Ilya Espino de Marotta is known for wearing her trademark pink construction helmet and pink safety vest. She is in charge of preparing the designs and specifications for all Panama Canal Projects.
Ilya led the execution of the Panama Canal Expansion Program and the opening of the new waterway in 2017. She took the job to inspire a new generation of female engineers.
The expansion is expected to double the isthmus’s capacity for carrying cargo between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and to have a significant impact on global markets, by increasing the capacity for larger oil cargo ships to pass through the locks, lowering overall maritime transport costs.
The canal will accommodate ships the size of three football fields, which will carry double the capacity of current cargo vessels.
Ilya earned a bachelor’s degree in marine engineering from Texas A&M University in 1985. She went on to earn a master’s in economic engineering from the Universidad Santa María La Antigua (The Old Saint Mary University in Panama City, Republic of Panama) in 1996. She also studied management at the Instituto Centroamericano de Administración de Empresas (INCAE).
A qualified public speaker, she gives keynote addresses to experts from around the world about the engineering challenges of the canal and its future impact on global trade.
With a blazing crescendo of multi-colored fireworks, the Chinese-owned container ship Cosco Shipping Panama slowly nosed through the long-heralded “Third Set of Locks” on the Pacific side of the expanded Panama Canal.
Cosco Shipping Panama’s 984-foot length, far too big for the century-old canal’s original lock system, makes it the first “Neo-Panamax” vessel to transit the canal, opening a new era in world commerce.
The big cargo ships from Asia that before now only could dock in Long Beach, CA, now can begin heading to the U.S. East and Gulf Coast ports, not only to deliver Pacific Rim cargoes but, in increasingly large quantities, to move American-produced energy supplies out to world markets.
It’s a big thing because as U.S. Ambassador John Feely said in a press briefing, most of the canal’s ship traffic, coming from and going to ports all over the world, either ends up in a U.S. port or leaves from one.
Materials supplied by the Canal Authority, an independent government agency authorized by an amendment (Title XIV) to the Panamanian Constitution, back him up: Cargo from 1,700 ports in 160 countries reaches the canal from over 144 ocean routes, and Ambassador Feely said that two out of every three ships transiting the canal either head to a U.S. port or have just left from one.
But after 102 years of service, the old lock system—even after improvements that replaced mechanical gate actuators with hydraulics, renovated and upgraded the railway over which the famous GE “donkey engines” moved to haul ships through the locks, and replaced the donkey engines themselves with more sophisticated models—simply could not suffice for the vastly bigger vessels being built to move cargo in the 21st century.
To be truthful, however, the roots of this Canal Expansion Project go much further back in history.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built the canal at the turn of the 20th century, actually began developing ways to enlarge the canal just before World War II. With clouds gathering for the coming global storm, top U.S. commanders wanted a way to move their biggest combatants—aircraft carriers and battleships—rapidly between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Accordingly, contractors began digging huge trenches for the third set of locks in 1939. Those trenches, their construction halted when Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, were orphaned after the war because, in addition to establishing naval fleets in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, the U.S. military now had bases all over the world. There was no need to hustle large fleet assemblages between the U.S. East and West Coast naval stations.
Alfred Thayer Mahan, the naval strategist whose policy arguments for a “Contiguous Sea Frontier” convinced a skeptical Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt to undertake the massive Panama Canal project in the first place, would have been pleased.
But the military was not the only user of the canal once it was built. As history has shown, captains of commerce and industry all over the world quickly realized that with a canal waterway cutting 50 miles across the narrow Isthmus dividing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, 5,600 miles of dangerous passage around the tip of South America could be bypassed, saving time and money for the shippers of goods and movers of people between ports all over the world.
Throughout the 20th century, the Panama Canal became a mainstay in logistical planning in the U.S. and all over the world, as it still is today.
U.S. Ambassador John Feely, speaking at a business briefing held at Hotel Riu in downtown Panama City just before Cosco Shipping Panama steamed westward from the Caribbean to the Cocoli Locks, made his astonishing statement that two out of every three ships that transit the Panama Canal are either headed to U.S. ports—from all 1,700 or so ports in some 160 countries—or headed out from U.S. ports.
As stated above, today the Panama Canal’s aging locks are too small for the large container ships and bulk liquids carriers that bring today’s shippers economies of scale, cutting fuel costs, personnel costs, and the time it takes to get goods to market.
By 1995 studies by the Army Corps of Engineers and Panama’s own Blue Ribbon Engineering Commission had established that far too many of today’s larger vessels, especially those carrying manufactured goods from Asia, were able to dock only at Long Beach, CA, to offload cargoes for rail shipment to eastern states.
Now, as Canal Authority chief Jorge Luis Quijano says, with the deepening of the canal to 60 feet in the new shipping channels to the Culebra Cut through a mountain range in the Isthmus’ middle, an earlier widening of the Cut itself for two-way traffic, and the installation of Cocoli Locks and their Aqua Clara siblings at the canal’s eastern end, some 95 to 98 percent of the world’s biggest cargo carriers will be able to scoot through the expanded canal to head for the East Coast ports of their shippers’ choice.
Not all of those Eastern port areas are completely ready yet of course.
According to Canal Authority personnel, the U.S. shale energy revolution is promoting U.S.-originated canal traffic that they never expected.
Interviewed at Authority headquarters, José Ramón Arango S., Senior Specialist, Liquid Bulk Segment, pointed out that “the Panama Canal has always been heavily involved in energy shipments.” But today, he said, the rush of new reservations for ship transits through the expanded canal is almost all from the U.S.
And potential new U.S. energy ports abound:
Proof of Arango’s point was not long in coming. Cosco Shipping Panama, a massive container carrier, had to win an Authority lottery to become the first vessel to sail through the expanded canal’s “Third Set of Locks” on June 26. But as if to underscore Arango’s comments, the second ship through on June 27 was a Japanese-owned tanker, the Lycaste Peace, carrying a load of liquefied petroleum gas on its way from Houston, TX, to Hitachi, Japan. The LPG tanker Passat, owned by Avance Gas, followed in short order.
And if further proof was needed, in the month following the expansion project’s opening, 22 of the 53 vessels transiting the canal’s new locks and deepened channels have been tankers carrying U.S.-sourced energy resources out to the Pacific Rim.
At a Canal Authority press briefing, top administrator Jorge Luis Quijano acknowledged that when the plans were laid out for the expansion project, petroleum shipments from the U.S. were not in the cards. But the shale drilling revolution changed things.
Now, with the ending of the U.S. ban on oil exports, Panama also expects to be seeing crude oil shipments, with Very Large Crude Carriers moving American “light,” low-sulfur crude to ports all across the Pacific Seaboard.
Liquid Bulk Specialist Arango S. interviewed earlier, said that even could include fully loaded Suezmax tankers. High-sulfur “heavy” crudes, such as those produced in Venezuelan wells, would so weigh the tankers down that they could only be loaded half full, Arango said, but “condensate,” light crude, such as that produced by Texas’ Eagle Ford and the Utica Shale in Pennsylvania and Ohio, or the light crude coming from the Permian Basin in West Texas and eastern New Mexico, could more easily be moved through the canal.
In today’s energy markets, where low commodity prices have crushed many a best-laid business plan and sent many energy producers (and some shippers!) to the bankruptcy courts, critics have questioned whether the Canal Authority made the wrong bet at the wrong time, looking to make money at a time when many of its potential customers are drowning in red ink.
Canal Authority Executive Vice President Ilya R. Espinosa de Marotta, an engineer involved in planning improvements for the canal for most of her 20 years at the Authority, dismissed that along with a litany of engineering issues raised in a recent New York Times report questioning the quality of the concrete used to build the locks, and complaints by the Panamanian Society of Civil Engineers, the Canal pilots’ union and the tugboat captains themselves about the decision to use tugs to move ships through the locks instead of the old system’s electric engines as just “old news.”
For as Authority Administrator Quijano said at the press briefing, it often is said that generals prepare for war with the army they’d like to have but fight their battles with the army they actually do have. Panama, he said, had long been working to build the logistics connection everyone would like to have, sure that the market would catch up to Panama’s forward-thinking audacity.
Thus, in Administrator Quijana’s view, Panama will see the tripling of canal transits it planned for. Using the old locks, big cargo and passenger ships were paying $200,000 to $300,000 a transit. Now, he said, a new, higher “toll structure” will enable Panama, in 20 years, to pay off the loans it took to build this $5.3-billion expansion project.
That’s despite a whopping $3-billion-plus claim for additional fees filed by the Spanish-led contractor team that built the new lock system. The Authority negotiated a moratorium on its collection, but that bill still is out there.
Still, Quijana was upbeat: “We’ve been through these commodity price cycles before,” he said. “We know how it comes out.” In Panama’s view, the future is bright.
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