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"It's a mission-driven business, but it is absolutely a business"

A week after it set out, and a hundred miles downriver, the Apollonia at last docked at the One°15 Brooklyn Marina. A morning shower had soaked the deck and in the cabin rain gear was hung to dry. The crew looked tired but happy. What they'd accomplished was not much from a practical standpoint — unloading barrels of barley malt at breweries along the way and picking up assorted goods like grain, flour, beer, whiskey, and preserves to deliver to customers downstream — but from a symbolic perspective it could be seen as epic. The Apollonia is the first sail-powered vessel in decades to run cargo along the US coast, and while the ship and its technology are old, its goal is new and ambitious: to demonstrate effective ways to decarbonize the maritime transport industry by 2050. from The New Age of Sail [Sherwood News]
posted by chavenet on Jul 03, 2024 at 1:57 AM

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you really have to understand the Hudson
posted by HearHere at 3:40 AM

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I have a friend who spent a year sailing a tall ship around the world, and, while it was exhausting, she enjoyed it so much that she looked into getting her licenses to change careers, then took a long hard look at the pay and decided she couldn't.

I hope this group makes a go of it and are successful enough to pay living wages. Sailing has always been hard work for uncertain pay.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:52 AM

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This is neat! Especially considering the technologies that make sailing easier and less dangerous and more comfortable than in the Age of Sail. (Though it's still hard physical work for the crew.)

If these sources are to be believed, fuel costs are up to 50% of the costs of shipping, and highly volatile.

It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to imagine a market and regulatory environment in which shipping by sail is more competitive.
posted by BrashTech at 4:04 AM

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See also Mast Brothers.

"According to The Wall Street Journal, in May 2011, Mast Brothers chartered the three-masted Black Seal, a 70-foot schooner built over 25 years by Captain Eric Loftfield,[8] to sail from Cape Cod, Massachusetts to the Dominican Republic in order to pick up 20 tons of cocoa beans. On June 14, 2011, the Black Seal arrived at the Red Hook waterfront in Brooklyn where a group of deckhands and makers of artisanal chocolate unloaded the cocoa beans from the schooner. It was the first time a sailing ship had unloaded commercial cargo in New York since 1939, according to one city official.[9]"

I'm not sure whether they still use a sailing ship.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:54 AM

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Right now sailing ships are required to have auxiliary motors, which makes sense, since you can't have sailors getting becalmed. Now imagine for a moment, an unmanned sail-barge.

No crew, so no requirement for a motor. No crew, so no onboard plumbing. That means nothing piercing the hull to turn a screw. So no need for a bilge pump either. (Well, you do still need it, but it's not on semi-continuously to pump out the water coming in from the axle meets the hull.)

Now imagine a flotilla of these, tended to by a crewed flagship that is much more conventional.
The booms, sails, and rudder are remote-controlled. No need for tech bro autonomous nonsense, just plain RC control from the flagship.

Fuel costs near 0. Crew levels that are closer to what we have in container shipping. And the vessels have way more longevity.
posted by ocschwar at 5:15 AM

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I went on one of the ferries pictured in the article last summer, the Copenhagen, one of a pair that go from Rostock in Germany to southeastern Denmark. Both feature what the article calls WAPS, but which in this particular case are called Flettner rotors. They basically have a cylinder on deck that looks like an oddly elongated chimney but it spins as they travel and essentially takes advantage of the wind to save on fuel. I got one of my students to look at the current state of play with Flettner rotors and there are around 12-15 ships with them deployed globally (iirc) with lots of potential for more. They only started to be deployed from about 2010 after the German wind turbine company Enercon was looking for a way to reduce emissions from its new E-ship 1. It added 4 Flettner rotors. Several others have added them since, including the first bulk carrier to have them enabled, the Afros. The installation on the latter is interesting since all 5 rotors can be shifted from one side of the ship to the other, or folded down, to allow for different loading architectures.

I'm hoping to have another student have a look at the barriers to wider adoption this year.
posted by biffa at 5:43 AM

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That means nothing piercing the hull to turn a screw. So no need for a bilge pump either.

I'm not a naval architect, but I don't think the stuffing box is a huge failure point for these vessels? And anyways, all-electric engine pods also solve this problem though they also introduce problems of their own.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:34 AM

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I remember someone trying exactly this on the Hudson River about ten years ago. I found out about them through a Kickstarter or something, contributed to it, and met them when they docked in the Navy Yard at the end of the trip. I think I ordered some carrots and a bag of rice from a farm in Vermont or something. The plan was to keep that going, but they couldn't.

Here's hoping the Apollonia can.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:38 AM

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If it brings back sea shanties, I'm all for it. Whale-killing, no so much, but sea shanties would be awesome.

This sounds like a neat idea - especially for things that don't have to be there right-the-hell then.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:54 AM

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There are a lot of sail freight companies quietly working on this, I suspect it will be a common sight within five years. Sail Cargo in Costa Rica have a 25 tonne ship in the works.

I've heard rumours of a timber freighter like Sail Cargo's being contructed in Indonesia too, but nothing found on the web.

biffa Flettner sails are also being installed on ships as auxilliary power. Norse Power has installed sixteen since 2014, with at least four being built at the moment, ship builders are also building ships so they can be easily retrofitted for Norse's sails. These are ships in the ~20,000 tonne size and downwards, but they have projects in the works for 100K tonne plus.

Discussion on sail freight with many projects large and small mentioned at Sailing Anarchy

BrashTech, re costs of shipping fuel, in an article on the elegant Canopée (built to ship rocket compoennts for Ariane). I don't know what the sail type is, like a vertical furling wing, and again it's to reduce fuel use not replace in, but this seems a sensible business model, and test platform all in one unit.
posted by unearthed at 10:37 AM

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APRIL -- 2050
APOLLONIA IS KING OF SOUR BEER MASH
ONLY THE HUDSON STANDS BEFORE THEM
OCEANS ARE NOW CARGO FIELDS
posted by credulous at 1:11 PM

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Sure, this is romantic but the article itself says that the economics suck.

This is never going to be commercially viable. Conventional shipping is very, very cheap. Sail is slow, unreliable, has higher labour costs, and higher costs to build ships that only carry small amount of cargo. Cargo by sail will never be anything other than a niche.

So what's the solution to lower-carbon shipping? It's lower-carbon fuels for conventional ships. There's three options: electric, methanol, and ammonia.

Electric will win for coastal and regional as batteries keep plummeting in price. COSCO in China just launched a 10,000 ton coaster running the 370 km Shanghai to Nanjing route. Batteries will win for all routes less than maybe a 1,000 km. That's a huge chunk of the market - everything in the North Sea, the Baltic, north-south in the Med, all river freight, China-Korea-Japan, etc.

Intercontinental means liquid fuels. Methanol is the easy one. Maersk is building 18 full-size methanol-fueled cargo ships with the first in the water in 2026. These will carry 9,000 shipping containers each with two-thirds less carbon emissions.

Ammonia has the potential for higher carbon savings. It's harder to burn than methanol so needs modified engines but we know how to do that. The first big ammonia ship is being built now - it'll carry 800 shipping containers and should be in the water in 2026.

These technologies are going to decarbonise shipping. The faster we roll them out, the better. That means stronger incentives and regulations to end fossil fuels. Not getting distracted by solutions that will never be viable.
posted by happyinmotion at 2:01 PM

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Having read Two Years Before The Mast (which I highly recommend and it's free via Project Gutenberg), I would not want sail as it was back. It was very dangerous for the crew. Romance aside, people die aloft from blows, from falls, from simple cold, by drowning.

I can see a role for modern automation - I'd suspect a lot of what the crew did in an old sailing vessel could be done by servo motors and computer controlled, and the danger would be confined to emergency repairs at sea. That'd cut down the labour cost a lot too. Maybe some kind of halfway between wind turbines to generate electric power and the three masted schooner is possible.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 6:00 PM

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The economics absolutely work for wind-assisted shipping, at least. The business model is still a work in progress.

Much like a rental apartment, fuel costs for a ship are paid by the company whose cargo is filling the ship, not the ship owner. The ship owner doesn't payfor fuel but pays for equipment and crew, and therefore lacks an incentive for efficiency.

This economic arrangement has stalled out the use of fully automated kite power assist, which can be added to an existing large cargo ship to save 20% of the fuel cost. The initial startups in the space, like Skysails and Cargokite, proved the model. Now Airbus has a kite power company (Airseas) and the political heft to hopefully make the business case work.
posted by Headfullofair at 8:28 AM

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Transport can be decarbonized, all of it. Even if the result were 80% as fast and 80% the rage and cost double, (which it doesn't) we could adapt quickly if we choose to. We've all been forced to adapt to 50-100% higher prices, declines in quality, and all sorts of other inconveniences due to war, pandemic, and the new poverty.

Once a functional green alternative is present, the world destroying practices should be outlawed. Let sail power shipping firms compete with each other, but why force them to compete with firms that poison us? And as commenters have noted up-thread, the new age of sail will have all the technological conveniences of better maps and navagation, coms and metallurgy, and the possibility of auto-pilot on the seas is appealing.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 10:47 PM

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