350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat | Hacker News Reader

350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

untappedcities.com

127 pointsgeox137 comments

Everyone is always concerned about scale.

But I sometimes wonder if we need to scale down. Are cargo ships full of essential goods or disposable items that will more likely than not enter a landfill without seeing any use at all? We’re really good at over producing items and goods that we don’t need or use.

It’s interesting to see businesses try things like this. It might not be efficient or affordable now. But someone had to break ground and move the needle somewhere.

There’s an interesting story in a similar vein behind the publishing of the card game, Earthborne Rangers. They wanted to print the game so that it was fully compostable. Save for the staples in the rulebook they succeeded despite industry veterans telling them it would be too expensive and not work. I’m glad they did it. I hope others will also try it.

This is where carbon tax helps. Having to pay the true cost of goods helps everyone make better decisions. Maybe, hopefully, it also pushes the needle towards higher quality, more essential items and hence less waste.

Yet, "make everything more expensive" is a challenging position to make progress on.

Doesn’t this just drive up the cost for the people who are already struggling to afford these goods?

It does, but it is also supposed to bring up the hidden costs of buying things in their prices, so that greener products that would do less harm would be cheaper than more destructive goods.

For example, a plane ticket might be cheaper than a train one for the same trip but it costs more to the community in the long term because of global warming.

And pollution. People forget that pollution is not just the fuzzy and far-off consequences of global warming, but also very real and immediate deaths and illnesses.

One of the solution for this would be to pay them more, by example with direct aid (coming from carbon taxes). They will then be able to chose better products or higher quality ones.

A carbon dividend pairs effectively with a carbon tax. You give people (not businesses) an equal proportion of the tax collected. People who consume less than the average end up earning more than they spent.

How is "carbon dividend plus carbon tax" different from "cap and trade"? C&T seems to have gone very out of fashion, but it also seems to me to be the most equitable approach — I don't follow this closely enough, maybe I'm missing something.

It’s similar in some ways, but very different in practice. I don’t study these things, but my understanding is that cap & trade puts a hard limit on emissions, then allows businesses to trade carbon allowance as a new sort of currency.

Carbon tax + dividend doesn’t put a hard limit, and it doesn’t establish a new currency/market. Instead, emissions are taxed at the business level and that revenue is paid out at the individual level. I like the way it plays to the strengths of our existing capitalistic system. It’s easy to ratchet up the taxes without affecting the little guy—even benefitting them. It seems easier to administer too.

It imposes the real cost of the goods including externalities. The costs will be borne by somebody, why not the consumer of the good?

It also encourages people to find ways to get goods to consumers that are more efficient.

> We’re really good at over producing items and goods that we don’t need or use.

Overproduction of essential things like food is by design as it makes a famine much less likely.

About non-essential stuff, I would agree with you.

One thing to keep in mind is that cargo ships are one of the most efficient ways of transport stuff. It is likely that any advantage from this sailing ship was lost driving the cargo to warehouse and then shipping it to destination. It is strange to worry about the cheap part of shipping and ignore the expensive parts.

Also, there are lots of disposable goods that are essential like food and toilet paper. Lots of food is shipped by container. What is the difference between a mango and an apple? Clothing is frequently shipped by container. How are you going to decide what clothing is frivolous fast fashion and what is essential?

At end of life, cargo ships are cut up into scrap steel. That scrap is then melted down and re-used to make new steel. I strongly suspect that, if you take into account the energy used to manufacture the ship, sailboats will turn out to have a far higher carbon footprint per ton-mile of shipping than normal cargo ships. Cargo ships, as dirty as they seem on a per-ship basis, are crazy efficient on a per ton-mile basis.

But all that aside, sailing cargo ships are nothing more than a curiosity. Their capacity is tiny, they are very slow, are limited in their routes, etc. And as far as I can tell Grain de Sail's business is NOT shipping. It's some sort of luxury wine & chocolates with an eco theme. I suspect the boat is just a way for the owner to have the company pay for his yachts (the boats only make 2 cargo trips a year) .

Up until WWII, Finnish shippers were competitive using sailing ships for long range bulk transport of grain, Eric Newby details one such voyage as a sailor in The Last Grain Race (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Grain_Race). I see no particular reason why sailing ships with a little optimization couldn't be competitive these days if they were back then, especially since the fuel prices comparatively is higher now.

The real kicker is labor cost per ton. Bigger ships don’t have a proportionately bigger crew. And sailboats were quite labor intensive.

Sounds like you just “created some jobs”

It’s totally possible that manipulating the sails and rigging is motorized and automated on these ships. Would be interested to see a demo of the operation of this ship.

I think the next thing you run into is height.

Sailboats are much taller than fossil fuel cargo ships of the same size. A lot of harbors have bridges in their path.

Don't know about CO², but scrapping of cargo ships is a huge polluter. Places like Alang ship breaking yard are nightmarish on both the human and environmental level.

The cost of scrapping a massive cargo to reuse its materials is going to produce an enormous amount of CO2.

Though, there are already sail technologies you can add to existing shipping. I’m amazed more haven’t been retrofitted, quite frankly.

Do you have any number that can back up your claims? And any real info about the owners having yachts? If not, you should really delete your conspiracy shitty comment

"Cargo ships, as dirty as they seem on a per-ship basis, are crazy efficient on a per ton-mile basis."

As I understand it, this reinforces the parent's comment about scaling down. Efficiency facilitates scaling up, increased demand, supply and consumption, and inevitably, increased carbon footprint and other environmental issues. The comment is not only directed at the footprint of "normal" cargo ships, it's directed at the footprint of the consumption that they enable.

When it is cheap and efficient to ship goods, then more goods will be produced, shipped and consumed; this has an enviromental impact. If it becomes more expensive and less efficient, then perhaps less goods would be produced, shipped and consumed, with reduced environmental impact.

it'll still grow to the limits of the system: impact on the environment is not unique to post-industrial civilisation. It'll saturate either way, with the same effects, just less people.

If scale down, the limits of the system might be less, lowering total environmental impact when compared with the total impact from a system with higher limits.

In the article it states they make 5 trips per year.

> Are cargo ships full of essential goods

This article is about a company transporting luxury coffee, chocolate and wine from France - hardly what I would call "essential goods". And given that coffee and chocolate doesn't grow in France, dollars to doughnuts the commodities for those products was originally brought to France on traditional cargo ships.

Totally agree with another commenter, this is simply greenwashing.

> then down through the Caribbean, where the sailboat will dispatch humanitarian aid, working alongside local NGOs. The sailboat will also restock its coffee and cacao supply on its journey through the Caribbean. That supply is then brought back across the sea to France

The current economic system optimises and rewards this kind of overproduction. That's the simple truth. As long as this is the case fighting this issue is a losing battle

>Are cargo ships full of essential goods

Yes, for any reasonable definition of "essential".

https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/countries/43/export-basket

https://comtradeplus.un.org/Publication/ITSY

Keeping climate change mitigation separate and off-topic, no, that's absurd. Hand-wringing about too much success or too much efficiency is contrary to the nature of business. If scaling down were essential, it would need to be imposed by consistent regulation so all legitimate participants are held to the same standard. Instead, greater efficiencies, less pollution, faster transit times, and less costs are positive values to optimize for.

"Everything from Grain de Sail brand fine chocolates and organic coffee to cosmetic products, wine, and French fashion house luxury goods were on board."

So luxury stuff that no one really needs to get from the other side of the world. There is nothing environmentally friendly about useless stuff shipped from a country 10.000km away. Cocoa and coffee obviously doesn't grow in France, so it already came for somewhere else very far away. Cosmetic products are either a scam or available locally, those are chemicals or plants that don't grow in France.

“We must change our mindset to products that last longer and generate less pressure on the environment.” Yes, so no luxury goods across the oceans. More local stuff.

That's textbook greenwashing. (full disclosure, I'm French, never seen a cocoa or coffee or cosmetic plant grow here)

You think luxury goods are the problem?

Theres 8 billion of us... Most of the population eats based on imports.

China, a billion people, only produces 60 percent of its own food. Africa, large portions of the Middle East survive on imported grain. Hell what started out as aid to Nigeria is now a delicacy and part of the culture: stock fish. An African nation identifies part of its culture with a Norwegian export.

This isnt a "rich" problem the system is fucked from tip to tail. EVERYTHING needs to change, and we can do that now and figure out a way that is "fair" or we can just wait till it's fucked, and then famine and war solve the problem.

I was tracking with you till the last sentence - why is this bad? I tend to think it's a good thing that 40% of Chinese people (580 million people) aren't starving. Britain hasn't been able to feed itself from domestic agriculture for 200+ years, would you have their population halved so that they don't need food imports anymore? I don't understand.

Hasn't been able or hasn't been trying? I reeeaally doubt that the UK couldn't produce enough if they tried, they just don't because it is more expensive.

Yes, the greenest luxury good is the one which is not consumed. The second greenest luxury good is the one made with supply chains close to home.

Almost nothing is entirely local. Even with foodstuffs, fertilizer feed and other supplies has to be transported from great distances. Whether something gets to its destination in a less energy-intensive way locally depends on the product. Plus it's more land-efficient (and therefore less hard on environment) for farmers to sell to a wider area.

You can of course give up luxuries if you want, but it's a pointless race to the bottom. Emissions go up because demand goes up in the developing world, not because you ordered coffee and chocolate. And of course that surge in demand is a reflection of an improved quality of life, i.e. living more like the West.

Since climate change is a short-run imminent problem, I agree that interventions of some sort alongside the innovation race are warranted. Here though, some are more impactful and politically viable than others. There is some low hanging fruit that governments can take advantage of, such as green grants for improving home insulation, dissuading purchase of SUVs (the gas-powered ones), greatly improving public transportation and zoning reform, etc.

> Cocoa and coffee obviously doesn't grow in France, so it already came for somewhere else very far away.

From the article:

> After the ship leaves New York City on April 15, 2024, Grain de Sail ll will return to France, loaded with various goods. This is the first load of many for the Grain de Sail ll. In total, this vessel plans to sail the seas five times a year, trekking from France to New York and then down through the Caribbean, where the sailboat will dispatch humanitarian aid, working alongside local NGOs. The sailboat will also restock its coffee and cacao supply on its journey through the Caribbean. That supply is then brought back across the sea to France, where the coffee is roasted, and fine chocolates are produced.

You can find more details on their site: https://graindesail-overseas.com/q-a

Another recent case of cargo by sail that may be a bit more practical:

ESA is now sending rocket subassemblies across the Atlantic (to their launch site in French Guyana) in a hybrid ship equipped with both sails and diesel; the linked article claims the sails reduce fuel consumption by 30%.

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ar...

This could work for luxury goods if the products and the associated marketing reflects it.

It has to be on the label - “brought you by a sailboat across the Atlantic”.

I could imagine someone paying a large markup for it just like they pay for fancy wine or jewelry. As long as everyone involved in the business understands it and doesn’t drink their own kool-aid, which often happens.

This is their second boat,and they already do exactly that. So far it's been quite successful

I always thought there was a market for fleets of smaller wind powered ships for car transportation especially with EVs.

Plenty of opportunities with taxation to make this viable.

But I think we run into the issue of why cargo was centralized in the first place.

They are definitely promoting it, there's a list of retailers [0] on their website for the goods they transport.

0: https://graindesail-overseas.com/search-retailers

Here's an example:

"Barrels of Jefferson’s Ocean Aged at Sea® Bourbon travel aboard ships that visit ports all around the globe. The constant motion of the sea churns the whiskey, increasing its interaction with the wood of the barrel."

https://jeffersonsbourbon.com/jeffersons-ocean-bourbon/

350 tons equals about 20 40ft containers at 18 tons cargo per container (usable capacity of ~67 m³) or 14 at 25 tons per container (maximum freight weight for a standard 40ft container) or 12 at 30 ton per container (maximum freight weight for 40ft reefer (cooling) containers). The average capacity for container ships traversing the oceans is around 5000 20ft containers (TEU) or 2500 40ft containers. That equates anything between 125 and 200 of these sailing ships for each average container ship. Most modern container ships are far larger at 12000 TEU capacity or more.

While this looks like an interesting approach for the types of cargo which caters to people who are willing to pay a premium for having their product transported by sail power - this coffee/chocolate/... was made with single-origin beans/... harvested by ... and shipped on a modern clipper - it is not a feasible solution for normal container shipping. Other types of wind-powered propulsion exist which can be used to reduce the fuel consumption for cargo ships which probably are more efficient in reducing shipping emissions than having large fleets of these 'freight yachts' traverse the seas.

Just by reading the article the impression is that it's both faster and should be cheaper (?). I get that only some type of cargo would fit or would make sense to load like this. What are the downsides?

Margins in the shipping industry are typically rather low and it's offset by scaling well with container ships of proportions only limited by the canals they must traverse. This ship is positively microscopic in comparison. I would imagine it's only cost effective for very specific types of cargo.

There are hybrid options with flettner rotors and deployable kite sails for partial fuel savings on specific routes, but it's all rather experimental.

> I would imagine it's only cost effective for very specific types of cargo

I imagine you're close to correct, but that some people might be willing to pay a premium for types of cargo that normally would not turn a profit. "Fine goods", as my local Specs puts it.

the French could keep shipping mass produced crappy cars economically on big ships, and then small numbers of cars de luxe on these bougie ships, and advertise the... "car bon offsets".

Doldrums. Hurricanes. Impulsively murdered albatrosses. Kraken.

Also pirates, undead and otherwise.

Really the list goes on.

Rum, sodomy, and the lash.

I can't believe scurvy has yet to be mentioned.

Well we have juice boxes for that now. Krakens are still a problem though.

Ha! I can see a kid's commercial for a juice box with pirates sipping on a juice box while sword fighting a Kraken attacking their ship. "While sailing the high seas, we no longer have to worry about scurvy thanks to Hi-C's vitamin C fortified juice boxes. We do still have to fight the Kraken though!" narrator voice kicks in

Please don’t tell Sora.

Pressgangs and veneral disease

Oh yeah definitely the venereal disease.

Any port in a storm isn’t a good motto for a long life.

Scale and throughput. Ships used to have cranes on deck and unload this way (look at pretty much any ocean liner, they had cranes on the forded for cargo). Containerisation improved throughput considerably, but added to latency. There is no way this is cheaper. Way more crew per tonne, the ship itself is almost certainly way more expensive for it capacity, and so on.

Not that I don’t think sailing is a bad way to move cargo, but I suspect if it does work, it won’t be small boats with crew.

> Containerisation improved throughput considerably, but added to latency.

I doubt the “added latency” part. How long do you think it takes to unload 11,000 twenty-foot container from a ship? Do you think anyone would move the contained stuff faster if it were just in a loose pile?

That used crates, but yes I think it way quicker per ship, because ocean liners in particular wanted fast turnaround times. A lot more labour was involved, obviously.

> yes I think it way quicker per ship, because ocean liners in particular wanted fast turnaround times

But container ships also want fast turnaround times. This is not a convincing argument.

It doesn't carry even a 10th of the cargo of the big windjammers of the 19th century (5000-8000 tons!).

Of course, setting aside the value of zero emissions which is their obvious selling point, it would otherwise be competing against big container ships (up to 200,000 tons!).

I assume that until they scale it for a few more generations that it'll be more a gimmick for low tonnage luxury items that just want the zero emission marketing claim. Even after scaling, I assume it couldn't be competitive for most bulk things.

Use wind power to produce methane, then use methane to power huge container ships.

Sailing by proxy.

You'll be emitting nitrous oxides when burning that methane. Use wind to produce hydrogen, use that in fuel cells. Electric propulsion units are already in use, what remains to be solved is the megawatt-sized fuel cells needed for this application at a price which makes the whole scheme feasible.

How are you emitting nitrous oxides from a synthetically produced (ie very pure) fuel that contains no nitrogen?

You’re burning it in air which has lots of nitrogen.

Long term, I agree. But we already have methane and methanol powered huge container ships. Much better than burning bunker fuel.

It may be the easier option for electrically propelled ships, several of which are already in service. Mind I'm not talking about battery-electric ships but diesel-electric (hybrid, [1]) which have the range and load capacity needed for 'serious' applications. If - and that is a big if - the requisite fuel cells can be developed they could directly drive the existing electric propulsion units in those ships, replacing the diesel generators currently in use.

[1] https://www.wartsila.com/marine/products/ship-electrificatio...

NOx is addressable through diesel exhaust fluid (urea) and catalysts; maybe not elimination, but at least significant reduction. Methane is easier to store and transport than hydrogen, and there's potential for refitting existing engines to run from cng/lng (although I think purpose built cng powered devices usually start from a gasoline engine design and freight vehicles usually have a diesel engine).

How are you going to store all that hydrogen? You need extremely large and heavy high-pressure tanks, capable of holding 350–700 bar. Methane can be liquefied and stored at only 10 bar.

Hydrogen just doesn't have the density required here. Even if you want to use hydrogen-powered fuel cells, it might make more sense to convert it to ammonia for transport and storage.

how much hydrogen do you need to store though? it doesn't make sense in cars to me, but water-based vehicles seem like they wouldn't need to store problematic amounts given that they have access to h2o

That would imply the ship has the requisite power generation on board to produce hydrogen from water, in which case it would be more efficient to use that power to propel the ship.

So, yes, the ship would have to take all the hydrogen it needs with it.

oh. I thought we were talking about sails to make electricity to run electrolysis to make hydrogen to run engines. storing enough hydrogen for an entire voyage seems prohibitive to me, but I've not done the math

There's many ways to store hydrogen ranging from 'cryogenic' to 'dissolved in ... (acetone is a good candidate)' to 'converted to ... (ammonia et al)' to 'compressed'. Ships (can) have a lot of space so that is not much of a problem. Cryogenic is probably not feasible, compressed is probably also out but in between there are many options.

Sailing ships continued to be economic into the 1930s, for certain cargoes and routes. See Eric Newby, "The Last Grain Race".

It is really small compared to the iron-hulled sailing cargo ships of the beginning of the last century. I can't find any information on the construction, but it seems like a converted pleasure vessel. Seems like a smart fit for their products. But feels more like good marketing than any kind of shipping innovation.

I can't believe the answer to environmentally friendly wine and chocolate in New York, at least for the size of the market, is really to innovate on how to ship it from France..?!

The coffee and cacao is presumably making its second Atlantic crossing too.

And wait, coffee? What are they doing, just roasting it in France? And then it's at minimum 18 days stale by the time you buy it? That's not a premium good at all, and much less environmentally friendly than if it came directly from South America, roasted in New York or wherever. But then I guess you can't label it 'French Roast' or something stupid.

Confirmed in TFA:

> The sailboat will also restock its coffee and cacao supply on its journey through the Caribbean. That supply is then brought back across the sea to France, where the coffee is roasted, and fine chocolates are produced.

So, the commodities are taken from the Caribbean region, to France, and back across the Atlantic to NYC.

Just to be clear, this is a typical sail cargo route because of the prevailing / trade winds

> And then it's at minimum 18 days stale by the time you buy it?

You generally don't want to use freshly roasted coffee anyway. It ideally gets some time to de-gas.

18 days, though, is towards the tail end of what you'd want.

https://fellowproducts.com/blogs/learn/understanding-degassi...

Sure, but something like mail order 'freshly roasted' within your local country accounts for that and you're good to go; if I come back to a bag that's 18d post-roast from holiday or something I'll definitely taste the difference from the 2-3d at which I'd typically receive it. (Not in a good way.) Paying the surely enormous premium for roasted-in-France and zero-emission-sailboat-delivered coffee in NYC just doesn't make any sense to me.

I got to see this boat when it docked in Brooklyn last year. Pretty cool setup and actually seemed feasible for shipping some things at low environmental impact.

350 tons as compared to a heavy freighter with 50,000 or 100,000 tons cargo.

By all means let's get more sail area these big guys and save that 30% fuel, yes.

One explanation is an old one, MONEY. My understanding is that for a cargo ship of reasonable size, the diesel or black oil fuel to cross the Atlantic can be > $1 million. The wind? Free. And, with a well designed sailboat, the speed can be reasonably fast. And save on the purchase and maintenance costs of steam turbines and big diesel engines and their weight.

It would make more sense to roast the cacao and make the fine chocolates in the countries where cacao is harvested if you ask me.

The chocolate has to be shipped cool, requiring more energy. That said: more and more producing countries are doing initial processing (roasting and grinding into liquor), and derivatives (powder and butter).

Processing cacao in North America means I have to pay to get rid of shell which could be brought back to farms. Hopefully one day I can buy good liquor.

Still less energy than shipping left and right 3 times

It's not clear that shipping the sugar to where the cacao is, then shipping refrigerated chocolate is any better than shipping unrefrigerated cacao mass to the North where it's milled with sugar.

Especially if you look at grid emissions in all those countries. Transport uses energy, but so do milling, tempering and packaging.

Looks to me like the same countries could provide sugar and cacao.

The end result will always have to be shipped refrigerated anyway and is consumed pretty much worldwide so it doesn't look like a decisive factor, especially as it isn't a product that needs to be aged like say, a wine or a cheese. Once it is produced it is ready to ship, no long term storage needed.

Less energy turns out to be a relatively minor consideration in the world; for example cost of labor is vastly more important.

I have wondered a lot bout using sail for shipping. If you are the shipper and you enjoy he sailing it seems like it could be a good idea. Just a way to pay for a lifestyle not a way to make boatloads of money. It would not make much of a dent in traditions shipping but more of a way to live a nice life.

all in all it's gotta be cheaper to ship time-insensitive things via a vehicle that consumes no fuel. I'm curious if they can turn around and monetize their lack of emissions thru some kind of carbon markets or whatnot

Only if staffing and maintenance costs are low enough.

The fuel burned by container ships is literally the sludge left at the bottom of the distillation vessel after all of the lighter petroleum fuels have been removed for sale. It is incredibly cheap fuel, extremely energy dense, but unbelievably dirty stuff.

Unfortunately, these ships only burn the nasty fuel in international waters so the process of getting them to pay for emissions would have to go through international maritime law, specifically MARPOL [1]. If you want an idea of how difficult that would be, check out the implementation and enforcement section of that page.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78

I'm envisioning a Coast Guard cutter type boat in the middle of the vast ocean trying to pull over a ship to issue a ticket. Of course, it's all in the style of a cartoon in my mind to compensate for the farcical nature of trying to police the open ocean

The dirtiness of the fuel has certain environmental benefits, namely the production of low marine clouds. These were offsetting the warming impact of shipping by about a third. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/marine-clouds-climate-change...

The crew consumes fuel. A large sailing vessel and a large container ship probably require a similar number of crew.

Labor cost per ton will be huge.

Relative to all oceangoing vessels, there are no large sailing vessels.

That's the point. A large sailing vessel takes the same crew and moves way fewer tons.

You have to beat 4K for a shipping container from Asia to the US.

No way.

We're so much faster these days than in the 1800s. That's pretty cool. Relatively fast boat!

With starlink we could see completely autonomous drone sailboats for shipping coming soon?

How would you secure them? Pirates have already begun to be a huge problem in particular political/economic hot spots around the world. Autonomous drone sailboats would be ripe plums just waiting to be plucked.

I think one of the biggest issues is that these drones could ostensibly be jammed from beyond visual range and then disabled and captured during jamming. This would make it very difficult to detect the perpetrators via any sort of remote surveillance.

There could be a convoy of drone ships, each with automated defensive system. The convoy would be patrolled by smaller/faster manned ships with security personnel looking out for pirates

Oh, okay. So, instead of crewing the ship, you're crewing multiple ships to go along with the unmanned ship? The logic with some just eludes me

Ok but what if we dig deeper. What does an autonomous ship afford? The space and weight savings of having no human habitation (just mechanic/engineer access for equipment maintenance at dock) would be rather large. No need to maintain human-comfortable conditions, bring water and food for the voyage, no recreational areas, quarters, corridors, etc.

In fact, the entire ship can be sealed and resealed at port so that if pirates board, they'd need plasma cutters. With no bridge, they'd need to hack the sheep instead of take over the crew.

Cargo ships are so stupidly big that crew accommodations are a rounding error in the volume. Much bigger concerns are equipment breaking down in the middle of the ocean without anyone able to affect repairs.

You could probably do a smaller crew than if you had to man all the cargo ships. I'm imagining like an ocean train

I suppose there is no reason to make an autonomous cargo ship accessible to humans.

If you they have access to it for hours-to-days, then there is no practical way to keep people out, assuming they care enough to try. Even if they have to cut through the hull, there's enough time to do it on trans-oceanic voyage.

Given time and sufficient motivation (starvation is a common one for pirates), anything is accessible to humans.

with sufficient motivation, we were even able to get to the moon! getting to the sun is still elusive though (current plans are to go at night)

There won't be fully autonomous ships for transoceanic shipping until all the maintenance can be done autonomously too. Perhaps you can eliminate most of the bridge crew, but the engineers aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Starlink is not what's been holding back autonomous shipping, wind- or otherwise powered.

Hmm, what’s starlink needed for if it’s completely autonomous? Satellite internet covering oceans has been around for a while - but the hard part of fully autonomous sailing is not a low latency backchannel for telemetry :)

Some small, drone sailboats exist for ocean research in the 2-3m range. There are some designs and prototypes for larger vessels. A lot of the actual work of the crew on an ocean crossing is fixing stuff that breaks. No real way to AI that away, and the bigger you go the more likely things are to fail.

For these drone ships, what are the operating parameters regarding weather, size of waves, etc?

This is not a method by which carbon emissions can be significantly reduced. It is essentially a marketing ploy to provide an option for virtue signaling consumers to show that they get their luxury chocolates and wine by sailboat.

I was going to start out this comment by saying "I don't mean to dump on well-intentioned entrepreneurs", but in all honesty I think I might. That is, at this point, anything that doesn't have at least a possible path to scaling up is just a simple sideshow, ignoring the massive changes that need to happen to get to a zero-carbon future. So this "use a little sailboat to ferry some expensive wine, coffee and chocolate across the ocean" may get good press (hence, the article) but it's not really a path to make any dent in our carbon dependency. I would contrast this with, for example, attempts to make "wind-assisted" cargo ships, e.g. https://www.offshore-energy.biz/worlds-1st-cargo-ship-equipp.... I'm not an engineer so I don't know if this approach will be scalable long term, but it's at least going in with an attempt to scale.

I just feel at this point that virtue signaling luxury products (affordable to a tiny portion of the populace anyway) is just a net negative because it allows some people to pretend they're "doing good" for the environment.

> It is essentially a marketing ploy to provide an option for virtue signaling consumers to show that they get their luxury chocolates and wine by sailboat.

How much more does it cost to get something delivered this way via the "bad for environment traditional way"?

The rich are responsible for a disproportionate amount of emissions. They fly more (often ridiculously more with their private jets), buy more, live in houses that take more energy than whole suburbs. If it becomes taboo for them to spend their fortunes on things that have high emissions and they're pressured to use this sort of innovative solution because of that, it may actually make a big difference.

Also, what's your alternative? Shouldn't anyone do anything just because in the grand scheme of things, it won't make a dent?

> Also, what's your alternative? Shouldn't anyone do anything just because in the grand scheme of things, it won't make a dent?

I was very clear in my alternative - I even posted a link to one such example real alternative in my post.

We should be very clear headed about the types of technologies that can actually reduce worldwide global emissions. Anything else should be completely ignored. Reducing carbon emissions isn't like cleaning up litter. If you clean up litter in your little town, you're left with a sparkling clean town, which is great, even if other towns don't do anything and look like a dump. With carbon reduction, if you find a way to reduce .00001% of emissions, it literally does nothing to affect overall climate and temperature. In fact, I think it can do more harm than good, as it is basically a way for people to pay off their conscience without doing anything that makes a difference.

It's a question of what has the most bang for the buck. Using wind to generate electricity via big wind turbines has a vastly lower cost per ton of avoided carbon pumped into the atmosphere than using wind to move very small capacity sailboats across the ocean.

This is basically pointless, but the economics of modern sailing ships can get closer than you might think. Historic sailing ships where 10x this size and carried 8,000 tons of cargo at close to the speed of slow steaming shipping. That’s only 1/15th of a Panamax ship, but 8,000 tons isn’t some inherent limit on sails it’s what you got from the technology of the time aka wood.

Modern weather forcasts, better hulls, more automation, and the economics get surprisingly close. So sure, today it’s pointless but PV looked like a dumb investment for decades before suddenly taking over the world.

Also, currently about half of marine cargo is moving fuel around the world. As that volume decreases (energy transition), along with deglobalization also decreasing marine shipments, total volume potential for sailing is much more reasonable.

Could you elaborate on why this is not a method by which carbon emissions can be significantly reduced ?

This is only the second boat of a small company, they most likely don't have the ressources to get a bigger one. At this scale, the only way to make money is to move luxury products.

IMO it's a good start.

The problem is that carbon emissions come from more than just fuel. You also have to take into account the construction of the ship, the crew, loading/unloading, and pre/post-transport.

Best-case scenario, you're looking at a crew of 4 who can transport 6x350T in a year, or 525T / person-year. Meanwhile a container ship has a crew of 20, but it can carry 240.000T, and do in the ballpark of 50 transatlantic crossings a year - so 600.000T / person-year. That discrepancy is large enough that even things like per-crew-member CO2 contributions starts to become relevant.

I'm all for decarbonizing shipping, but this boat is nothing more than a rich person's plaything. It'll contribute absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. Maybe sail is viable, but at least put it on realistically-sized vessel like [0].

[0]: https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/new-wind-powered...

I don't really understand how the yearly tonnage per person is relevant here

I recall seeing their company on french national TV a few years ago.

If I remember correctly, they didn't claim that sailboats would be able to replace our global cargo fleet, but rather that in an energetically shrinking world they would provide a (luxury) alternative to shipping exotic goods (in a lesser volume, of course).

Also I don't think that there are any ways to both conserve trade capacity and reduce carbon emissions significantly. At some point we'll have to choose which is most beneficial between importing cars from Japan and not reaching +4°C.

perfect is the enemy if the good

I was a little sad to see that this is more eco-friendly performative than a serious attempt to disrupt the shipping industry.

With advances in material science, meteorology, and automation, I’m hopeful cargo sailboats can make a comeback.

Its not actually more eco friendly than placing the cargo on a container ship.

The fuel cost for moving one container over the Atlantic on a big container ship is about 30$. A container takes 30 tons. So 12 containers could move that cargo for a fuel cost of 360$, the scale is unbeatable; both economically and environmentally.

Things like this can only ever be a type of artistic thing rather than used for real shipping.

How is 360$ of fuel more eco-friendly than 0$ ? I don't get your argument

Just cause it is a sailing vessel does not mean it does not have an engine. It probably uses a couple of 100 liters of disel to get in and out of port, driving generators and heating the boat.

On top of that the sails will degrade with time and the ship will need to be repaired and there is allot more crew and manpower needed per unit of cargo.

Everything has environmental cost in CO2 emissions, and the amount of useful work you get from a large container ship per amount CO2 emissions is insane. The only thing that can get you those kinds of numbers is scale.

According to [0], a typical container ship generate 12.5 g of CO2 per ton per km, which means that one trip from France to NY with 350T of cargo would release about 35T of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I'm convinced that this sail boat generates an order of magnitude less of that (I can't find any estimate of it)

Whatever the initial CO2 cost of the construction of this boat is, I'm sure that it's a net benefits if it's used long enough

[0]: https://www.ecsa.eu/sites/default/files/publications/2020%20...

Modern container ships are more like 3g per ton (page 5):

https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/158911010...

6000km from France to NY

3g * 6000km * 350tones / 1000 / 1000 = 6.3 metric tones of CO2.

I don't know how much disel the sail ship might use, but 6.4 tones of C02 is equivalent of 1974L of disel.

According to their own website https://graindesail-logistics.com/en/ they aim for 1.8 g off CO2 per km per ton.

1.8 is lower than 3g. If those aims are reached I guess they are "more green" than I thought. But the gain is quite small, if you truck that cargo for 160km all the CO2 savings are gone. A modern truck emits 45g of CO2 per km.

It doesn't really make sense to compare a 350T sail boat with a super tanker, a comparable diesel boat produce 36g per ton per km(according to the same report), the "grain de sail II" aims to replace those, and the gains are huge.

Well that comparision is what we were doing here.

There are market niches for many things that target things that are impractical for various reasons. There is nothing wrong with that.

As an experienced pirate, I vow to attack this vessel and take her sweet cargo for mine own, you may depend upon it.

There is no reason to ship fermented grape juice in heavy glass bottles all around the world.

All so that snobby people can buy wine with the right label and source, so they can pretend to themselves and others that is it all about the taste¹

This is a good place for some serious climate taxes.

A small improvement would be to ship the wine in enormous "plastic bladders" on repurposed oil tankers. Then it can be poured into bottles at the destination.

But wine can be made nearly anywhere. Even in the toilet (Pruno wine)² So you dont need a lot of expensive equipment. If grapes are an issue other fruits and veggies can be used.

Every city should be able to produce lots of it, so buying local would be easy.

¹ https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_wine_tasting#:~:text=Som....

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruno

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