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Labelling products that used these low carbon sail methods would be a product differentiator for the commodities they shipped. A great lakes trading route for regional craft products shipped by sail would be super interesting as well, especially for breweries and distileries.
A retro "platform" company that facilitated this and authenticated the cargo with labels akin to a fair-trade/organic and other effective luxury branding could be a thing. The great lakes and the intracoastal waterways connect markets large enough to support it, and companies could in effect audition products for it. Doing sail deliveries could be a way to offset the cost of a sailing trip as well.
Craziest idea ever.
This would be super neat. There's got to be a big enough cross section of craft product business owners & sailors that would at least have interest in buying into this.
250+ craft breweries just in Ontario: https://www.ontariocraftbrewers.com/FactsAndFigures.html
Then there's Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, and that's not including the St. Lawrence seaway that has Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, then New Hampshire and Vermont. Intracoastal you can't really sail, as it's motor power, which would be off brand, but enough in the region to try it anyway.
20+ distileries: https://www.ontariotravel.net/en/social/blog/article/8903
By linking it to the low carbon footprint of sails and the geography of the waterways, the brands would be relatively resistant to pressure from globalization given it's a luxury environmental product. I know people in both sailing and heavy industry logistics who would think this was nuts, except.
Depending on trade treaties around these products, we could probably get exceptions to them on environmental grounds. Ideally there are some existing tariff protections or something that keeps these craft companies out of each others markets already that we could use the environmental path as an exception.
Some do this and you can see the route the product took
Literally the thing we're talking about, amazing it exists.
Interestingly enough, there were sail-powered cargo ships well into the 20th century[1], hauling bulk cargo for cheap. The crews were severely underpaid because some countries still had various licenses that required commercial sailing experience to get.
The boats could sail from Austrailia to England in 3-4 months.
Not sail freight but in a similar vein, the flettner rotor is pretty neat:
That's fascinating - and kind of what I was hoping this article was about.
That lead to the E-Ship 1 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1) - a wind turbine servicing ship with 4 Flettner Rotors.
There's a detailed breakdown of that ship here: https://www.stg-online.org/onTEAM/shipefficiency/programm/06...
That paper gives some interesting numbers - in one voyage spinning the rotors gave a speed boost of 2.4 knots with a constant power going to the propellers, which they calculated as a 1.7MW power boost (engine was running at 2.8MW). Overall the rotors give - with favourable wind and sailing direction - a maximum of about a 50% fuel reduction.
Obviously actual performance was much worse (you often want to go where the wind isn't blowing) - for the test voyage they used around 85% of the fuel they would have without the rotors.
If you like this stuff:’one of my all time favorite books is “The Last Grain Race” by Eric Newby. He signed on as a sailor on the Last sail shipment of grain from Rotterdam to Sydney in 1939 (just as WWII was breaking out in Europe). As is typical for him he knew nothing about sailing when he signed on. He’s a great writer and it’s an exciting story.
Another good one is "A Man for All Oceans" about Joshua Slocum. Slocum was the captain of several large commercial sailing vessels in the late 1800's before his famed solo trip around the world. Over the course of his life he also witnessed the transition of commercial shipping from sailing ships to steam ships.
I'll add to the list:
Voyage by Sterling Hayden
It's a book about a South Easter ship doing a coal delivery from East to West coast of the USA via Cape Horn. The book doesn't seem to be very popular, but IMO the most vivid depiction of merchant navy under sail, written by someone who lived it.
Wonderful fey footnote about the word "fok" and "fokking" -All my WWII escape books from this era have solders saying "mucking hell" for much the same reasons...
Thanks for the recommendation. I really enjoyed "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush" by him some years ago.
The whole book is hair raising and hilarious but the very end when they run into Thesiger is unforgettable.
Most of these seem pretty gimmicky. I love sailing, and I'd like to see a reduction in the carbon footprint from sea freight, but it's already pretty low per-pound. It's certainly better than flying cargo.
The total footprint from sea freight is high (3% of global carbon emissions), and the fuel they use is terrible in other ways (it's dirty and carbon isn't the only bad thing emitted). It can't be replaced by sailing, though. Maybe if someone creates a sailing megafreighter, but not by schooners or smaller vessels.
Of everything on that page, the Kwai seems the most pragmatic and the least gimmicky; it's a large vessel and operates in an underserved market. While Tres Hombres is also a large vessel, trans-Atlantic freight is just a silly market to operate in. That's a gimmick to sell expensive "fair trade" goods to niche markets. People are paying a premium to absolve themselves of consumer guilt.
Not as impressive as going fully wind or solar powerered, but there are some initiatives to improve fuel economy by using kite, for example airseas [1] claim to get a 20% improvement with an autonomous kite, and what seem to be limited fitting cost (couldn't find a number).
Interesting design choice to make a giant header video and start it off with just watching a dudes butt as he walks into a room.
It literally could be replaced by sailing, but would be much more expensive, more human-labor-intensive, and less efficient. But it's entirely technically feasible, especially if motors or tugs are used for harbors and channels.
The largest bulk carriers would need to be replaced by almost 10,000 of the larger of these ships, and 400,000 of the smallest. There are no commercial ports capable of this transition. It's not technically feasible if it would take years to load and unload.
Basically all sailboats that go out on the blue water have an engine for safety reasons.
Paolo Bacigalupi's shipbreaker novels and The Windup Girl take place in a post-oil future with fleets of high-tech clipper ships. The ships transport freight and people around the world using high-altitude kite-like sails.
Eliminating or mitigating the use of bunker fuel could be impactful towards reducing harmful emissions. The use of conventional sailing power is not.
In 2015 cargo ships transported 70 trillion ton-kilometers. The largest vessel here displaces 45 tons, so how many sailing vessels and sailors able to work for such low wages do you need to make a dent?
I was surprised to see that most of these are traditional sailing vessels, which as you note are not practical at large scale. With all the advances in competitive sailing technologies (eg solid wing sails), it would be interesting to see how they would translate to making a more efficient sailing vessel for hauling freight.
There are a couple companies that tried to chase "wingsails to assist freighters" as a concept. It seems there just wasn't enough interest. Bunker fuel is too cheap.
well at least one of them was a non-sail cargo ship that has been converted.
Do you need sailors or fleets of autonomous sailboats?
Sailboats are complicated. Who's going to fund the development of an autonomous one of the above size?
I can buy this ship for ~4M USD https://www.oceanmarine.com/detail.cfm?5280%2DDWT%2DRORO%2CG...
Then transport 5,000 tons from Newark to London in ten days with <10,000 USD of bunker fuel.
Bunker fuel is very very cheap. I don't see how you can compete on either the fixed or variable costs with conventional shipping in the current regulatory regime.
An added issue with a flotilla approach is the decreased ability to handle sea state, which impacts the costs for insurance/LOC for shippers, as well as the useful coverage with respect to routes and seasonality.
This would be interesting.
Let's say you made a boat that could hold 4 standard cargo containers. Sail powered, solar electric + batteries. Fully autonomous. Then have autonomous loading and unloading of containers as well. Build a fleet of boats.
The beauty of it would be zero waiting. Boats are always ready to take the next container, and loading takes only 5 minutes, then it leaves right away. Even if it were slower than standard container ships, it's always moving.
This is interesting.
Not sure about the economics of this though. Sailing seems like slow way of transport and may have higher cost because of more human crew. Why would any business opt for this service unless there are no alternatives? Am I missing something here?
But I see the appeal as a tourists. I would love to travel in one of these beauties.
Slow is the wrong word, I think. Big container ships don't necessarily move a lot faster than sailing ships, since speed = fuel usage, which is a big cost in shipping. A big modern container ship might cruise at half it's maximum speed for this reason.
The main thing is modern container ships are much, much bigger than any traditional sail ship, which drives down the cost per shipped item. This particular article shows wooden ships with (I assume) comparatively big crews as you say, and I don't think those will be taking over international shipping again this side of a major economic downturn, but that doesn't mean that sail as a method of propulsion can't have a role to play in sustainable shipping.
You could construct sail ships with modern materials, and it's certainly possible to automate them to keep crew sizes down. I imagine you'd need a lot of fabric to move the Emma Mærsk when carrying 11,000 20' containers! But sail doesn't have to mean traditional methods and materials.
It might not be practical to make ships exactly as large as with fossil fuel propulsion. But if we're serious about efficiency and sustainability, in this and many other cases, we need to take a serious look at using renewable energy directly, rather than converting to electricity for storage and then back to kinetic energy.
Seems most businesses in this space don't compete on price for bulk goods. They compete on sustainability, similar to e.g. people buying Fairtrade coffee even though it's more expensive than "normal" coffee.
Also sometimes they have other non-freight income, such as only a few of the people onboard lift a salary, the rest are trainees paying for the privilege of working on a sailing ship, or even passengers.
You can of course claim that this is just a daydream of hippies, and it can never scale up to provide anything near the cargo carrying capacity of the current shipping industry, and you're probably right. So what?
Fuel costs will increase as we transition away from fossil fuels, so the competition may be against other forms of non-fossil fuels changing the equation somewhat. (Unless we decide to give up on mitigating the climate crisis, in which case global unrest will probably make it a moot point)
I've read that ammonia created from hydrogen & nitrogen using electricity from wind turbines is currently the predicted shipping fuel of the future. A less romantic way to harness the wind but rather more practical sounding. Less chance of being caught on a lee shore too.
This is the boring but correct answer, particularly as diesel engines can be refitted to burn ammonia until fuel cells are ready to take over.
However, to make it geeky and exciting again you could have autonomous floating wind and solar farms generating the hydrogen and converting it to ammonia.
The ships could then refuel at multiple points in the middle of the ocean (ideally without stopping) and so carry less fuel and save on the costs of fuel burnt transporting the fuel.
Ammonia sounds very nasty. Wouldn't some artificial alcohol or other carbohydrate be a better choice?
Has anyone here taken a freighter cruise? I like my imagination of what it would be like, but I’ve no idea what the reality would be.
My conception is getting to see the industrial side of ocean going transport without the amusement park atmosphere of a ‘consumer’ cruise line.
There are many YouTube tours and breakdowns of freighter passenger trips.
Interesting, but a bit old (5 years). A number of these appear to be no longer active.
A chocolate maker has a small ship under construction to transport cocoa
there's also https://www.sailcargo.org/ I know they're actively building currently.
maybe the title should get updated?
The Nordlys they mention in passing came online and was transporting goods at least up until last year.
I'm also curious about wave glider technologies.
https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/how-it-works/
It uses an under water "kite" to harvest the wave energy for propulsion.
I imagine using these for ocean cleanup. Like scooping up all the great plastic gyre debris (or whatever we're calling the floating plastic).
Remember those river clean up barges? Make ocean faring versions. Use the wave glider tech for navigation and station keeping.
Wow, so beautiful: https://youtu.be/YUtwJYVdUms?t=103
Also very beautiful, the cargo ship Kwai: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0nz6pEhn80
Huh I wonder if freight ships could be converted to become electric/solar powered
Many large freight ships are in the process of having rotor sails installed [1]. A rotor sail is basically a circular mechanism that uses the magnus effect to spin and generate propulsion.
[1] https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/norsepower-unveils-firs...
There are some experiments with solar on boats for propulsion. Most recently I saw a 40' catamaran in Canada with about 4kw of solar, replacing the sails. The owner is claiming about sustained 60-70 miles a day during the long summer months there.
The catamaran has relatively low displacement however, compared to both traditional sailboats and freight ships.
Norway has been experimenting with battery powered ferries to make short, sub-10 mile trips, with good success. The main problem they've seen is that the power required to recharge the batteries can overwhelm local power supplies, so they've added industrial size capacitors to assist with fast charging.
I don't see 700'+ container ships being converted to solar without a complete redesign/rethink of their systems. Typically solar panels are mounted above the ship, and on a container ship, the containers are craned into the hold through the same airspace that any solar panels would occupy.
I just can't imagine that a solar farm could absorb as much energy as a diesel motor of that size can output. Can someone with more knowledge on that spare some insight?
Yes, but they would be slow if operating only on solar power.