Record Shipping to Come

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Atlas, an iron ore company, expects to have record shipments this year.

"The iron ore miner says its on track to achieve shipping guidance of 7.4 million tons for 2013."

Of course, with the mining industry the largest industry in Australia, this comes as no surprise. Strong demand for iron ore is cited as the main cause for this increase in shipping volume.

This links directly to the ideas that we've been discussing in class - shipping goods overseas. As mentioned, Australia has many ports, and is isolated from other continents. This makes the use of freighters essential.

But iron ore isn't sent overseas in containers, like all other goods we've discussed so far. The idea of loading up a TEU container with iron ore is silly at the least, ridiculous at most. Iron ore is loaded upon a massive barge, known as bulk carriers. As far as size goes, most are considered capesize - the largest type of bulk carrier (93% of capesize boats are specialized to transport iron ore and coal). The use of such large ships is great for fuel and cost efficiency.

With such a large increase in loads of iron ore leaving Australia, we can expect that GDP should increase due to the increase in net exports.