The 1,230 km river, a world famous tourist destination and a part of the national psyche, is the commercial artery for 80% of the German economy's inland shipping of goods, including crude oil and natural gas.again too low in parts of the river for cargo vessels to sail fully loaded when they can hold the equivalent of up to 150 trucks.
"Climate change and the increasing occurrence of low water levels are posing significant challenges to Covestro as well as other companies," Uwe Arndt, who heads Covestro's Rhine taskforce, said. But Kaub levels below a metre mean that traditional barges must reduce their cargoes by more than half to under 1,500 metric tonnes, the DTG shipping cooperative says.BASF's new low-water tanker - the Stolt Ludwigshafen - however can still carry a load of 2,300 tonnes and sail through the Kaub bottleneck at ultra-low levels of 30 centimetres .
As a rule of thumb, if water levels at Kaub fall below 78 centimetres for 30 straight days, as was the case in 2022 and 2018, industrial production falls by 1%, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.