Arete, and it was the highest fee the waterway has ever charged for a slot, Bloomberg reported. The auction bid to skip the queue at the Panama Canal last week was $4.6 million. Days earlier, a container ship had paid $4 million for the same privilege.
It was paid by an empty liquefied petroleum gas supertanker, the G.
Panama is among the wettest countries in the world, which is why the shortfall matters as a regional signal as well as a local one. A strengthening El Niño, the Pacific warming pattern that reshapes global rainfall, is believed to be the reason for this lack of rainfall. Every transit by a vessel spills water out to sea, and the lakes have to be topped up by rain. When rainfall falls short, the operator has two levers to pull — the number of ships it lets through, and the depth to which each ship can be loaded.
Rainfall in the canal’s watershed from May through August has run 34% below the historical average, and inflows to the artificial lakes that feed the locks — Gatun and Alajuela — are 44% below normal, the authority said.
The canal has been at this spot before. But what’s different this time is the rest of the shipping system. The pressure is evident in the LPG trade. That extra volume is being pushed through a canal whose Neopanamax locks — the size class most LPG supertankers need — are now the bottleneck.
During the El Niño-driven drought of 2023 and 2024, the authority cut daily transits from 38 to 22, well below the levels being introduced this September. About 60% of US LPG exports have gone to Asia so far in 2026, up from 55% for all of 2025, according to Kpler data cited by Bloomberg.
What comes next
The canal authority has said the 2026-27 El Niño could last longer than usual, and its administrator, Ricaurte Vasquez, told a business event on Wednesday that the operator was preparing accordingly.
