World’s biggest container ship, the Ever Ace, is hitting the high seas – Insider

The Ever Ace, the world's largest container ship, docked at the UK port of Felixstowe in Suffolk on Sunday morning.

The giant vessel is part of a newer class of container ship than the Ever Given, which memorably blocked the Suez Canal for six days in March. The Ever Ace is an Evergreen A-class, which can hold up to 23,992 cargo units. This is up from the 20,124 cargo units that the Ever Given, which is an Evergreen G-class ship, can carry.

Eleven other mega container ships are being built in the make of the Ever Ace, three of which could become operational this year. The Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen Marine, which owns the Ever Ace, did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

According to American Bureau of Shipping records, the two ships are the same length, but the Ever Ace is wider and deeper. The Ever Given is 192.9 feet wide, slightly narrower than the Ever Ace's 201.7 feet. The Ever Given has a draught, or depth, of 52.4 feet in comparison with the Ever Ace's 54.1 feet.

The Ever Ace is now taking a two-day break at the Suffolk port and is set to depart for Rotterdam on Wednesday, per the BBC. It then is set to traverse the Suez Canal, which accounts for about 12% of the world's seaborne cargo trade.

This is the same route the Ever Given took when it got stuck, throwing the global supply chain into chaos that lasted weeks even after the ship was freed. A logjam of more than 400 ships formed, even after some vessels opted to abandon the Suez Canal and reroute, taking a massive detour around the southern tip of Africa.

It took almost a week of dredging and digging to get the massive Ever Given unstuck from the Suez, a costly endeavor that prompted the Egyptian authorities to seize the Ever Given on April 13 and hold it for months.

The Ever Given finally ported at Rotterdam on July 29 with more than 20,000 containers on board, a full 106 days after it first got lodged in the waterway and after the ship's owner, the Japanese company Shoei Kisen Kaisha, arrived at an undisclosed compensation agreement with the Suez Canal Authority.

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World's biggest container ship, the Ever Ace, is hitting the high seas - Insider