How many locks are there in Jiangsu Grand Canal?

High oil prices and energy shortage are increasing the shipping status of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal.

"China Business News" recently learned in an interview in Jiangsu Province that Jiangsu is improving the navigation capacity of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal by increasing infrastructure construction, dredging navigation channels and improving navigation environment, so as to rush to transport electric coal and cope with high oil prices.

Standing at the Jietai Gate of the Xuzhou section of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, the reporter saw that there were many giant fleets running side by side on the wide river. Zhao, deputy director of Xuzhou Environmental Protection Bureau, told the reporter that the 404-kilometer Subei Canal has an average annual freight volume of/kloc-0.50 billion tons, of which coal accounts for two-thirds of the country's inland rivers and is the main channel for "transporting coal from the north to the south".

In Shaobo Shiplock, an ancient canal town in Yangzhou, the busy shipping scene is even more spectacular. At 1 1 in the morning, nearly 100 cargo ships were waiting for the gate. Wang Youfang, deputy head of Baoying County, said that the original two navigation channels of Shaobo Shiplock are not enough, and a third navigation channel with wider river channel is being built.

At the beginning of June, there was a backlog of ships in Yangzhou section of the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal, with a fleet of more than 100 and more than 400 ships waiting for navigation. In recent years, the average number of traffic jams in the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal for more than 8 hours has reached 46 times a year, and more than 6,543,800 ships have been blocked. It is reported that the shipping management department of Jiangsu Province stipulates that the total length of a single ship entering the Subei Canal shall not exceed 68 meters, and the total width shall not exceed 15.8 meters.

The Jiangsu section of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, with a total length of 683 kilometers, is the waterway with the highest shipping value. In addition to the Subei Canal, the Sunan Canal is the main transportation channel for bulk building materials and other materials. In 2006 alone, the freight volume was equivalent to the annual freight volume of four Shanghai-Nanjing single-track railways or six Shanghai-Nanjing expressways (quotes, information and comments). The Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal is still the "golden waterway" in East China, which is second only to the Yangtze River, forming four inland ports with an annual throughput of over 30 million tons: Hangzhou, Suzhou, Wuxi and Xuzhou.

Inland navigation is cheap, only railways 1/2 and highways 1/4. From the environmental point of view, the emission of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides per unit freight volume of highway is 2 times and 3 times that of waterway respectively, and the pollution caused by unit freight volume of railway is 3.3 times that of inland river.

Waterway regulation and construction is the key to improve the navigation capacity of the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal. Zhao said that during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan period, Jiangsu Province will invest more than 654.38 billion yuan in the renovation of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal.

It is understood that at present, river regulation projects such as Danyang Lingkou section of Sunan Canal and Suzhou Canglang New Town section have started one after another. The Sunan Canal will implement the plan of changing the fourth-class waterway to the third-class waterway, and the investment will reach 8.5 billion yuan in five years, and the Subei Canal will also be changed from the current third-class waterway to the second-class waterway. After the renovation, the navigation capacity of the Jiangsu section of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal is expected to increase by 40% on the existing basis.