Sailcargo
sailcargo.inc
sailcargo.inc
Maybe I'm wrong and people will pay absurd prices for coffee that's been shipped "green" and carbon free on a sailboat.
Perhaps, but the economics aren't the only side, there's also the total impact. While there might be a profitable business in this idea, is there a real positive climate impact as suggested, or would the effort be put to better use on projects that can scale.
Edit: this is a huge deal for seafood in my opinion because your total fuel is impacted by the need to maintain a balance between range and what you dedicate to running walk in freezers on the ship for your catch.
Uphill battle...
Otherwise I would be surprised if you could even make a good faith argument that this will be commercially viable.
As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, shipping a 20ft container from Shenzhen to Los Angeles is about $1200 and takes about 14 days. Assuming you can sail at the same speed, and considering this sail ship has a capacity of about 10 containers, that is a revenue of $24000 / month. In reality you'll only be able to sail 100 to 150 miles a day, so crossing those 6500 miles will take you to 43 to 65 days - or a revenue of $5100-$7800 / month.
How are you going to run your ship for that little, considering you need 12 crew (and 12 additional "guest crew")?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_E-class_container_ship
It seems like ~ 1 gallon of fuel per day per container
shipping across the pacific is 15-30 days, from asia to europe is 30-45 days.
seems pretty efficient, per container.
Probably dwarfed by the costs of getting the container to and from the ship.
Even if you compare fuel usage against inland barges, which capacity-wise are much closer, they use something on the order of magnitude of 25 metric tons of fuel every 2 to 3 weeks or so, depending on cruising speed and number of stops of course. Assuming about a 208 TEU capacity, and 1.8 tons of fuel a day, that'd be roughly 2 or 3 gallons of fuel per container per day.
People tend to really underestimate how ridiculously efficient ships are per unit of cargo shipped.
Realistically, if you want to make a difference in emissions right now, figure out a way to move inland shipping (the port-to-actual-destination leg) from trucks onto trains and barges, only doing last-mile trucking. I don't think the barrier to that happening is actually technical, nor is it financial because those modes tend to be cheaper. The economics around these modes of transport are well established. It's primarily that they are slower, so you tie up a lot of cashflow into goods in-transit.
Because the cost of shipping is so low relative to the cost of the goods itself, it typically does not make sense to save pennies on the transport while tying up serious cashflow for longer. I'm honestly surprised there is no financial institution that has made a financial product around financing the cashflow gap created by greener modes of transport: the pay-off is predictable, and the risks are low.
It's a great plaything though!
(Sent from my narrowboat)
So I don't see how food factors into this. It doesn't really matter if they're eating at another job on shore, or eating while crewing a ship.
I might be able to buy that "actually, wooden ships are a good idea", though it's going to be a hard sell.
This company appears to be trying both at once though, that strikes me as a quite unlikely to be a good business decision - unless there is some synergy between "wooden ship" and "sailing ship" that I'm completely missing.
That said, I know very little about the industry.
1: https://spectrum.ieee.org/michelin-puffy-sails-cargo-ships-i...
Then again, I guess the same applies to old sailing ship and they figured it out. It just boggles my mind.
There have been auto pilots for sailing ships and motorized ships for decades, it's nothing new. Ocean sailing is usually keeping the same course and sails for days.
They started with buying an older ship from 1909 and improving it. Now building a similar one from scratch. I think these iterations fit the startup mentality of just starting and continuously improving.
There is a plan to eventually build a container sailboat [0], but it's just a rendering. I could be wrong, but I'm getting strong "just ~~give us your money~~ invest and we'll totally spend it on container ships" vibe.
I don't like sound too negative and would love to be wrong.
Otherwise though it's an elegant idea. It would be pretty cool to see more wind powered ships
Things that don't fit in containers basically.
Often its roll on roll off rather than crane.
So there are non container options but if they could use containers for break bulk they would so the efficiency of this is probably not very high.
I think if you want to make an impact in cargo environmentalism, you need better power sources. I'll admit I've only just seen how much power we're talking about. 12MW to move a large container ship. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe we should buy less tat from the other side of the planet.
According to the below link, trash per human per day ranges from:
0.74 kilogram but ranges widely, from 0.11 to 4.54 kilograms.
That ship carries more than a human makes in waste in a lifetime, but not by a huge margin (if you are in a wealthy country). That’s rather depressing.
https://datatopics.worldbank.org/what-a-waste/trends_in_soli...
There is enough oddity here that it sniffs a bit like a scam to me. Perhaps unintentional. Probably because they have a proper businessplan and I dont yet understand it.
You would need something small, low volume with a giant markup run by someone willing to pay a huge premium for virtue signaling. (or something else the US market really craves from Columbia)
>. Crew 12 crew + 12 guest crew
They also need a supply of people who wish to work for free (?) since free workers make up 50% of the crew?
Using wood to construct the boat does not seem like a sensible idea apart from the optics.
Are there any laws governing the safety of merchant cargo vessels? I would want a proper engine for this thing.
But perhaps they will always sail close enough to shore that they won't need more than what they have.
Which may indicate that delivery times might be less predictable than other freight and the danger of loss higher.
Insurance costs might become a problem.
"Sorry we will be two weeks late due to weather"?
Perhaps I should get a startup going providing cargo services with copies of old viking ships? Renewable power, either ship or oars. At least one allegedly made it ot the US and back.
On raids they often came back with a ship filled with loot or so I think I have heard.
Dont trust me on this.
I believe this was the first big use of insurance too, sailing cargo across the world in ships.
Take the average person's footprint of 7co2-ton/yr, math that out with the 80 ton cargo capacity, the short daily distances ~250km/day, 14 crew, and you come out with about 12g-co2/ton/km just for crew for these schooners. easy to see another 4g-co2/ton/km being in just upkeep for a vessel of wood and canvass. So yeah if someone wants to virtue-signal, then go for it ship your stuff this way but don't think you are actually netting out a smaller carbon footprint then a container ship here.
https://www.youtube.com/@SampsonBoatCo/videos
I’m on a mission to rebuild a 1910 English sailing yacht called Tally Ho. Designed by Albert Strange in 1909, she is a well-known and important historic vessel – but after many adventures she was left in a remote port in Oregon to rot for decades, despite some valiant attempts to rescue her. I bought her and moved her to the Olympic Peninsular earlier this year, and am now rebuilding her from the keel up. Eventually I hope to sail her back to the UK.
Edit: The question is a little facetious but I’m really interested in the technology here. Sailboats aren’t what they used to be, and while building then as they were is charming there is nothing practical about it. And, yes, I actually know my “futtocks”.
Sailcargo's under-construction flagship can carry 9 TEUs with a crew of 24. So replacing a single Panamax cargo ship means building around 560 of these ships, which will sail with a crew of 13k people.
(Or to put it another way, carrying 9 TEUs might earn you $10k for a trip at current cargo rates. Let's assume you can double that due to charging people a green premium, that's $20k a trip. At traditional sail speeds, you can earn that every 2 months, meaning each ship earns $120k/year, which needs to pay for building the ship, maintenance, food, power, sattelite internet, salaries, etc. With a listed crew of 24 people, that's $5k of revenue per person, per year.)
This isn't remotely economic or scalable, but I'm not sure it's even better environmentally. The amount of resources (especially lumber) that would go into making a fleet of almost six hundred, 150ft long sailing vessels is immense. And then youi think about the cost of having 13k people sailing around - the salaries, the food they'd eat, the medical care they'd consume, the waste they'd generate. And all that to replace just one of the smaller cargo ships still operating, out of the thousands and thousands operating.
There may well be a lucrative niche here; people will pay money for the damndest things! It's entirely possible you can make good money charging people to LARP as a 19th century sailboat crew, sure, why not? But whatever this is, it's certainly not the future of cargo shipping.
(Now the idea of using wind power on cargo ships is potentially promising. Just...not this kind of ship.)
Edit: I should emphasise, the ships they're building and planning to build use quite a lot of of very old trees. You're not building these things from radiata pine! Sailcargo stresses they're using lumber from sustainable forestry, which is great, but they're building one schooner, and replacing just a dozen container ships means building maybe 8,000 schooners. If you were hoping to have them operating anytime this decade, you're going to need to start clearcutting. But it's okay, you can use the land you clear to build the training schools needed for the 200,000 new sailors those ships will need. Because there absolutely aren't 200k crew who know how to sail a tall ship just waiting for a call.
Oh, and in case anyone was thinking, "well, maybe we should just ship less cargo", shipping freight by sea is actually the most environmentally friendly option. If sending cargo by sea becomes more expensive - and it would have to, given the economics of these ships - cargo will start being sent by land or (even worse) air. That does mean you'd need to build fewer schooners, but unfortunately means the environmental impact would be even more negative on balance.
I do love the idea of seeing the the Port of LA swarming with tends of thousands of tall ships. Aesthetically it sounds amazing! But in reality it couldn't possibly work.
I urge folk to consider why folk would come from around the world to help build and sail these ships. We build container haulers to live but there are folk that live to build sailing ships.
Please compare the sails, antifouling, boat paint per load compared to a container ship, its much uglier than you think when you compare it to a big size petrol container ship! Just do the math! Its has more a symbolic "green thing" character, which is good! :)
Even an automatically controlled boat is too expensive concerning insurance, fire and so compared to a megaboat with a small amount of people.
It is, and it’s still pretty fast and cheap.
I was under the impression that vessels of that relatively small size can get lost at sea in storms with huge waves when traveling between continents.