Sail Freight Projects Around the World
sailingdog.org
sailingdog.org
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.
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.
20+ distileries: https://www.ontariotravel.net/en/social/blog/article/8903
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.
> 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.
They are one the way to build a more modern ship https://www.towt.eu/voilier-cargo-towt/?lang=en
The boats could sail from Austrailia to England in 3-4 months.
That lead to the E-Ship 1 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1) - a wind turbine servicing ship with 4 Flettner Rotors.
There's a detailed breakdown of that ship here: https://www.stg-online.org/onTEAM/shipefficiency/programm/06...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/carrier-capacity-cuts-send...
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.
seriously look at these things
I can buy this ship for ~4M USD https://www.oceanmarine.com/detail.cfm?5280%2DDWT%2DRORO%2CG...
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.
i expect that if some of these ships show a decent profit, they will eventually be able to build a new ship on their own.
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.
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.
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?
Some numbers here (Esp concerning energy density etc):
https://sea-lng.org/our-work/comparison-of-alternative-marin...
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.
My conception is getting to see the industrial side of ocean going transport without the amusement park atmosphere of a ‘consumer’ cruise line.
maybe the title should get updated?
https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/how-it-works/
It uses an under water "kite" to harvest the wave energy for propulsion.
I imagine using these for ocean cleanup. Like scooping up all the great plastic gyre debris (or whatever we're calling the floating plastic).
Remember those river clean up barges? Make ocean faring versions. Use the wave glider tech for navigation and station keeping.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/norsepower-unveils-firs...