You Can Restart a Shipyard

…all it takes is will, a viable contract, & confidence in the future…

From New England to Puerto Rico, across the Gulf of America, skipping over the desert to the West Coast…the vast American coastline is littered with closed and abandoned shipyards.

They surround us like ghosts haunting the ruins of a once great empire, whispering of what once was.

Some have been repurposed so much it would require a national emergency to claw back the waterfront. Others only a bit, and another cohort almost frozen in aspic from the day they were closed.

Every time there is a proposal to do something as straightforward as reviving Charleston or something more ambitious like Jan Sramek’s Solano Shipyard, those trying to make forward progress have to swim through a sea of excuses, defeatism, obstructive regulations, or outright greed from those who want to turn industrial future into just another mixed-use development for empty nesters—nationalizing national security risk and privatizing profit.

There is some progress, but it is along the edges, like we see in Charleston linked above, what Davie is doing in Texas or on a very small but important way by companies like Saronic…but it isn’t on global seapower scale.

It doesn’t have to be this way. With firm, visionary leadership, sustainable funding, and will—it can be done.

That is what South Korea is doing.

Plans to fully relaunch the long-dormant Gunsan Shipyard in South Korea got a boost as the company signed a letter of intent to build its first ships in nine years.

The yard had fallen victim to a downturn in the shipbuilding industry nearly a decade ago and never achieved its full potential…

This is serious work. The shipyard is a little more turnkey than some of our abandoned shipyards—but not by too much. It is the land that matters.

The letter of intent calls for the construction of four 114,000-ton crude oil and petroleum product tankers. They identify the shipowner only as a company in Oceania.

The plan is to operate J Ocean alongside HJ Shipbuilding to provide a large increase in total capacity. HJ is a mid-sized yard that also undertakes repair work but is constrained on the size of vessels. The Gunsan yard has an approximately 700-meter (approximately 2,300-foot) dock and was designed to build 10 to 12 ships a year, including ultra-large vessels.

The U.S.A. has a population 6.8x that of South Korea. Our economy is 16.8x the size of South Korea’s.

When my father’s generation came back from the Korean War, South Korea was little more than rubble and rural poverty.

We can do this.

Look at the graph below, then ponder that civilian shipyards are, in times of war, the difference between being able to carry on the fight against a determined enemy and finding yourself at an early culmination point, needing to come to the negotiating table.

We do not need more think tank work. We do not need more studies. We do not need more problem appreciation. We have a little bit of a head of steam going. We need to up the pressure and expand the base, because that's what we once were and what we could be again.