Labelling products that used these low carbon sail methods would be a product differentiator for the commodities they shipped. A great lakes trading route for regional craft products shipped by sail would be super interesting as well, especially for breweries and distileries.
A retro "platform" company that facilitated this and authenticated the cargo with labels akin to a fair-trade/organic and other effective luxury branding could be a thing. The great lakes and the intracoastal waterways connect markets large enough to support it, and companies could in effect audition products for it. Doing sail deliveries could be a way to offset the cost of a sailing trip as well.
This would be super neat. There's got to be a big enough cross section of craft product business owners & sailors that would at least have interest in buying into this.
Then there's Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, and that's not including the St. Lawrence seaway that has Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, then New Hampshire and Vermont. Intracoastal you can't really sail, as it's motor power, which would be off brand, but enough in the region to try it anyway.
By linking it to the low carbon footprint of sails and the geography of the waterways, the brands would be relatively resistant to pressure from globalization given it's a luxury environmental product. I know people in both sailing and heavy industry logistics who would think this was nuts, except.
Depending on trade treaties around these products, we could probably get exceptions to them on environmental grounds. Ideally there are some existing tariff protections or something that keeps these craft companies out of each others markets already that we could use the environmental path as an exception.
Valuable data point. This idea of a premium green service is the key, and beer/distileries were the examples of local products, but if there were dry goods, that would make it. Also, we can solve the preservative issue with refrigeration if it's worth it. Again, there's no ceiling on what people will pay for a luxury item that is green/local/craft etc, and we could figure out what's involved in making kegs/cans survive a great lakes transfer and price it in.
> Ships transported Hodgson's beers to India, among them his October beer, which benefited exceptionally from conditions of the voyage and was apparently highly regarded among its consumers in India.
Interestingly enough, there were sail-powered cargo ships well into the 20th century[1], hauling bulk cargo for cheap. The crews were severely underpaid because some countries still had various licenses that required commercial sailing experience to get.
The boats could sail from Austrailia to England in 3-4 months.
That paper gives some interesting numbers - in one voyage spinning the rotors gave a speed boost of 2.4 knots with a constant power going to the propellers, which they calculated as a 1.7MW power boost (engine was running at 2.8MW). Overall the rotors give - with favourable wind and sailing direction - a maximum of about a 50% fuel reduction.
Obviously actual performance was much worse (you often want to go where the wind isn't blowing) - for the test voyage they used around 85% of the fuel they would have without the rotors.
If you like this stuff:’one of my all time favorite books is “The Last Grain Race” by Eric Newby. He signed on as a sailor on the Last sail shipment of grain from Rotterdam to Sydney in 1939 (just as WWII was breaking out in Europe). As is typical for him he knew nothing about sailing when he signed on. He’s a great writer and it’s an exciting story.
Another good one is "A Man for All Oceans" about Joshua Slocum. Slocum was the captain of several large commercial sailing vessels in the late 1800's before his famed solo trip around the world. Over the course of his life he also witnessed the transition of commercial shipping from sailing ships to steam ships.
It's a book about a South Easter ship doing a coal delivery from East to West coast of the USA via Cape Horn. The book doesn't seem to be very popular, but IMO the most vivid depiction of merchant navy under sail, written by someone who lived it.
Wonderful fey footnote about the word "fok" and "fokking" -All my WWII escape books from this era have solders saying "mucking hell" for much the same reasons...
Most of these seem pretty gimmicky. I love sailing, and I'd like to see a reduction in the carbon footprint from sea freight, but it's already pretty low per-pound. It's certainly better than flying cargo.
The total footprint from sea freight is high (3% of global carbon emissions), and the fuel they use is terrible in other ways (it's dirty and carbon isn't the only bad thing emitted). It can't be replaced by sailing, though. Maybe if someone creates a sailing megafreighter, but not by schooners or smaller vessels.
Of everything on that page, the Kwai seems the most pragmatic and the least gimmicky; it's a large vessel and operates in an underserved market. While Tres Hombres is also a large vessel, trans-Atlantic freight is just a silly market to operate in. That's a gimmick to sell expensive "fair trade" goods to niche markets. People are paying a premium to absolve themselves of consumer guilt.
Not as impressive as going fully wind or solar powerered, but there are some initiatives to improve fuel economy by using kite, for example airseas [1] claim to get a 20% improvement with an autonomous kite, and what seem to be limited fitting cost (couldn't find a number).
It literally could be replaced by sailing, but would be much more expensive, more human-labor-intensive, and less efficient. But it's entirely technically feasible, especially if motors or tugs are used for harbors and channels.
The largest bulk carriers would need to be replaced by almost 10,000 of the larger of these ships, and 400,000 of the smallest. There are no commercial ports capable of this transition. It's not technically feasible if it would take years to load and unload.
Paolo Bacigalupi's shipbreaker novels and The Windup Girl take place in a post-oil future with fleets of high-tech clipper ships. The ships transport freight and people around the world using high-altitude kite-like sails.
Eliminating or mitigating the use of bunker fuel could be impactful towards reducing harmful emissions. The use of conventional sailing power is not.
In 2015 cargo ships transported 70 trillion ton-kilometers. The largest vessel here displaces 45 tons, so how many sailing vessels and sailors able to work for such low wages do you need to make a dent?
I was surprised to see that most of these are traditional sailing vessels, which as you note are not practical at large scale. With all the advances in competitive sailing technologies (eg solid wing sails), it would be interesting to see how they would translate to making a more efficient sailing vessel for hauling freight.
There are a couple companies that tried to chase "wingsails to assist freighters" as a concept. It seems there just wasn't enough interest. Bunker fuel is too cheap.
Then transport 5,000 tons from Newark to London in ten days with <10,000 USD of bunker fuel.
Bunker fuel is very very cheap. I don't see how you can compete on either the fixed or variable costs with conventional shipping in the current regulatory regime.
An added issue with a flotilla approach is the decreased ability to handle sea state, which impacts the costs for insurance/LOC for shippers, as well as the useful coverage with respect to routes and seasonality.
Built 1991, it's nearing the end of its useful lifespan in salt water conditions. Maintenance and repairs will get very costly, very soon. There's a reason you don't see 35+ year old cargo ships operating in widespread commercial service... Some time in the next 5-7 years that ship is almost certainly going to end up operating in an increasingly decrepit condition in the coastal trade in a location with lax regulations, or cut up for scrap on a beach in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh.
Let's say you made a boat that could hold 4 standard cargo containers. Sail powered, solar electric + batteries. Fully autonomous. Then have autonomous loading and unloading of containers as well. Build a fleet of boats.
The beauty of it would be zero waiting. Boats are always ready to take the next container, and loading takes only 5 minutes, then it leaves right away. Even if it were slower than standard container ships, it's always moving.
Let's say a typical call is about 5000 moves. So that would mean about 625 of your small vessels. It won't take 5 minutes to load the containers, because the discharge containers need to be unlashed and the load units need to be lashed (which you can't do during operations). It'll be more like 30 minutes to discharge, load and get the next boat alongside (in the best case). You could shift the boat along the quay for lashing (or shift the crane, but that takes the same amount of time)and get the next boat working. Even then the productivity will be at least half of what a typical terminal can do. The overhead per boat is simply to high.
That's not even taking into account the seaworthiness of these small vessels or the logistics of getting all these boats in and out of port without congestion.
If the ships only carry 4 TEU (or 4 FEU), then lashing is likely not needed if they use Twistloc's welded to a boat deck that is designed for the dynamic loads. With only four containers, I wouldn't even dock/undock the ships; keep them continuously moving, and pick and place the containers dynamically as the boats move through canal lock style controlled conditions. There are Twistloc designs that are purpose-built to automatically work with the container cranes with no manual intervention.
The idea is impractical because the fast turnaround is not going to offset the overhead of a separate boat per 4 containers. People usually don't think of container ships, but they're bean-counter-efficient designs, and the boat overhead costs per container are absurdly low.
We're at multi-year highs now nearly touching $2590 USD per FEU Asia-West Coast on the spot market, maybe around $4-5K if you're doing a one-off by your lonesome through a freight forwarder [1]. But the opex cost per TEU per day for the larger container ships is around the $10 USD zone [2].
Using super slow steaming numbers, which would be comparable to sailing vessels' time, we're likely looking at 15-20 days for that Pacific voyage. Say 20 days to be generous to the case of the autonomous boats, so the opex cost for that voyage works out to about $400 USD per FEU. Amortized capex works out to maybe another $500 USD per FEU in normal economic conditions, plus overhead for maintenance (the ocean is a real PITA), plus some profit off the top?
Whatever that capex really is, building and financing those autonomous 4-container boats have to squeeze into about that budget, plus whatever of the opex they can skim over for not having to pay for bunker fuel (which is absurdly cheap, yay externalities) and crew (a fraction of the opex) [3]. I'd probably look into vanadium redox or iron batteries, since I'd want to amortize out way longer than say a Panamax does. Everything that touches the phrase "marine-grade" gets magic 10X cost pixie dust sprinkled on it giving the bean-counters who buy the stuff micro-strokes every day (bean-counters on the other side of the sale get hookers and blow, there's gonna be a Nobel for the person who figures out how to replace 304 grade stainless with something as cheap as pig iron and just as workable), so I find it hard to see how the numbers pencil out wrapping lots of ship around so few containers, until the global economy radically changes to a form we don't recognize today.
One last thing: sails at scale are freaking hard to recycle. These days with sails mostly relegated to recreational markets, there is sufficient demand for the bags and other stuff they make out of used sails. I think the Dacron-based remnants that is in tatters can be sent into PET recycling streams, but the more exotic stuff is going to be more challenging like windmill blades. Commercial quantities of beaten sails would be an interesting problem to solve.
>If the ships only carry 4 TEU (or 4 FEU), then lashing is likely not needed if they use Twistloc's welded to a boat deck that is designed for the dynamic loads. With only four containers, I wouldn't even dock/undock the ships; keep them continuously moving, and pick and place the containers dynamically as the boats move through canal lock style controlled conditions. There are Twistloc designs that are purpose-built to automatically work with the container cranes with no manual intervention.
on a ocean going vessel you wouldn't need to lash them, no. On a ship this small I would most certainly do. We can probably devise a hypothetical solution for this as well, though.
I tried to illustrate (badly) how hyper-efficient modern container operations are. People don't really realize how much work has been put in optimizing all this stuff.
Leaving aside a lot of potential issues, I'm not sure how you envision how a boat this size is meant to scale to the size where it replaces modern container freight operations (many of which will be substantially automated themselves.)
A wooden boat with a human crew is about 19,000% more environmentally friendly. Pretty much all of it will decompose when it's reached the end of it's life.
Suppose this is true and a wooden boat with a human crew is 190x as environmentally friendly. Can they carry even 1/190 ~= 0.5% of the cargo while maintaining this property?
Not sure about the economics of this though. Sailing seems like slow way of transport and may have higher cost because of more human crew. Why would any business opt for this service unless there are no alternatives? Am I missing something here?
But I see the appeal as a tourists. I would love to travel in one of these beauties.
Slow is the wrong word, I think. Big container ships don't necessarily move a lot faster than sailing ships, since speed = fuel usage, which is a big cost in shipping. A big modern container ship might cruise at half it's maximum speed for this reason.
The main thing is modern container ships are much, much bigger than any traditional sail ship, which drives down the cost per shipped item. This particular article shows wooden ships with (I assume) comparatively big crews as you say, and I don't think those will be taking over international shipping again this side of a major economic downturn, but that doesn't mean that sail as a method of propulsion can't have a role to play in sustainable shipping.
You could construct sail ships with modern materials, and it's certainly possible to automate them to keep crew sizes down. I imagine you'd need a lot of fabric to move the Emma Mærsk when carrying 11,000 20' containers! But sail doesn't have to mean traditional methods and materials.
It might not be practical to make ships exactly as large as with fossil fuel propulsion. But if we're serious about efficiency and sustainability, in this and many other cases, we need to take a serious look at using renewable energy directly, rather than converting to electricity for storage and then back to kinetic energy.
Seems most businesses in this space don't compete on price for bulk goods. They compete on sustainability, similar to e.g. people buying Fairtrade coffee even though it's more expensive than "normal" coffee.
Also sometimes they have other non-freight income, such as only a few of the people onboard lift a salary, the rest are trainees paying for the privilege of working on a sailing ship, or even passengers.
You can of course claim that this is just a daydream of hippies, and it can never scale up to provide anything near the cargo carrying capacity of the current shipping industry, and you're probably right. So what?
Fuel costs will increase as we transition away from fossil fuels, so the competition may be against other forms of non-fossil fuels changing the equation somewhat. (Unless we decide to give up on mitigating the climate crisis, in which case global unrest will probably make it a moot point)
I've read that ammonia created from hydrogen & nitrogen using electricity from wind turbines is currently the predicted shipping fuel of the future. A less romantic way to harness the wind but rather more practical sounding. Less chance of being caught on a lee shore too.
This is the boring but correct answer, particularly as diesel engines can be refitted to burn ammonia until fuel cells are ready to take over.
However, to make it geeky and exciting again you could have autonomous floating wind and solar farms generating the hydrogen and converting it to ammonia.
The ships could then refuel at multiple points in the middle of the ocean (ideally without stopping) and so carry less fuel and save on the costs of fuel burnt transporting the fuel.
Energy density is a big issue. Bunker oil is nasty stuff, but weight/volume/energy is very hard to beat. And it's redicoulsly cheap, thanks externalities of local and global environmental impact/risk not being properly priced in. But ammonia-hydrogen at least approaches the ballpark of diesel fuel iirc (also much less concentrated energy - but a more "natural" replacement for toxic bunker oil, which is finally being banned due to the pollution from regular use and spills).
Some numbers here (Esp concerning energy density etc):
As a sort of thread topic derail, this video is a good example of the use of a common consumer-grade easy to fly drone (DJI mavic 2 pro, mavic air, mavic air 2, etc) in the under $2000 category, used for travelogue type video, without the drone shots being used excessively. It's a good way to show an overview of a place from a different perspective.
Since drone video is without audio, you need some sort of audio track to overlay on it to keep things interesting. The traditional singing and chants work really well to set the tone of the piece.
Many large freight ships are in the process of having rotor sails installed [1]. A rotor sail is basically a circular mechanism that uses the magnus effect to spin and generate propulsion.
There are some experiments with solar on boats for propulsion. Most recently I saw a 40' catamaran in Canada with about 4kw of solar, replacing the sails. The owner is claiming about sustained 60-70 miles a day during the long summer months there.
The catamaran has relatively low displacement however, compared to both traditional sailboats and freight ships.
Norway has been experimenting with battery powered ferries to make short, sub-10 mile trips, with good success. The main problem they've seen is that the power required to recharge the batteries can overwhelm local power supplies, so they've added industrial size capacitors to assist with fast charging.
I don't see 700'+ container ships being converted to solar without a complete redesign/rethink of their systems. Typically solar panels are mounted above the ship, and on a container ship, the containers are craned into the hold through the same airspace that any solar panels would occupy.
I just can't imagine that a solar farm could absorb as much energy as a diesel motor of that size can output. Can someone with more knowledge on that spare some insight?
A retro "platform" company that facilitated this and authenticated the cargo with labels akin to a fair-trade/organic and other effective luxury branding could be a thing. The great lakes and the intracoastal waterways connect markets large enough to support it, and companies could in effect audition products for it. Doing sail deliveries could be a way to offset the cost of a sailing trip as well.
Craziest idea ever.