the Leif Eiriksson, had 28% greater capacity than the VdG, so we might try pinning a Leif-beating dredger at at least $154 million.
This paper has a table comparing US domestic vs. foreign ship construction costs:
The Leif Eiriksson was 46373 GT. So at foreign shipyard costs, it could have cost anywhere from $23 million ($500/GT) to $231 million ($5000/GT). It looks like in the USA, we’d need to increase that to perhaps closer to $280 million at the high end.
Given that US costs appear to be about 1.5-2.5x that of foreign shipyards, that would give an alternative estimate of about $231-$385 million for a US-built Leif Eiriksson.
This paper on shipbuilding costs makes labor seem to be a relatively negligible portion of the total cost of building a ship, though I state that with very low confidence.
I think you’d need to convince the investor that this large dredging ship would ultimately find demand. Building it would not be competitively priced on the world scale, so the business logic is to satisfy unmet US demand. Making that business case seems important for justifying such a project. I have to imagine there are hurdles in terms of willingness to invest in infrastructure and regulatory barriers.
The US ship building industry is around $30 billion, while the worldwide industry is about $150 billion, so we’re about 20% of the global industry. By contrast, we’re about 40% of the global automotive industry (US vs world). This suggests to me that the USA is somehow at a structural disadvantage when it comes to shipbuilding? If the idea is that we build up capacity to build lots of big dredgers long-term both for domestic and international use, I think that’s a concern.
My model of ships vs. cars is that we have a very high-value domestic car market and shipping cars is expensive, so it makes sense to build those here, whereas there is no good reason (other than regulations) to build ships here rather than Europe or Asia, which made it easy for us to become uncompetitive there.
The story which is being told about the related Jones Act consistently suggests that American commercial shipbuilding missed a critical industry shift in the 70s, of which I have yet to track down any concrete details. My best guess based on the other problems mentioned at the same time—by which I literally mean shortest word distance between a problem with operation costs and this allusion—is industrial automation, both in the manufacture and operation of the ships.
I think this is plausible because the automotive industry was having the same fight, with the Big Three passing on automated manufacturing until the 1980s due to a combination of short-sighted corporate leadership and union opposition. Since the shipping industry was not under increasing pressure from things like Japanese imports due to the laws, it would at least be consistent for them to have made the transition later, and fail to keep abreast of the newest developments.
Does Manson Construction Co actually have access to a shipyard that’s big enough to build a dredger that’s 4x bigger than what they want to build?
From the podcast it sounded like shipyards that are big enough might be the constraint.
Yeah that’s one of my main concerns as well as far as just building a single dredger.
There’s a drydock in Portland, OR long enough to accommodate up to a 366m ship, and the Leif Eiriksson is 213m. I don’t know about Manson Construction Co, but it seems like if the shipyard size is the constraint, there are places in the USA that can accommodate.
One interesting aspect of this is that it’s currently hard to understand what the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906 actually says. At the time of this writing, Wikipedia has no page for it.
When it comes to byzantine regulations like this, simply having better documentation might be useful for moving the regulation in a more sensible way.
I just created a short Wikipedia article for it.
I believe it is codified at 46 USC 55109, which can be found here:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/46/55109#tab_default_2
Here it is in the US Code on the US House’s website.
What does “Unless documented as a vessel of the United States” mean?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/9
Sounds like it just means if we’re having problems with dredges it might not really be an issue of building them. I think maybe the question is what is preventing a business, person or government agency from buying such ships? I might get with governmental actors approvals might be highly biased towards US built. Then given the problem with size (and likely willingness to pay economically viable prices—we do a REALLY BAD job with this type of maintenance activity due to wanting to spend the money on more visible or “profitable” activities with more immediate returns) having local ship builders to make the required ships is under provided.
AFAIK this is basically a nothingburger, but a bill to repeal the Foreign Dredge Act was introduced in December by Sen. Lee of Utah.
Be aware that the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) will need to classify the vessel, and if they have not done so for a dredge of the size described for some time then it can be expected that this will add to a time estimate for completion.
The physics is not hard and the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) manuals are good enough that they are used in various countries to educate young engineer’s on coastal soil dynamics (Hi!), so if discussions of green cards are on the table then the right people within the US are being overlooked.
ABS certified steel is manufactured in America (of course but worth noting).
Manufacturing huge ships is a labour intensive operation and the bottleneck I suspect will be cost of Labor. Keppel Fels or Jurong can build comparable vessels for the likes of Valaris (the DPS-1 ne Atwood Condor is a Singapore build which is in my neighbourhood now) for peanuts because they employ thousands on thousands of serfs. Constructing a similar sized vessel with mechanical systems integrated in America would require a bypassing labour by investing hugely in automated fabrication plant and methods, on a large plot of land near a large port.
I expect Elon Musk could do it. Make the dredging company a subsidiary of the boring company and buy a plot of industrial portside land and build a marine giga-factory. Maybe Bezos will feel competitive enough to do it first.
A dollar-value answer doesn’t quite address the question of whether the correct way to answer “we can do it” is by spending a fortune on American labour (seems like a good thing, pays mortgages) or a fortune on new and likely novel large scale autated fabrication processes (also seems like a good thing, pays different people’s mortgages and possibly adds to current state of human knowledge and industry).