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On August 25 Bloomberg reported that SK Gas had taken a Panama Canal slot auction at $5.3 million for the VLGC G. Spirit (IMO 9797876), buying the September 1 northbound slot. It is the highest bid ever recorded for a transit slot. Eleven days earlier the record had been $4.6 million, for the empty gas carrier G. Arete. Tolls are charged on top of both.
Price the bid against what the time is worth. The Baltic Exchange closed the BLPG3 route from Houston to Chiba at $269.50 per tonne in the week to August 21, returning $156,469 a day. Argus Media, cited by Bloomberg, put the wait for a vessel arriving without a reservation at as long as eleven days.
Divide the bid by the day rate and the number that comes out is 33.9. SK Gas paid roughly 34 days of a very large gas carrier’s earnings to move eleven days up a queue.
Now look at what the bid was competing for. The Canal Authority cut daily transit slots twice this month, on booking dates from September 4 and September 15. What it did not cut is the thing being bid for. In the Authority's own words there is one daily auction slot, shared by Neopanamax, Supers and Regular vessels.
Then count who was bidding for them. Ricaurte Vásquez told gCaptain that the Neopanamax locks drew up to 15 bidders for a single slot in August, against an average of around two a day from October to March. On the night of August 25 the waiting queue held 127 vessels against a normal figure of up to 90, and of the 31 Neopanamax in it only four had no booking.
The rest of the trade is not in the queue because it stopped using the canal. Vortexa put the Cape of Good Hope at roughly 43 percent of all US Gulf Coast to Asia LPG voyages in April, the highest share since October 2016.
So the canal did not become more valuable this month. It became a smaller market. What is left bidding is the fraction of the trade that cannot route around it, and the price is a measure of how few of them there are.
📋 In This Issue:
⚖️ The Story:
What was bid, what the money actually buys, the two things the market has wrong, the cargo that already left, the shuttle forming off Balboa and the water underneath all of it.
📊 By The Numbers:
The record, the ratio, the bidders, the bypass, the rainfall and the draft.
🔍 Why It Matters:
What changes for the gas charterer, the owner, the underwriter and the container line.
👀 What To Watch:
The five markers that will settle whether this is a spike or a repricing.
🚨 Gosships Signal:
What an auction record means when only one slot a day is being bid for.
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🔗 Related Coverage
📌 Gosships Data Card
November 8, 2023: The Eneos Group pays $3.975 million at auction for the LPG carrier Sunny Bright, the first slot the vessel could secure being November 15, setting the record for the previous congestion cycle (Fortune, November 8, 2023; Maritime Executive).
February 28, 2026: The conflict with Iran begins. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz collapses, and Al Jazeera reported on August 27 that “from July 15 to August 23, an average of about five vessels a day passed through, marking an almost 95 percent decrease from pre-war traffic levels” (Britannica; Al Jazeera, August 27, 2026).
April 2026: Roughly 43 percent of US Gulf Coast to Asia LPG voyages route via the Cape of Good Hope, the highest share since October 2016, when it reached 48 percent (Vortexa, May 25, 2026).
August 15, 2026: The maximum authorized draft in the Neopanamax locks falls to 48.5 feet TFW, the third reduction in force this year against a design normal of 50 feet (Panama Canal Authority, Advisory to Shipping A-22-2026).
August 20, 2026: The Canal Authority cuts daily booking slots from 36 to 34 and then to 32, taking Neopanamax from 10 to nine and Panamax from 26 to 23, while leaving the daily auction at a single slot, and separately organizes that slot into four market segment groups from September 3, with LNG and LPG together in Group 1 (Panama Canal Authority, Advisories A-28-2026 and A-29-2026).
August 25, 2026: SK Gas takes a slot auction at $5.3 million for the VLGC G. Spirit, buying the September 1 northbound slot, the highest bid ever recorded for a Panama Canal transit slot (Bloomberg, August 25, 2026).
Sources: Bloomberg, August 25, August 20 and August 14, 2026; Panama Canal Authority Advisories to Shipping A-22-2026, A-28-2026, A-29-2026 and A-50-2023, Operations Notice N-07-2025 and the Maritime Tariffs effective January 1, 2025; Baltic Exchange BLPG3 assessment, week ending August 21, 2026; Vortexa via Hellenic Shipping News, May 25, 2026; Kpler; Argus Media via Maritime Executive; La Prensa, August 14, 2026; Infobae, August 26, 2026; gCaptain, August 26 and May 21, 2026; NOAA Climate Prediction Center ENSO Diagnostic Discussion, August 13, 2026; Al Jazeera, August 27, 2026; Engineering News-Record, August 24, 2026; Fortune, November 8, 2023.
⚖️The Story
What Was Bid
The Panama Canal offers slots at auction in Period 3, which its Operations Notice N-07-2025 defines as running “from 7 to 2 days prior to the requested transit date.” On the method the same notice is blunt: for the Neopanamax locks, “All slots are allocated to the highest bidder through auctions.” One further rule settles ties. Proxy bids take precedence over manual bids at the same amount, provided the proxy bid was placed first.
On August 25 Bloomberg reported that SK Gas had won one of those slots at $5.3 million.
The vessel is the G. Spirit, a very large gas carrier of 54,502 deadweight built in 2018, registered in Panama, with a beam of 36.60 meters. That beam matters more than anything else in this story. It is wider than the 32.31 meter limit of the original Panamax chambers, which means the G. Spirit cannot use the cheap locks. It was Neopanamax or nothing.
