Coal - the ingredient underlying port expansion plans in North China

摘要

Moving commodities from source to market over any distance frequently entails resort to multi-modal means of transport - rail and sea in particular - with the effectiveness of the transaction depending on the avoidance of bottlenecks. Bottlenecks are obstructions which crop up at one or more points in the transport chain, affecting either the links (stretches of railway or sea routes) or the nodes (break-bulk loading and discharging terminals), Ports, the intermediaries between land and sea carriage, are particularly prone to congestion, reducing traffic flows on the rest of the system. Authorities, in consequence, have attempted to guard against this tendency by building redundancy into the transport system through provision of excess port capacity. Capacity, however, is costly. Its amortisation forces ports to seek business for it, business which may turn to good use idle capacity but at the expense of traffic which would otherwise be routed through other ports. The more capacity there is available, the greater is the pressure to find uses for it, and this pressure can translate into keen competition between ports. As 'special ports' restricted to handling a single commodity, pure coal ports compete intensely with each other in such conditions of overcapacity and the competition can become ruinous during trade downturns.