The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind | Hacker News Reader

The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind

gcaptain.com

193 pointsgumby136 comments

As both a sailor and a wingsail designer, I've followed this space for a long time. I've gotta say this is just one of the thousands of trial PR announcements for different companies which develop something and think it's gonna save the world.

https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

We've been seeing these every other year or so ever since the walker wingsail back in the mid 80's:

https://www.change-climate.com/Transport_Land_Sea_Sustainabl...

As to why they are never successful, I don't exactly know. Most of the companies that put these on trial just quietly retire them without adoption, and never explain why. It's not about ease of use, plenty of designs have near 100% automation and simple design. It's not really about maintenance, plenty of designs have almost maintenance-free design as well.

My best guess is that sails/wingsails/rotorsails have inherent height, which interferes with bridges and gantry cranes, and requires furling/stowing capabilities which them makes the systems a lot more complex. My next best guess is that in order to get meaningful propulsion, you introduce heeling, which is bad for container ships and potentially catastrophic for dry bulk.

My understanding was that it was not just the height but also the deck space and depth (the vertical sails have to extend down through the decks). Giving up that much cargo volume (in addition to issues at the dock you note) is not worth it.

Unpredictability. The sails do reduce costs/fuel but they do so in a rather unpredictable manner. Cargo hauling is all about rigid scheduals and precalculated costs: contracts to deliver at an exact time and load an exact amount of fuel. Unpredictable elements, even if on average mostly good, do not mesh with that culture.

Delivery at an exact time is of course a constraint, but I’ve never seen any sort of constraint on the exact fuel usage. This isn’t anything like aviation where excess fuel has to be dumped in order to land safely. If you don’t use the fuel for your voyage, you just fill up less for your next voyage. Weight effects are countered via water ballast, as they always have been.

And sails for power augmentation do not complicate timelines at all. If there’s not enough wind, you use more fuel. Nobody has meaningfully proposed relying 100% on wind propulsion.

It's not about schedules. These things don't change when you arrive; they change how much it costs to arrive and how heavy you arrive.

So the only logical explanation is that they don't do that by enough to be worth installing and maintaining, or for fuel market systems to adapt to an amount of oversupply.

The industry clearly adapts to an amount of undersupply; ships are fairly often going to burn more fuel than the route might ordinarily need due to being held up or weather or the need to reroute, are they not? So it doesn't seem implausible that the market would adapt to this; it's going to average out quite quickly. It is presumably therefore about the juice not being worth the squeeze.

This doesn't rule out illogical explanations.

(Belated edit for clarity)

Heh, I work for a freight forwarder and spent half the day yesterday explaining to customers that the margin of error on their containers is currently between 1 to 2 weeks.

Not sure where I've read this, one of the main causes is supposedly ship ownership. Firms that operate ships pay for the fuel and would benefit from the retrofit for some specific routes. Outside a few that operate their own fleet, most are rented and mounting something expensive for no benefit to themselves and questionable benefit outside of areas with trade winds would be pretty idiotic from that perspective.

What would make it successful is some kind of mandate for a certain percentage of power needing to come from wind. The invisible hand of the market keeps burning the cheapest thing all day long if you leave it to its own devices.

The bottom line is though that cargo shipping is a time sensitive thing in today's world and wind does not cooperate with timetables. Saildrones and sailing yachts are the only good fits for it, since neither is in much of a hurry. Commercial shipping probably needs renewably generated biofuel to run carbon neutral and still function as we know it.

> in order to get meaningful propulsion, you introduce heeling

I think that in order for this to work we would have to take on more traditional downwind trade routes, which would avoid a lot of the traditional heeling

If anyone else was confused why those pictures were of giant tubes and not canvas sails, you are not alone. Apparently those are some version of "Suction Sails". The vendor's website has a graphic that explains it, though it was fighting my ability to scroll.

https://bound4blue.com/esail/

Possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship ?

Most of the sails in the article seemed to be rotor sails, but the suction sail mentioned by GP seems to be a type of turbosail.

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

interesting that the rotor sail principle can be used with planes too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_effect#In_aviation

(can't help but think "tilt rotor" of a different kind)

The rending of the Maersk ship really strains the concept. If the containers are stacked that high, would it not block the wind going to the solitary sail?

The force is perpendicular to the sail.

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

Same principal that causes a soccer ball to bend. The magnus effect.

That is not how I read the article you linked. It says the force is perpendicular to the long axis AND airflow. And later it says the force is perpendicular to the wind.

So I am reasoning with a side wind 'on the beam' you get a force pusing forward. Which incidentally is a traditional rigs best point of sail. This doesn't appear to be the full story, since the boat in the photograph is healed over in the same way as the gaff rigged sailboat next to it, so there appears to be some sideways force too. Laterall resistance of the hull in the water will force that into a resultant force that is mostly forwards (but with some leeway) I presume.

I am supossing that when running before the wind this means the force is to one or other sides of the ships axis (depending on the rotation). The resistance of the hull to lateral motion forces this again into forward motion. But the sail is indeed being obstructed by the containers and I believe the force will therefore be diminished as per the OP, since the wind has led sail area to act on.

I am inferring all this since the wiki is light on detail.

I would be concerned that one cannot reef this kind of sail. In a storm it is going to heel the boat more, change its motion through the waves, perhaps press the bow down. Bearing in mind that on a traditional square rigger, one would lower the top part of the mast before a storm to reduce windage.

I feel a better reference would be an aid... but I'm with the op, at some points of sail the containers are in the way

I attempted to say perpendicular to the wind and failed.

There are two visually similar sails. Some are rotating tubes that generate lift via the Magnus effect and even though they create low pressure zones, those are not “suction sails”, strictly speaking.

A suction sail is a more or less conventional airfoil that houses an axial compressor to basically suck in air which causes the boundary layer to stay attached which generates lift via the same mechanisms as an aircraft wing.

From a distance and to a casual observer they’re pretty similar.

The article did mention suction sails for the Maersk Tankers, but it does seem like the bulk of the article was about the rotating tubes.

Growing up as I did in an old seafaring town, quite near Ahab's ports of call, I love the romance of the sea and I listen exclusively to sea chanties.

For low-value and bulk cargo, ships make sense, and modern computer-controlled sail trim and wind energy harvesting probably makes a great case. But high value cargo is largely today shipped by air. Nvidia wants money for its chips ASAP, too valuable to sit around non productively while being steamered. Maybe with surplus wind energy they could mine bitcoin while en route?

A sort of related topic, about 20 years ago during peak farm-to-table "buy local" fashion, the NY Times pointed out that lamb shipped from New Zealand (where is that on a map, I can't find it?) to New York City arrives with a lower carbon footprint than lamb delivered by trucks from nearby upstate NY farms, such are the economies of scale in shipping.

But now, blow me down me hearties, I look forward to dining on New Zealand lamb carried to my door by the winds of fortune!

If there was a direct and maintained electric train route + stronger food regulation in the US you could dine on fresh local produce with a lower carbon footprint.

International cooperation and trade is great, but in the US specifically the economic behemoths have used globalization to paper over the real problems that we face at home (we haven't truly invested in infrastructure in a long time, the meat we produce is rejected on health standards abroad, etc). I doubt the smokescreen will last much longer with Trump et al blowing up international agreements.

NYers dine on fresh local produce without subsidies or government interference.

Farm fresh vegetable produce is perishable and goes from fresh to wilted/rotten very quickly. It is in the capitalist interest with no regulation to move fresh produce as quickly as possible to the supermarkets and onto the shelves. Every day trucks bring fresh produce from NJ and LI and upstate NY into the city and it immediately goes onto the shelves for sale. No communist system could do it as well.

Produce is an extremely profitable segment of supermarket sales. The markups are very low (no communist could compete) but the turnover is very quick. While a can of beans might sit there a few weeks, customers love fresh produce. So hypothetically, they could make a 0.5% markup (you going to take public transit to NJ to buy produce a half a point cheaper?), but that's every week, so in a year it's a healthy 25% markup for the supermarket's annual investment. I made up the numbers to explain the concept, but that in a nutshell is supermarket economics. Maybe they mark up 2% and the annualized profit is 100%. Tiny margin, healthy profit, point made. Very efficient, happy customers, happy supermarkets.

Trucks bring produce farm to table, maybe a distribution stop. Trains are for bulk stuff and not route flexible, so it's not clear they contribute any advantage to the mix, but I love me trains too.

And it's not just NYer's, that's just an urban extreme example, every supermarket chain the the country operates like this.

> Maybe they mark up 2% and the annualized profit is 100%.

That's not how profit works. If you spend $100 to make $102, that's a 2% margin. If you do that every week, you've spent $5200 to make $5304: still a 2% margin.

You don't get to count only the margin every week, you have to count the outlay every week too...

>If there was a direct and maintained electric train route

What do you mean by this? Most US freight trains are already diesel electric. German freight uses overhead electric wires on most of the shared passenger rail network, which is great, but doesn’t make it any easier or faster to deliver freight to consumers. Are you thinking of high speed rail? Bullet and maglev trains aren’t used to deliver freight anywhere globally that I’m aware of.

Diesel... electric. Now remove the word diesel.

It reduces the carbon footprint considerably if you don't have to fill up your trains with carbon.

Perhaps I misread the parent comment, but the emphasis on that clause seemed to be on the fresh produce, not the lower carbon emissions. I don’t know how swapping out for 100% electric improves people’s access to fresh produce is my point

Diesel electric are not at all the same as an electric train network. Electric trains have a very interesting property, as they work as a grid as both producers, feeding back when they are breaking.

You made a second point, that most trains are already "diesel electric", I am pointing out, that the function is very different from an electric train, and much less friendly(and less efficient) to the environment.

No, you don't need maglev to compete with a ship sailing from NZ on speed.

But you would need maglev if you wanted to compete on energy per ton of cargo per mile. Ships are several times more efficient than classic trains.

NZ is also several times farther.

Look around on youtube how dilapidated a lot of US freight rail is.

I'm German, so I'm well used to dishing out on our railways, but at least our rails don't look like spaghetti that have been way overcooked and can only safely be driven at walking speed. And the amount of black smoke the locomotives emit when spinning up their old engines... wouldn't pass any emissions inspections here in Germany.

American diesel emission standards are famously more strict than Germany's. That's the whole reason why diesel cars aren't as common in the USA, and why Volkswagen had to cheat to pass emissions tests.

Railways have emissions standards different from road vehicles. And VW cheated because they couldn't pass European regulations, the thing is that the big lawsuit took place in the US because US courts allow far bigger monetary amounts.

US rail is in great shape. You are confusing lines that are nearly abandoned and will be soon but they can take a couple more trips for the state of US rail. US rail is in great shape overall, and very well maintained.

YouTube is not an unbiased source of information, please find a better source before making claims.

HN, where a german lectures you about emissions inspections

lol

lmao even

I'd first question whether the NY Times' accounting included the carbon footprint within NZ, where the lambs are probably raised far from the shipping piers. Then you've got the infrastructure and power requirements for freezing for the long ocean voyage. Then...

After that, I'd question local sheep farmers about how suitable upstate NY is for raising lambs, compared to NZ. And about the regulatory and business environment they face. Agriculture in the US is a hellish mess, and the great majority of its problems are caused by neither its associated carbon emissions nor by underinvesting in transportation infrastructure.

Ooh what's your favourite sea shanty, or chanty gang?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BgpBZB3Apno seems appropriate somehow

I'm not sure when the lamb chops started showing up in local supermarkets but it feels like it's recent. I dress them in olive oil + kosher salt + crushed garlic + chopped thyme and oregano, and then grill over lump charcoal.

59 different companies including mine responded to MARAD's recent RFI on nuclear powered merchant ships. Many people are realizing that wind, hydrogen, ammonia, etc are falling short for global scale shipping.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/07/2026-09...

TBH this makes the most sense. Nuclear for large scale shipping + battery electric or hydrogen for smaller distances, rivers etc.

Nuclear power is expensive enough on land. At sea it’ll never compete with any other energy source. They’ll be pulling hydrocarbons from the air before they do nuclear ships in earnest. Yes I have heard of nuclear carriers and subs, the only two useful applications of nuclear power at sea.

Russia has been using nuclear icebreakers for civilian purposes since the 50s, and has also used nuclear propulsion for other vessel types, as has the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_icebreaker

Thanks, I am pretty knowledgeable about nuclear ships and they’re only used in specific situations because they don’t care about cost for those situations. It’s too expensive for cargo and there is no training pipeline for civilian naval reactors so this idea is dead on arrival.

I’m pro nuclear tech but the economics and systems will not support nuclear for ships right now. We are barely making headway into nuclear on land these days, let’s focus on that for now.

A 5% reduction in fuel is significant, especially as cargo ships are responsible for a disproportionate share of petro-pollution. They burn the cheapest petro gunk, emitting tremendous volumes of soot and such.

Is this still true after the IMO 2020 sulfur regulations? I remember they found out that these ships were producing so much white aerosol clouds that it actually had a really significant albedo effect that reflected a lot of the sun's heat back out. When they were banned it actually temporarily accelerated warming by an estimated 0.05°C bump

Yes it is still true. Sulphur is one element only that got regulated - petrol on its own is a soup of different hydrocarbons - various chains & lenghts - every one has specific burn characteristics and optimal conditions to burn.

Using this thick soup thats close to coal, the process of burning is always far from optimal for most of them. Thus black sud gets emitted - basically unburned carbon - a huge waste financially but also ecologically as its comparable to cigarette Fumes regarding unhealthy compounds. Plus fine particle dust. Chances its toxic for marine life are huge.

Those are all externalized costs no one of the polluters pays for besides the collective life on this planet.

How can this be fair?

The argument is simply that killing marine life is less bad than killing humans.

What? Heat kills both, sulphur pollution damages both. Its all connected, always..

I'm talking about ocean crossing container ships having less strict emission standards, because almost no humans has to breathe those emissions.

Sat next to a fusion researcher once on a commuter train.

This particular line struck me: "When oil prices go up, so does money for fusion research"

Feels the same for sail and cargo ships.

Sails have an immediate operational cost reduction that should add up to a future net savings. Fusion research has no immediate benefit.

So much of our economy is local maxima and path dependencies. Plastic is so cheap because it's basically a byproduct of the heavily subsidized oil industry. When we drill for oil we always also get ethane which companies would have to pay exorbitant amounts to get rid of in compliance with environmental standards. Turning it into plastic and other petro products is a great alternative

In a world that didn't do this much oil drilling, plastic wouldn't always be the cheapest option. In fact virgin plastic is often taxed even lower than recycled plastic to encourage plastic usage

The most recent example, it's somewhat down the page at the gcaptain URL:

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

You can also sail on the Neoliner Origin as a passenger if you want to get a closer look: https://www.sailcoop.fr/en/our-crossings/north-america/

I know that freighter cruises or nontraditional ways of crossing an ocean by ship get costly quick, but looking at the prices, it adds up... You need to obtain and give them a medical clearance certificate issued in the last 30 days, you need to buy their special travel insurance, and there's a 110 Euro cost (at each end of the trip?) to take their designated taxi service to/from the ship, because regular vehicles or transportation can't approach the secured areas of the ports. It's definitely something I would still do if I had tons of extra money laying around and wanted to cross the Atlantic in a very novel way.

Huh. I live in a major UK port city and while of course the actual docks are a restricted area I don't think anybody would stop me just walking in. Indeed one of the city buses goes there - it does say that you need a reason to still be on the bus when it enters that restricted area but obviously nobody checked any of the times I've been on that bus.

I think some of the "ride sharing" people are intimidated by the scary legal notices, when we tried to leave again after looking around a possible floating venue for my friend's big party she tried to summon an Uber (or maybe Lyft? One of them) and it did not result in ever getting a ride, but we eventually just booked an ordinary 20th century style cab out of the zone (the docks are sprawling, so walking out would take ages). This whole thing about paying €110 for a special taxi seems crazy. Is this normal in France?

This seems to happen once every 20 years.

Yep. They alternate decades with the 'Airships are returning for cargo' groups.

To date, they've achieved a very high level of advancement in making a new airship that looks like a butt. Sir Mixalot would be proud.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=airship+t...

Soon we’ll need to provide proof-of-age just to look up at the sky.

I feel like I've seen that same thing for 20, 30 years now, lol

You have. That airship's maiden voyage was in 2012. The US DoD has pretty much never stopped throwing a few dollars at airship projects. They want them as long term air reconnaissance assets, but now satellites are competitive for that.

Former Loring Air Force base in Limestone Maine has been the home of airship projects of various kinds since the 2000s. I got to see a few.

I'd be down for a future of awesome looking ships and giant zeppelins gracing the sky.

I'd love to fly in a Zeppelin, too, but the problem is they are very vulnerable to the weather.

AIUI the problem is the economics are pretty unfavorable for smaller-scale prototypes due to square-cube issues (drag and thus fuel costs is proportional to cross-sectional area, lift and thus cargo capacity is proportional to volume). You'd need a very big airship to get a competitive economic niche between sea and traditional air freight, where you're faster and more flexible than sea transport and cheaper than traditional air freight.

Hmm. Couldn't you put solar panels on top for power (and fly above the clouds) + use some sort of sail when wind is available? It might be really slow, but if you can get the systems to be fully autonomous (no people needed to pilot it) and need very little / no fuel... then couldn't it become a rather cheap way to ship things that aren't urgent?

Solar panels don't have good enough power to weight ratios and aren't likely to contribute effectively.

As far as sails go, you need a second medium to act as a keel, otherwise it's impossible to get a net push in any direction other than downwind.

One will quickly discover that when you're moving with the wind, any sail is going to sag empty.

There is another niche if you make them several miles long and width. Then can use more conventional construction materials like a concrete shell. (We are of course not ready for that)

In that case they should have those giant propellers that seem to spin at a few rotations per minute

We should first build the floating cities. Some old ships welded together surrounded by styrofoam in nets with mud on top and Mangroves, lots of Mangroves... Neptune's park.

An airship made from concrete? Better off using Led for Zeppelins.

Oh, the humanity!

A very recent xkcd touched on this:

https://xkcd.com/3298/

About the same frequency the US starts a major war or oil prices skyrocket for someone else's war. 20-ish years ago was the Iraq 2 war. 20-ish years before that was Iraq 1. Now it's the unholy combination of Ukraine beating Russia's refineries and US/Israel striking Iran.

And the higher oil prices go, the more people are interested in saving oil.

You mean once every 20 months. I've seen this article several times already. I first learned about Flettners from one - fascinating devices, btw. - which is why I notice when it resurfaces again, every year or two.

There are some in actual use though, for example this rotor ship that has docked at the Port of Vancouver: https://www.nsnews.com/local-news/what-is-this-strange-ship-...

Stena claim that their Flettner rotors (spinny sails) reduce fuel use by 9%.

https://stenaline.com/media/stories/introducing-stena-connec...

They are in commercial service already on the Irish Sea.

Skysails tried, now they appear to have fully pivoted to land based power generation.

My dream future would see the oceans swarming with kite driven robotic boats that just cruise around under kite power, harvesting electricity with hydrogenerators as they go, feeding that power into a hydrolyser slowly filling some hydrogen storage unit that they drop off for sale at a port when full.

We need to start fitting nuclear reactors on cargo ships.

The technology is proven and reliable. Not to mention no emissions.

If you think about this for a minute, maybe you'll be able to form a theory for why this is already very common for military vessels, but not so much for unarmed civilian ones...

Icebreakers are not military vessels and they have nuclear reactors.

Probably initial cost is the reason this did not become something more common.

Yes, but they're also not regular old merchant ships by any means. All existing ones see to be operated by a Russian government-owned corporation.

I guess this is not exactly "cost", but also lifetime spans. A nuclear reactor can sustain a ship for about 20+ years, and that lifetime is too long for many ships, who would be headed out to the scrap yard in less time than that.

> We need to start fitting nuclear reactors on cargo ships.

That's a great idea, and it's timely too. Right now, cargo ships are being attacked in many parts of the world.

This site is really hostile to people who do any kind of javascript blocking.

I feel that I read this same story every year ?

Wouldn't it make more sense to store windpower at sea and transfer the resulting fuel to passing by ships?

I've also thought this. There are loads of offshore wind farms in the North Sea and I bet the cost per kWh at the offshore substation is a fraction of the cost compared to the same electricity once stepped up for transmission through the undersea cables to the shore, possibly curtailed due to grid congestion and then transmitted still further to the urban load centers.

If only there was a reliable, mature process to turn air\seawater plus energy at the windfarm into a synthetic fuel (ammonia or methanol maybe?) that could be then stored and used to refuel green shipping that burned no bunker fuel or diesel?

Why is every paragraph in this article at most 2 sentences long, with most of them being a single sentence?

Gotta adapt to the decreasing attention span economy.

Can we bring zeppelins back next for air?

No, they’re really not.

Turns out, sail-power scales sublinearly and, shocker, the wind isn’t a reliable source of power for the logistics demands of today’s supply chains.

We’re never going back to wind, but we will be de-carbonizing shipping either with ammonia combustion, fuel cells, or both.

Longer term I think we'll also use synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuels manufactured through the Fischer–Tropsch process. People have proposed bringing back nuclear powered merchant ships but that's a non-starter for cost and security reasons. We can keep the nuclear plants safely on land and use them to make carbon-neutral fuel.

That is insanely inefficient however. It only makes sense for transoceanic air travel, probably supplanted by synthfuel from biomass, but in the long term we will see ships powered by batteries. Far far more efficient.

Batteries are already being used for ferries but they're too large and heavy for transoceanic merchant ships. I doubt that operators will be willing to make more frequent port calls just to recharge.

... at the moment. We might find ourselves with containers full of batteries being exchanged on sea by feeder ships. Doesn't help across the real oceans, but works along coastal routes (which Asia-Europe definitely is).

The more expensive oil is, the faster the transition will have to be done. Simply because at some point, even the trash that freight ships burn will be more expensive than a bunch of battery containers and an electric drivetrain.

Oil will not stay expensive for a long time without some carbon tax. Even if Hormuz will remain closed for years production will rise elsewhere. The main reason production is not increasing significantly right now - investors are not sure that prices will stay at the current level for a long time (3+ years) and expect prices to fall before they’ll get enough to recoup investments. The longer prices will stay around $100 the more will be invested into new oil wells.

> Oil will not stay expensive for a long time without some carbon tax.

Which the EU already does.

> Even if Hormuz will remain closed for years production will rise elsewhere.

There aren't that many places outside of MENA that produce oil in reasonable quantities. European reserves are effectively at capacity, can't really build out any more. The only ones who can expand are the US but they have to ship their oil elsewhere to refine it (and in turn get refined products back), the US is only net self-sufficient but not gross self-sufficient.

Even if the US were to increase shale oil/fracking... it wouldn't help the markets too much.

> There aren't that many places outside of MENA that produce oil in reasonable quantities

AFAIK all these countries can increase production given enough investments: US Canada Guyana Venezuela (high political risk but with high oil prices the risk will be taken) Brazil

Whether the US is self sufficient or not is not that important as net production and its dynamics.

> Whether US is self sufficient or not is not that important as net production and its dynamics.

Unfortunately it is. When there is no oil coming to the US any more that US refineries can handle and process into the stuff the US needs... all the reserves and production capacity the US has don't matter. The US cannot process its own oil.

> The US cannot process its own oil.

Today? No. A year or so, with the right economic incentive/certainty? Sure.

Most US produced oil is the easiest to refine stuff. It's got some of the highest demand on the global market. Makes sense to sell it.

The stuff we're set up to refine mostly? The hardest stuff to refine. The cheapest shit out there. We can add the most value buying that stuff and refining it. It also gives a lot of "byproducts" which are useful for plastics and other things which help give even more returns per barrel.

It's really not that hard to change a refinery to go from the heavy and sour junk to the light, sweet stuff. You essentially just end up bypassing a lot of equipment that's just no longer needed, with some other changes in processes. It's very expensive and complicated to go the other way, needing lots of new equipment among other things.

If we absolutely needed to, it wouldn't be incredibly challenging to retool to refine US produced oil. It doesn't currently make sense economically for most refiners, so they don't. And even a several month hit, it doesn't make sense to retool. A persistent expected future where we just won't get that heavy sour stuff anymore, sure, they'll retool. The biggest "cost" is they'll have a bunch of expensive machines sitting unused, and a bunch of new pipe to install to bypass it.

> It doesn't currently make sense economically for most refiners, so they don't.

Agreed. And that's where I see the biggest problems. There is no economic incentive for refineries to retool - if there is a supply crunch, they can make much, much more profit with the captive audience that is the utterly car-hooked American population.

The government would have to order refineries to retool, but that is extremely, extremely unlikely to happen in the next two years. After that, maybe.

Side note: you mentioned earlier that it might be possible to extend production in Venezuela... unfortunately, I don't think that's possible. Their infrastructure is horribly outdated and by all accounts more broken than even in somewhat of a working order. And thanks to Iran blasting a lot of MENA refinery equipment, the manufacturers of such equipment are booked out - there's estimates that it may take half a decade to rebuild all what was destroyed. And the demands of Russia are further adding strain on the supplier market.

> if there is a supply crunch, they can make much, much more profit with the captive audience that is the utterly car-hooked American population.

This only holds true until the first big refinery bothers retooling, then you're late to the party and suddenly aren't in place to produce nearly as much as your competitors.

> you mentioned earlier that it might be possible to extend production in Venezuela

I don't recall saying that, at least any time recently. You must be confusing me with someone else.

I do agree with you though. Rebuilding those fields would be incredibly expensive and take a while to produce some of the lowest quality oil out there. Things would be so much nicer if relations never fell apart and the US and Venezuela kept those fields operational.

> I don't recall saying that, at least any time recently. You must be confusing me with someone else.

Indeed, sorry, didn't realize that the username I replied to had changed. My bad.

> This only holds true until the first big refinery bothers retooling, then you're otw to the party and suddenly aren't in place to produce nearly as much as your competitors.

Well... theoretically there would be an agency responsible to follow up on violations of antitrust regulations. Practically it's been toothless before the current Presidency, nowadays it's degenerated into being yet another weapon to wield. Hand the President enough money and he'll not care what you do.

The notion of using cranes to swap heavy battery packs at sea (even near coastlines) is ludicrous. Some of you guys have never spent much time out on the ocean in bad weather and it shows. Plus the coastlines along much of the Asia-Europe route lack suitable deep-water ports, and have serious problems with lack of security and infrastructure.

> Some of you guys have never spent much time out on the ocean in bad weather and it shows.

Fair point, my license only allows 12 miles and I have no intent of ever exceeding that lol.

Couldn't they use sails plus that? Are these companies advocating for just sails, or sails plus other stuff?

Sails plus the regular engines, for a % in fuel reduction that adds up at scale.

That’s exactly what they’re doing to reduce fuel usage by up to 6%.

I think it's up to 24% for rotor sails,no?

How about the equivalent of an space elevator turned 90°:

Can we built giant conveyer belts across the ocean?

transpacific zipline (don't tell musk he might start a company)

s/start/buy

ftfy

Get rich quick scheme with the catch that you'll have to deal with Musk?

Guess I'll pass

Ships are ~5x more efficient than trains so unlikely a good trade off. It would have to be a maglev to beat shipping.

Agree that it's not going to be a binary shift. The tech does look promising for at least rotor sails, but that's an improvement which also demands use of traditional powerplants to drive the rotors ofc. Still worth investigating imo considering the shipping industry is the area of the world that still contributes highest to carbon output and is sort of an "untouchable" industry due to criticality. If cheap enough this could help while we wait for e.g. "greener" fuel or other things to develop. But yeah, to underscore further, not like shipping will look like my sailing yacht any time soon.

I think it’s clear that they are not turning back to use them exclusively, but clearly are ‘turning back’ in an additive way.

Eg putting these things on ammonia powered vessel will reduce the amount of fuel needed, which is probably a net benefit.

If you had bothered to at least skim TFA, this is addressed in the third paragraph:

> The idea is not to turn modern cargo ships back into sailing vessels. Instead, these systems are designed to work alongside conventional engines, using the wind to reduce fuel consumption whenever conditions allow.

News articles to this effect have been popping up occasionally for the past 20 years at least. So the economics don't seem to stack up. At least not yet; but if oil gets a bit dearer...

They really are being built and used commercially. Probably incentives play a part in this, but their numbers are slowly increasing, so it's not totally vaporware (of course we don't need new articles every ~6 month talking about how amazing this technique is) [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship#Modern_vessels

Some of these sails claim 10% fuel reduction, which is ~5% operational cost, or ~150k per trip to spend on some tubes of metal or sheets of cloth.

Sorry, typo, and unclear. I meant to say fuel is ~50% operational cost.

I've seen a few articles about Norsepower (mentioned in the top article) validating the shipboard measurement equipment meant to confirm how much is actively being saved by their sails. I haven't seen any hard numbers on what the actual savings are, but they've had at least one ship (Chinook Oldendorff) with sails since at least 2024. So hopefully the public will get some concrete numbers on how much is saved.

Given the increasing number of companies that are mentioned as upcoming partners for actual installations, it might be that they've finally been able to convince shippers that wind power is viable for cost savings.

Is that 10% best case or average case? Also, what's the capex on the the sails, and what's the additional opex (training, maintenance)? Not trying to pooh-pooh the idea, but as said, I've seen articles like this regularly for decades, and it hasn't become the norm, so I'd figure there's a reason for that.

The issue is that when conditions do not allow they actively increase fuel consumption through windage, maneuverability loss, air draft increases and extra weight. They also increase costs through increased maintenance needs and crew training and limits on which docks can load and unload them.

We have had hybrid sail/combustion engine cargo ships for 200+ years, today they are reduced to novelty or historical status. We have been experimenting with goofy hi tech rotary sails for more than a century, and no one has really done more than make a few demonstrators for publicity.

We're not going "back" to wind, but there are vessels with modern sails already deployed to save a couple of % fuel costs. There were 9 in 2020 and are 64 now, according to Sintef. Of course kinks are still getting ironed out, but it seems likely it will continue to grow.

And yet:

  Klaveness Combination Carriers (KCC) has launched a brand-new vessel that aims to use wind technology that the company believes will not just reduce emissions, but also improve fuel efficiency on its voyages between China and Australia.

  Equipped with the first wind-assisted propulsion system in KCC’s fleet and a range of advanced energy efficiency technologies, MV Baltazar was officially launched at Fremantle Port this week

  .. According to the company, due to the ship’s trading area, size and advanced energy efficiency measures including suction sails, MV Baltazar has the lowest carbon footprint of any vessel in these trades.

~ (September 16, 2026) https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/high-s...

> de-carbonizing shipping either with ammonia combustion, fuel cells, or both.

Or methanol:

  Methanol is emerging as one of the most practical low-greenhouse gas (GHG) fuels for deep-sea shipping.

* https://methanol.org/what-fuels-shipping

* https://www.dnv.com/maritime/publications/methanol-fuel-in-s...

* https://www.lr.org/en/knowledge/research/fuel-for-thought/me...

> methanol

Currently made from crude oil in a CO2 emitting process from a finite fossil fuel resource.

And yes, whilst methanol can be distilled from wood/crops (a more expensive process), this simply cannot scale, especially if humanity wishes to eat...... You do realise a large container ship is 1/4 mile long and carries north of 18,000 TEU containers; that's 9000 lorries worth. They are big.

I think news publishing has recurring schedule for topics for filler articles, and this is just the regularly scheduled appearance of Flettner rotors.

I saw the headline, and immediately knew what it is. Always the same: headline implying sail power is back, body correcting that it's about minor fuel savings, and that some shipping companies are planning to install rotors on their fleet.

Somewhere in a cube farm that hasn't been updated since the 90s:

"This month's analytics report indicates our college educated white collar employed left leaning traffic to our properties is down over the same month last year"

"Don't worry about it, I'm having AI re-write all the green tech articles from 2005-15, it'll be back by November"

"The International Windship Association says more than 100 large merchant ships are now equipped with modern wind propulsion systems, representing more than 5 million deadweight tons of carrying capacity."

It's not much, but it's more than just planned stuff. I do generally agree with your sentiment.

Let me just check the schedule here... ah, yes, it looks like we should be getting "AIRSHIPS - HAS THEIR TIME FINALLY COME" swinging back around here in about 6 weeks. See you all then.

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