Panama Canal’s top toll this year hits $5.2 million for one vessel

The headline toll figure matters less than what it reveals about scarcity pricing on a chokepoint where LNG carriers now transit at roughly a fraction of their pre-war pace. That gap between weekly LNG traffic and the earlier daily cadence explains why slots command such premiums, and it puts the cost squarely on energy shippers whose cargoes depend on this route. The open question is whether the canal's transit mix keeps skewing toward high-value, low-volume traffic, and whether LNG flows recover toward earlier levels or the waterway settles into a thinner, pricier regime.