Airline fuel use and operations strategy

An excellent analysis of the new International council on clean Transport figures on airline efficiency. You have to look below the covers to see what the data mean.

Marty Lariviere's avatarThe Operations Room

Jan has been on a data kick lately (see here, here and, oh yeah, here) so here is a picture he might like:

Fuel Use

It comes from a report by the International Council on Clean Transport entitled “U.S. domestic airline fuel efficiency ranking, 2010” that was published earlier this month. (It is also discussed in the Washington Post.) Here is the question that it is attempting to answer: Given that different airlines do different things, how can we fairly compare their ability to use fuel efficiently? What’s cool about the answer is that you see with in the answer firms’ strategic and operating choices.

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China Force Feeding Ships

This Bloomberg article leads us to believe that shipping rates won’t go up for a while.

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-20/china-force-feeding-ships-seen-by-billionaire-ross-curbing-rates.html

US Gas to the world thru Panama

The US is enjoying a gas boom of epic proportions, due to new recovery techniques known as “fracking”.  Where is the excess gas going to go? One answer is to export it to energy poor countries through the Panama Canal. Texas and Louisiana are the main US locations where gas pipelines terminate. These are ideal locations for ships to load up and head for Far East destinations. Japan is a major importer of LNG (liquefied natural gas).  The expansion of the Panama Canal allows large LNG tankers to move by sea economically to their customers. This article in Maritime Executive tells some of the story.

http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/US-Gas-Via-Panama-Frightens-LNG-Exporters-Worldwide-2013-09-05/