Panama Canal Sets New Auction Record as Korean LPG Carrier Pays $5.3 Million
26 August 2026 For the second time in a month, a South Korean shipowner has broken the record for the highest transit fee ever paid at the Panama Canal. Bloomberg reports that SK Gas, the LPG trading arm of SK Group, has agreed to pay $5.3 million for a booking slot allowing its carrier G. Spirit to transit the canal’s locks on 1 September. Without the payment, the vessel would still make the crossing, but only after a wait of up to eleven days. The record is the latest marker in a trend we highlighted last week, when the Canal Authority’s decision to cut daily transits from 3 September – falling from 36 to 34, and to 32 from 15 September – set the stage for exactly this kind of premium. It follows hard on the heels of the $4.6 million paid earlier this month by SK Shipping to move a near-identical carrier, G. Arete, on the same long-standing rotation between the Houston Ship Channel and East Asian markets. Two forces are compounding here. The first is demand-side: the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz has curtailed Gulf energy shipments to Asia, pushing up LPG prices and squeezing South Korean traders, who are reportedly seeking to offset domestic losses through more profitable positioning elsewhere in the global market. The second is supply-side: an El Niño-driven drought has forced the Canal Authority to reduce both maximum vessel draught and, from this week, the number of daily transit slots available. The result is a market in which the auction premium for priority passage has become a genuine cost of doing business rather than an occasional anomaly. For trading and logistics operators, the lesson from two record-breaking bids inside a month is the same one this drought has been signalling since it began: canal capacity is no longer a given, and route planning now needs to price that risk in as a matter of course, not an exception.
Panama Canal Authority to Cut Daily Transits as El Niño Drought Bites
21 August 2026 From 3 September, the Panama Canal Authority will reduce daily vessel transits from 36 to 34, falling further to 32 from 15 September, as a severe El Niño-driven drought depletes the freshwater lakes that feed the canal’s locks. The move reverses a period of relative ease earlier this year and lands at a moment when traffic through the waterway has already been elevated, boosted by US Gulf energy exports rerouted through the canal following disruption to the Strait of Hormuz. The numbers underline why this matters well beyond Panama. The canal carries around five per cent of global maritime trade and some 40 per cent of US container traffic, with no viable substitute on the US East Coast to Asia corridor, only a costly detour of roughly 8,000 nautical miles around Cape Horn. Vessel operators are already paying a premium to avoid delay: one auction slot changed hands for close to 4 million US dollars in early August, a figure surpassed days later by a 4.6 million dollar bid. For trading and logistics businesses, this is now a familiar pattern rather than an isolated shock. The 2023 to 2024 drought cut canal traffic by roughly a third and rippled through global supply chains for months. This second major restriction inside three years suggests freshwater scarcity, not lock capacity, has become the canal’s binding constraint, a structural risk rather than a seasonal one. At Gapuma, where our business depends on the reliable movement of commodities and speciality chemicals across borders, developments like this reinforce the value of diversified sourcing, flexible logistics planning and close attention to the routes our supply chains depend upon.