New Suez Canal 2015

Table of contents

1) The original Suez Canal: a brief history

The original Suez Canal was inaugurated on 17 November 1869 after ten years of construction under the direction of French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps and the forced labour of hundreds of thousands of Egyptian workers. The canal was 163 km long, 8 metres deep, and just 22 metres wide at its base — a narrow trench that nonetheless transformed global shipping by eliminating the need to circumnavigate the African continent between European and Asian ports. British forces occupied Egypt in 1882 partly to secure control of this vital artery, and Britain retained a military presence in the Canal Zone until 1956.

President Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956 — transferring ownership from the Anglo-French shareholders to the Egyptian state — was one of the defining acts of post-colonial Arab nationalism and triggered the disastrous Suez Crisis of that year, in which British, French, and Israeli forces invaded Egypt before withdrawing under American and Soviet pressure. The canal was closed for eight years during and after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, re-opening in 1975 under the flag of the newly renamed Suez Canal Authority, which has operated it ever since. Over the subsequent decades the canal was progressively deepened and widened to accommodate increasingly large vessels, but the basic single-lane configuration of its central section remained unchanged until 2015.

The original canal: key dimensions

By 2014, before the expansion, the canal had been deepened to 24 metres, widened to 205 metres at the water surface, and extended to 193 km. It could accommodate vessels of up to 20 metres draft — including the largest oil tankers and container ships of the time — but could handle only one convoy direction simultaneously in its central section, creating a daily queue of waiting vessels at either end.

2) Why an expansion was needed

The fundamental constraint of the pre-2015 canal was its single-lane configuration through the 78 km central section between the Great Bitter Lake and the Mediterranean. Vessels transited in two daily convoys — one northbound, one southbound — that could not pass each other except in the existing bypass sections around the Great Bitter Lake and at Ballah. This meant that southbound vessels had to wait at Port Said for an average of 18 hours before beginning their transit, a delay that cost shipping companies significant demurrage fees and disrupted supply-chain schedules.

Global container ship sizes had grown dramatically in the decade before the expansion: vessels of 18,000–20,000 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) capacity were entering service, pushing the limits of what the existing canal could accommodate in width and draft. The Suez Canal Authority estimated that without expansion, traffic capacity would plateau at around 78 ships per day, insufficient to absorb projected growth in global trade. There was also competitive pressure from the expanded Panama Canal, which completed its own third-set-of-locks expansion in 2016, and from speculative shipping routes through the Arctic that climate change was making increasingly plausible.

3) Engineering the New Canal

The core engineering work comprised two distinct but related components. The first was the excavation of a brand new 35 km channel running parallel to and east of the existing canal between the Ismailia region and the Great Bitter Lake — a section that had previously had no bypass capacity at all. The second was the deepening and widening of two existing bypass sections totalling 37 km to match the dimensions of the new parallel channel. Together, 72 km of the 193 km total canal length were upgraded to two-lane capacity, sufficient to allow simultaneous north and southbound convoys across the previously congested central section.

Project specifications

Specification	Dimension
New channel length	35 km (parallel, new excavation)
Deepened bypass sections	37 km widened & deepened
Channel depth	24 metres (matching existing)
Construction time	12 months (Aug 2014 – Aug 2015)

Dredging & excavation scale

The project required the removal of approximately 250 million cubic metres of sand, rock, and sediment — one of the largest dredging operations in history. Eight of the world's most powerful dredging vessels were deployed simultaneously, working around the clock in three shifts. The Egyptian Army Corps of Engineers played a central coordinating role, working alongside Dutch dredging firm Jan de Nul and Belgian company DEME, whose suction-hopper and cutter-suction dredgers were capable of removing tens of thousands of cubic metres of material per day. Dry excavation using conventional mining and earth-moving equipment was employed for the sections furthest from the existing water line.

Impact on transit times

The practical result of the expansion was a reduction in average southbound waiting time at Port Said from approximately 18 hours to 11 hours, and an increase in the theoretical daily capacity of the canal from 49 vessels to 97 vessels. Northbound transits — which already had the benefit of the Great Bitter Lake bypass — were less affected in terms of waiting time but benefited from smoother traffic flow as southbound convoys no longer needed to pull into the lakes to allow them to pass.

4) Financing & the national investment drive

The financing of the New Suez Canal was as remarkable as its construction. Rather than seeking international loans or borrowing from multilateral development banks, the government launched a domestic investment certificate drive on 5 September 2014, offering five-year certificates at 12 per cent annual interest — significantly above prevailing market rates — denominated in Egyptian pounds. The drive was framed explicitly as a patriotic act: Egyptians were invited to invest in the national project in the tradition of the popular fundraising campaigns that had funded the original canal's maintenance after the 1956 nationalisation.

The response exceeded all expectations. The full EGP 64 billion target (equivalent to approximately $8.5 billion at the time) was raised in just eight days, with the Central Bank of Egypt reporting queues at bank branches across the country as small savers, pensioners, and businesses rushed to subscribe. The certificate drive tapped into genuine popular pride in the project and provided the government with a politically powerful narrative: unlike the foreign-debt-financed mega-projects of the Mubarak era, the New Suez Canal was built with Egyptian money by Egyptian workers under Egyptian management. The certificates matured in 2019 and were repaid in full from canal revenues.

5) Economic impact & revenue figures

The government's pre-inauguration projection of $13.2 billion in annual canal revenues by 2023 proved optimistic. Actual annual revenues reached approximately $7–8 billion by the early 2020s — still a significant increase over the pre-expansion $5.3 billion baseline, but well short of the initial target. The gap reflected slower-than-projected global trade growth following the 2015–16 commodity price collapse, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on shipping volumes in 2020–21, and the structural fact that transit fees are governed by global freight market conditions rather than canal capacity alone.

The canal remains, nonetheless, one of Egypt's most important sources of hard-currency earnings. In the fiscal year 2022–23, revenues reached a record $9.4 billion, driven by the post-pandemic shipping boom and elevated freight rates, before moderating again in 2024 as the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping from Yemen prompted many container lines to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, causing a significant temporary drop in canal traffic that underlined the geopolitical vulnerabilities of the waterway.

The expansion's measurable gains

• Daily capacity: Theoretical maximum capacity increased from 49 to 97 vessels per day, though actual daily throughput typically ranges between 50 and 80 ships depending on vessel mix and size.
• Waiting time: Average southbound waiting time reduced from 18 to 11 hours — a 39 per cent reduction in delays that translates into meaningful cost savings for shipping operators across hundreds of thousands of transits annually.
• Employment: The construction phase employed approximately 37,000 Egyptian workers at its peak, with the broader Suez Canal Economic Zone expected to generate hundreds of thousands of permanent jobs over a longer horizon.

6) The Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZone)

The New Canal was conceived not merely as an infrastructure upgrade but as the anchor for a much larger economic development vision: the Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZone), a special economic area of approximately 460 sq km spanning both banks of the canal and incorporating the existing Port Said, East Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez industrial areas. Established by law in 2015 alongside the canal inauguration, the SCZone was designed to attract foreign direct investment in logistics, manufacturing, and services by offering streamlined regulations, tax incentives, and world-class port infrastructure capable of handling the largest vessel classes.

The East Port Said Industrial Zone, positioned at the Mediterranean entrance to the canal, was developed with particular ambition as a container transshipment hub capable of competing with established regional rivals such as Malta's Freeport and the ports of Tanger Med in Morocco. Several significant investments materialised, including a major logistics platform operated by the Danish shipping conglomerate A.P. Møller-Mærsk and automotive manufacturing facilities. However, the broader transformation of the corridor into a globally competitive manufacturing and logistics cluster has progressed more slowly than the original 2015 masterplan envisaged, reflecting the challenges of competing with established industrial zones in Southeast Asia and the ongoing complexities of Egypt's business environment.

7) Visiting the Suez Canal today

Last updated: April 2026. Canal access arrangements and local transport connections are subject to change; verify current conditions before travelling.

8) Sources & further reading

The following are reputable starting points used to compile the information on this page.

• Suez Canal Authority. Annual Reports 2015–2023. Suez Canal Authority, Ismailia. — The official statistical record of canal traffic, revenues, and operational data; available via the SCA's official website at suezcanal.gov.eg.
• El-Anwar, Heba. The New Suez Canal: Economic Rationale and Development Impact. Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, 2016. — A detailed policy analysis of the expansion's economic projections and early outcomes, freely available through the ECES research portal.
• Fagerberg, Jan & Mowery, David (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Innovation. Oxford University Press, 2005. — Provides comparative context for understanding Egypt's infrastructure investment as an economic development strategy.
• Lloyd's List Intelligence / LSEG. Suez Canal Traffic Statistics Database. LSEG, ongoing. — The primary commercial source for vessel-by-vessel transit data; available by subscription to maritime industry users.

Images on this page are sourced from Wikimedia Commons and NASA Earth Observatory under public domain and Creative Commons licences. See individual image captions for full attribution details.