Simple idea cuts cargo ship emissions by 17.3% in first trials | Hacker News Reader

Simple idea cuts cargo ship emissions by 17.3% in first trials

newatlas.com

36 pointsbelter22 comments

I've driven my car like this on occasion, preserving fuel by timing the traffic signals ahead and arriving just in time for the signal to turn green. The problem is, people behind me don't understand and get all pissed off. Most people prefer to arrive at the light when it turns red, to buy high & sell low, etc. We love doing everything in the most inefficient way possible. I imagine sea captains won't like the plan much either, for similar reasons.

In this situation you're the sea captain, and there's no one behind you getting pissed off. If they're properly incentivised, as the article mentions, I don't see why they couldn't come round to it

I drive like that sometimes and have not annoyed people. I believe it reduces wear and tear too (less braking and gear changing). It might be because most of my driving is in light traffic in (and between) small towns in the English Midlands rather than city commuting.

The most common problem I have is when I slow down because I am unfamiliar with a road and cannot figure out what the right lane is or similar.

> The Blue Visby Solution requires considerable connectivity, co-ordination and participation, from lots of different stakeholders, on a global scale – but where the rubber meets the road, it's incredibly simple. It simply tells the ships to slow down, so they arrive at port right on time.

IMHO, the real motivation is cognitive load or mental effort.

It requires a lot of work just to mind the optimization. Easier to just go quickly to the stop light then wait, where you can turn off brain. Similarly with "Sail Fast Then Wait".

This is absolutely ridiculous, everyone is already trying to optimise shipping routes and the idea that the captains are not told to slow down/speed up when ports are expected to be full and/or there isn’t stuff to pick up is simply not true. I worked on a system optimising this for Rio Tinto (experience human operators were trying to figure out manually when to speed up and slow down ships). You know what would be much more efficient; banning the shipping of ore from places with resources to places without it like China. The idea that Australia should be allowed to export both the coal and the iron ore when shipping finished steel is obviously about half the weight seemed crazy to me. I’ve already saved you 50% of the fuel on most of those routes, if you could make the politics work.

I also worked for Zodiac maritime and they were working on route optimisation there too. The article makes out that everyone is sail fast then wait all the time and then straw-mans savings based on that. Fuel also isn’t the only factor especially if the ships are rented for specific journeys, ports also charge fees if you cause a traffic jam, so it’s a classic and fairly simple optimisation problem.

> export both the coal and the iron ore when shipping finished steel is obviously about half the weight

Wait until you hear about 2% lithium ore shipped 5000km for refining ..

I'm gonna blow your mind here. Read about comparative advantage. As crazy as it sounds there might be reasons for Australia to ship coal and iron while China makes steel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Sure, but if we are talking about environmental damage clearly this sort of thing isn't a great idea.

Isn't it? I think it's at possible that there's less environmental damage when a product or service is created by the person who knows best how to do that.

How much damage would I do if I tried to make a car from scratch? I'd argue quite a bit because you'd have to use 10 times the parts and energy from just about anyone else because I would create a piece of useless junk 10 times before I'd get anything useful.

If you watch someone skilled in an art there's a tendency to think you could never do it. That might not be true but even if it is the real question is what it would cost you to be as good as the artisan. What is it that you create that wouldn't get done because you've taken them to learn how and do something else?

> The Blue Visby Solution requires considerable connectivity, co-ordination and participation, from lots of different stakeholders, on a global scale

> eliminating SFTW thinking from the global shipping trade is no small task; according to Marine Log it's a practice that dates back to the age of sail. It's embedded in hard-fought, long-term contracts between shipping companies, customers, ports, dockworkers and all the many dependent services that plug into global logistics, sometimes with incentives.

So just change the entire processes for global shipping that have existed for hundreds of years. Such a simple idea.

Captains take orders from somewhere, no?

Don't shipping companies spend $MMs on fuel every year? I suspect they'd respond to incentives?

Why such a snarky comment? The article even goes into how the idea is simple, but implementation is difficult:

"The Blue Visby Solution requires considerable connectivity, co-ordination and participation, from lots of different stakeholders, on a global scale"

Given the obvious cost savings that come with reduced fuel usage, I find it hard to believe there isn't a very good reason the shipping companies don't do this already.

Chesterton's Fence

https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

Loads of things that are a good idea don't get done because nobody in a position to actually do them believed they were a good idea and followed through.

You can have pretty astonishing results if you do the work to be sure you're right and then you follow through. A really extreme example that's known to the public would be the "Big Short". Steven Eisman didn't have some secret insider info, he studied the data and he concluded that this short was the correct play. Or consider "Moneyball". There's no reason other baseball teams couldn't use these metrics, it worked, it's used today, but at the time other teams weren't doing it which gave the A's an edge.

Ocean carriers already optimize and it’s odd to have the article suggest they don’t. The company Sofar Ocean (https://www.sofarocean.com/products/wayfinder) does it in a particularly interesting way and actually has people using it, rather than a theoretical analysis of a small number of voyages

> Ocean carriers already optimize

Of course. But slow sailing is a co-ordination problem. You need an enforcer and a penalty system.

> Sofar Ocean .. does it in a particularly interesting way

What is the "particularly interesting" way? It seems like a "basic" optimizer over known data

They make and deploy their own weather monitoring buoys for weather prediction

So basically JIT for cargo arrivals, at the cost of flexibility for getting a cargo delivered /unloaded early.

Presumably the crew won't like this very much.

Much less time in port seems like quite a downgrade.

I don't think they get shore leave while waiting to get into the port.

Uh, weather is not predictable, which explains SFTW. The article talks about emissions but not about cost savings, which I think bears mention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com