They hired a company specialized in this kind of stuff (Boskalis), but as their CEO mentioned of TV it depends on how stuck it is. If you're lucky, pumping out the fuel and ballast can make the ship light enough to drag it clear with tugboats. If that doesn't work, you might have to unload some, most or all of the 20k containers from the ship to make it light enough. It can be done, but depending on how much is required it'll take a few days to a week to get the required equipment all the way to Egypt.
The people who should be desperately trying to pay a lot of money to get the ship unstuck are maritime insurance underwriters. There is a lot of insurance against late delivery. Unless they have managed to figure out how this is an act of god, that is.
I think this is the hidden story here. Egypt doesn't have a particularly strong economy, its stock market (unlike the US) is 40% below 2018, it's currency fell more than 50% vs USD in 2016 and has only recovered a few percent, and it (like the US) appears to have significantly more debt than ever before. And the entire globe is still somewhat covid-depressed economically.
When governments, banks and major companies are highly leveraged, all it takes is temporary system shocks to collapse the whole thing. It's not just the lost canal revenue, it's tons of companies in the region that can't get their goods to international markets which slows capital flows, tax revenue, import/export tariffs, etc. Will be interesting to see the effects.
That's more than 5% of the total government revenue. It can definitively lead to instability in the currency because the government might be forced to print the deficit if it cannot secure funding through other means. The inflation rate is well above 2% which means that the government should cut spending and only put money into investments that net a return (cleaning up the canal nets a return).
Given that so many ships that are run by people who can afford $300k per trip, which could pay the annual salary for a team of analysts, it's amazing you're making this comment.
