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Breakbulk

Breakbulk and project cargo

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Breakbulk is general cargo that is carried loose and counted in pieces. Examples are steel, goods in bags, timber, machinery and railway vehicles. Project cargo is the harder kind. In project cargo, one or more pieces cannot be split up, and they are so large that the piece decides which ship can carry it, not the total amount. Deadweight is the total weight a ship can carry. If a dry bulk broker answers a project enquiry with a deadweight, the broker has answered the wrong question.

Deadweight is almost irrelevant

A bulk cargo is limited by one of three ceilings: weight, draft (how deep the ship sits in the water) or volume. A project cargo is usually limited by none of them. The real questions are these: can the piece physically get on board, and can the ship carry it safely?

The questionThe particular that answers it
Can the ship lift the heaviest piece?The crane's safe working load (SWL), and the combined figure when two cranes lift together
Can the ship put it down where it has to go?How far the crane reaches, and the distance at which that SWL still applies. A crane can lift less as the hook moves further out
Will it fit through the opening?The size of the hatch, measured inside the coamings (the raised edges) and any other obstruction
Will it fit in the space?The size of the hold. For anything tall, the clear height under the deck or the tween deck (a second deck inside the hold)
Will the ship take the point load?The strength of the tank top (the floor of the hold) and the deck, in tonnes per square metre. A heavy, compact piece breaks this limit first
Can it go on deck?The strength of the hatch covers, and whether the ship still has enough stability and a clear view from the bridge with the cargo there

This list explains how the market works. Multipurpose and heavy lift ships are described by their cranes and the size of their holds, and there are few of them. Each one is different, so you cannot swap one for another the way you can swap Supramaxes. Replacing one ship with another of the same deadweight is normal on a bulk fixture, but here it can be impossible.

101,900

Ships in the Neptune Atlas register. Every one has an IMO number, and 75,596 of them have a deadweight. Not one of them has a crane capacity, a hatch size or a tank top strength, because no general ship register records these. A heavy lift enquiry is answered from the ship's own capacity plan and crane certificate, which means the owner answers it. The register can shorten the list of possible ships, but it cannot give the final answer.

Point loads, spreading and the tank top

Deck strength is given as a load spread over an area, in tonnes per square metre. A transformer, a press or a generator set rests its weight on a few small feet. So the pressure under each foot is very high, even when the total weight is small compared with the ship's deadweight.

The answer is to spread the load. Timber beds, steel spreader frames, or sometimes a cradle made for the piece carry the weight into the ship's frames and girders (its strong internal beams). They keep it off the middle of a plate that has no support beneath it. Designing this is engineering work. It needs drawings and time, and it must be done before the ship arrives. If a project fixture is agreed two weeks before loading with no stowage drawing, it includes a cost that nobody has planned for.

Freight is quoted differently

Bulk freight is a rate per tonne. Breakbulk is usually quoted per freight tonne, also called a revenue tonne. That means the charge is by weight or by volume, whichever gives the higher figure, with one cubic metre counted against one tonne. So light, bulky cargo pays for the space it takes up. This is fair in economic terms, but it often surprises customers.

Project work adds one more layer: lump sum freight, which is one fixed price for the whole parcel. Sometimes the price also includes the lifting, the securing materials and the engineering. A lump sum ends any argument about quantity. But it moves all the risk to whoever accepted it: the risk that the cargo is bigger, heavier or later than described. Accepting that is a real decision, not a formality.

The recap (the written summary of the deal) must state clearly who does the work at each end. Liner terms (the owner pays for loading and unloading), free in and out (the charterer pays), and the versions that add stowed, trimmed or lashed each move the cost of handling the cargo between owner and charterer. On a project cargo, that cost is a large part of the freight, not a small extra.

The marine warranty surveyor

When a cargo is valuable or complex enough, the cargo insurer will only cover the move if an independent surveyor has approved the plan. This person is the marine warranty surveyor. The surveyor checks the loadout (moving the cargo onto the ship), the seafastening design (how it is fixed to the ship), the planned voyage and the weather limits. The surveyor then issues a certificate of approval. The operation cannot go ahead without it.

The technical standard most often used for this work is DNV-ST-N001. It covers marine operations and marine warranty: loadout, transport, lifting, and the load cases the design must deal with. It grew out of the older Noble Denton guidelines.

For a broker, the point is time and cost. Approval takes weeks, not days, and the surveyor can send the engineering back for changes. Laycan is the window of dates in which the ship must arrive to load. If a fixture's laycan assumes the surveyor will approve the first plan, the fixture depends on something nobody has checked.

Securing is part of the transport, not an afterthought

Non-standard cargo has no approved lashing pattern ready to use, so the securing must be calculated for each piece and each voyage. The method is in Annex 13 of the IMO Code of Safe Practice for Cargo Stowage and Securing. It compares the forces from the ship's movement with the friction and the strength of the lashings, using a maximum securing load with a safety factor, and it checks sliding sideways, tipping over and sliding forward or back separately.

One result surprises many people: a stiff ship is worse for the cargo than a tender one (a ship that returns to upright slowly). A stiff ship has a large metacentric height (a measure of how strongly it returns to upright). It rolls quickly and violently. Lashings break because of this sudden acceleration, not because of the angle of the roll. So loading a project ship for maximum stability can be exactly the wrong thing to do. The details are in cargo securing and lashing.

Where the enquiry actually starts

A useful project enquiry includes a piece list. For each piece it gives the weight, the three dimensions, the centre of gravity when it is not obvious, and how the piece is lifted. Then it gives the load port, the discharge port, and what happens at each end. The quay may not be strong enough for the load, and there may be no shore crane.

An enquiry that only gives a tonnage and a route is not yet a project enquiry. The first useful thing a broker does is ask for the piece list. The second is to check the heaviest piece against the ship's cranes before sending anything out. Neptune Atlas has a page on this trade at heavy lift and project cargo.

References

Cargo securing and lashingWhy the ship with the best stability figures is often the worst place to put a heavy piece of cargo. Stowage factor and broken stowageTwo numbers that both turn space into tonnes. Only one of them is printed in the cargo book. Matching a cargo to a shipOne cargo, five open ships and one real candidate. Which checks are simple arithmetic, which are judgement, and why the shortlist is short. Reading a ship's particularsWhat each figure on a vessel description limits, why GRT measures volume, and why draught rules a ship out long before deadweight does.

Neptune Atlas

Neptune Atlas keeps a multipurpose enquiry in the form it arrived in, with its pieces and their sizes. It does not reduce the enquiry to a tonnage figure, because that would lose the one number that decides the fixture. Every paid plan starts with 7 free days. A card is needed to start them, and cancelling before they end costs nothing.

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