Neptune Atlas

Breakbulk

Breakbulk and project cargo

·

Breakbulk is general cargo carried loose and counted in pieces: steel, bagged goods, timber, machinery, rolling stock. Project cargo is the harder relative, where one or more pieces are indivisible and large enough that the piece, not the parcel, selects the ship. A dry bulk broker who answers a project enquiry with a deadweight has answered the wrong question.

Deadweight is almost irrelevant

On a bulk cargo the constraint is one of three ceilings: weight, draft or volume. On a project cargo the binding constraint is usually none of them. It is whether the piece can physically get aboard and whether the ship can stand it.

The questionThe particular that answers it
Can the ship lift the heaviest piece?Crane safe working load, and the combined figure when two cranes work in tandem
Can she land it where it has to go?Crane outreach and the radius at which that SWL still applies. A crane’s capacity falls as the hook moves out
Will it fit through the opening?Hatch dimensions, clear of coamings and any obstruction
Will it fit in the space?Hold dimensions and, for anything tall, the clear height under the deck or the tween deck
Will the ship take the point load?Tank top and deck strength in tonnes per square metre, which is where a heavy compact piece fails first
Can it go on deck?Hatch cover strength, and whether the stowage leaves the ship with acceptable stability and visibility from the bridge

Read that list and the shape of the market follows. Multipurpose and heavy lift tonnage is specified by its gear and its box dimensions, and the fleet is small, individual and not interchangeable in the way Supramaxes are. Substituting one ship for another of the same deadweight is a normal move on a bulk fixture and can be impossible here.

101,850

Hulls in the Neptune Atlas register, every one with an IMO number, and 75,596 of them carrying a deadweight. Not one of them carries a crane capacity, a hatch dimension or a tank top strength, because no general vessel register does. A heavy lift enquiry is answered from the ship’s own capacity plan and gear certificate, which means it is answered by the owner. The register narrows the field; it cannot close it.

Point loads, spreading and the tank top

Deck strength is quoted as a distributed load, tonnes per square metre. A transformer, a press or a generator set delivers its weight through a handful of small feet, so the local pressure is enormous even when the total weight is modest against the ship’s deadweight.

The answer is load spreading: timber beds, steel spreader frames, sometimes a purpose-built cradle, arranged to carry the load into the ship’s frames and girders rather than into the middle of an unsupported plate panel. Designing that is engineering, it takes drawings and time, and it has to happen before the ship arrives. A project fixture that is agreed a fortnight before loading with no stowage drawing behind it is a fixture with an unfunded liability in it.

Freight is quoted differently

Bulk freight is a rate per tonne. Breakbulk is customarily quoted per freight tonne, also called a revenue tonne, meaning weight or measurement, whichever produces more, with a cubic metre standing against a tonne. Light bulky cargo therefore pays for the space it wastes, which is the correct answer economically and the source of a lot of surprise commercially.

Project work adds a further layer: lump sum freight for the whole parcel, sometimes with the lifting, the securing materials and the engineering priced inside it. Lump sum removes the quantity argument and moves the whole risk of the cargo turning out bigger, heavier or later than described onto whoever accepted it. That is a decision, not a formality.

The term to have straight in the recap is who does the work at each end. Liner terms, free in and out, and the variants that add stowed, trimmed or lashed each move the cost of the cargo handling between owner and charterer, and on a project cargo that cost is a large fraction of the freight rather than a rounding.

The marine warranty surveyor

Above a certain value or complexity, the cargo insurer will not cover the movement unless an independent surveyor has approved the plan. The marine warranty surveyor reviews the loadout, the seafastening design, the intended voyage and the weather criteria, and issues a certificate of approval before the operation may proceed.

The technical standard most often referenced for this work is DNV-ST-N001, which covers marine operations and marine warranty: loadout, transport, lifting and the load cases that have to be addressed in the design. Its lineage runs back to the Noble Denton guidelines.

For a broker the point is scheduling and cost. Approval takes weeks, not days, and it can send the engineering back for revision. A fixture whose laycan assumes the surveyor will approve on first submission has a hidden dependency in it.

Securing is part of the transport, not an afterthought

Non-standardised cargo does not have a pre-approved lashing pattern, so the securing has to be calculated for the piece and the voyage. The method is in Annex 13 of the IMO Code of Safe Practice for Cargo Stowage and Securing, which balances the forces from the ship’s motion against friction and the strength of the securing arrangements, using a maximum securing load with a safety factor, and checks transverse sliding, tipping and longitudinal sliding separately.

The counter-intuitive result that catches people out is that a stiff ship is worse for the cargo than a tender one. A large metacentric height produces a short, violent roll, and it is acceleration rather than angle that breaks lashings. Loading a project ship to maximise stability can be exactly the wrong thing to do. The detail is in cargo securing and lashing.

Where the enquiry actually starts

A usable project enquiry carries a piece list: for each piece, the weight, the three dimensions, the centre of gravity where it is not obvious, and the lifting arrangement. Then the load port, the discharge port, and what happens at each end, because the quay may not take the load and the shore crane may not exist.

An enquiry that arrives as a tonnage and a route is not a project enquiry yet. The first useful thing a broker does is ask for the list, and the second is to check the heaviest piece against the gear before circulating anything. Neptune Atlas keeps 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. Stowage factor and broken stowageTwo numbers that both turn space into tonnes, and 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 constraints are arithmetic, which are somebody's opinion, and why the shortlist is short. Reading a ship's particularsWhat each figure on a vessel description constrains, why GRT is a volume, and why draught excludes a ship long before deadweight does.

Neptune Atlas

Neptune Atlas keeps a multipurpose enquiry in the shape it arrived in, with its pieces and its dimensions, rather than flattening it into a tonnage figure 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.

Try 7 days free Ship chartering software for brokers What each plan includes