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.
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.