I avoided the saga of Boatplug McWedgie in the Suez. Now that the ship is free, David Fickling posts a thread about future shipping. I don't know squat about this topic myself so I'll mostly just summarise him.
Although Suez might be done heaving this stuff through its colon (at present size), ships are only going to get bigger in future. Bigger boats carry more cargo at once. Which means Suez will have to get bigger. But other straits like Singapore really can't get bigger - they're natural, so the very tides are conspiring to keep them the way they are. So the bigger boats out in Asia are going to have to accept longer trip-times through such natural straits as are deeper and wider.
Some tie-in engineering projects being noted are that Indonesia wants to move its capital over to eastern Borneo; and that Australia and New Guinea are up for restoring the Sundaland via bridge. A mighty bridge at 500 meters over the seafloor would keep the ferries out of the way, so the shipping can continue. Although I am unfamiliar with the typhoon situation down under.
Nuclear power is being mooted to run these monsters, as well. Of course private corporations can't have them, only sovereign ones - that is, governments. Fickling floats the public / private mix of international trade common to the Age of Sail. I'd have brought up the pochteca. I will say that if an international port doesn't want the RFS Chernobyl docking nearby, she can float out in a calm spot of sea and let lower-capacity chemical shuttles take the freight. Any fine spot for this sort of thing would be some submerged old Pleistocene lemuria - like the Dogger Bank, or the Zealandia. Should be shallow enough to drop anchor(s) whilst still deep enough not to get SHOALED.
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