THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • March/April 2018 29 TheCoastalBend.com locks that allow the world’s largest ships to pass. The idea of a passage connecting the two great oceans dates back to the Spanish Empire in the 1500’s and was finally taken on in 1880 by the French team that built the 120-mile-long Suez Canal through the Egyptian desert. The challenge of the mountainous terrain, torrential rains that led to devastating mudslides, along with malaria and yellow fever spread by plagues of mosquitos, were too much, and the French gave up on the fifty-mile-wide Panama Canal project in 1888. At the time, the Panamanian Isthmus that connected Central to South America, was a “department” of Colombia, although native Panamanians had sought inde- pendence for decades. The Thousand Days War was a civil conflict between the two dominant political parties in Colombia, including rebel factions in Panama. After the conflict, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the purchase of land and assets owned by the French government, together called the New Panama Canal Company, for $40 million—pending approval of the Colombian senate. They rejected the deal, and soon Colombia was facing the military might of the United States Navy, which was deployed to defend the Panamanian independence movement. The Hay– Bunau-Varilla Treaty was signed in November 1903, essentially establishing Panama as an independent nation, while guaranteeing sovereignty to the United States of the fifty-by-six-mile Panama Canal Zone. The canal was completed in 1914 at a cost of $350 million and the lives of over 5,600 workers, a full 10% of the entire labor force in the American phase. In the end, however, the Panama Canal opened opposite sides of the world to one another as never before, saving almost 8,000 nautical miles, and weeks at sea, versus rounding South America’s perilous Cape Horn. An effort to expand the 1914 canal with a third set of locks was abandoned after the outbreak of World War II, and was not finally undertaken until 2006, completed in 2016. The expanded shipping capacity of the Panama Canal is proving almost as revo- lutionary for maritime interests as its original opening. “Panamax” ships, those that can pass through the original locks, had a cargo capacity of 4,500 shipping contain- ers. New Panamax ships, those that can pass through the new set of locks, can carry up to 12,000 containers. Similarly, most of the world’s largest supertankers can now do business between Pacific and Atlantic ports via the canal. One such ship is the 1,100-foot, Belgian-owned, Anne, which made a historic dry-run visit to Occidental Petroleum’s (Oxy) oil shipping dock in Ingleside—the re- purposed, former Naval Station Ingleside—in May 2017. The Anne was the largest oil tanker to ever stop at a port on the Gulf of Mexico, and its visit served as a celebra- tion and preview of the future for the petrochemical industry at the Port of Corpus Christi. With a capacity of two million barrels of crude oil, over a half-day’s produc- tion for the entire state of Texas, a tanker the size of Anne offers the most efficient method of transporting oil to Europe and to Asia via the Panama Canal, where the New Panamax ship length is 1,200 feet. While reaching the Oxy dock does not require passage under the Harbor Bridge, other, also larger, vessels are now transgressing the expanded Panama Canal, includ- ing ships transporting refined petroleum products, liquified natural gas, dry cargo, agricultural products, refrigerated cargo, and even gigantic wind turbine compo- nents like those that have passed through the port for over a decade, coming from Spain and Brazil and headed to new wind farms throughout Texas, the top wind energy-producing state in the U.S. East Coast ports like Miami, Savannah, Newark, New York, and Boston, and even the ports at Southampton and Liverpool, England, are deepening their channels, expanding their docking and ground transportation capacities, and raising and building bridges—all to accommodate the historically large ships now passing through the Panama Canal. In the decade since the Eagle Ford Shale play emerged, made possible by the implementation of fractured drilling technology (“fracking”), United States crude oil and natural gas production reached an all-time high, while imports reached a re- cord low—in effect, America had achieved energy independence by 2015, surpassing both Russia and Saudi Arabia in oil and gas production. In a rare moment of political harmony, the Obama Administration and the Republican-controlled congress agreed to lift the ban on U.S. oil exports in December 2015, reversing the 1975 Ford Admin- istration policy put in place in response to the Arab oil embargo. top to bottom: The Port of Corpus Christi is now the number one oil exporting port in the U.S. Military cargo ship enters the port to load equipment, weapons and supplies bound for the Iraq War theater in 2003. The Tianjin Texas pipe plant in Gregory is China’s largest, indus- trial investment in the U.S.