12 ms·

How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?

85 points by rudenoise 5y ago

fouc 5y ago
> The amount of cargo that was traded across the oceans in 2019 equals the freight capacity of 22.4 million EcoClippers. Assuming the EcoClipper500 can make 2-3 trips per year, we would need to build and operate at least 7.5 million ships, with a total crew of at least 90 million people. Those ships could only take 0.5 billion passengers (12 passengers and 8 trainees per ship), so we would need millions of ships and crew members more to replace international air traffic. Interesting article but I'd like to hear about other large scale sail boat designs, perhaps even mega-catamaran sailboats..
- hindsightbias 5y ago
  These people are really serious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2WKJtbm8yM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2WKJtbm8yM IDK how many forrests have to be cut down though.
carapace 5y ago
Make it big, get it up out of the water. The larger your ship is the more efficient it can be, and the less of it in the water the less energy is needed to push it. So make big big ships with really really big sails. You want the ships to fly with just the keel in the water to steer against the wind. You might think I'm joking or talking nonsense, but look up Alexander Bell's cellular geodesic kites, and Bucky Fuller's "Cloud Nine" floating city.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  Well ok. But my limited understanding of material science says no. For now at least. Material strength doesn't scale well to go "properly big big" in the sci-fi sense. OTOH, I am constantly amazed by what material science keeps managing to do, so I have hopes that maybe one day your dream will be true.
  - carapace 5y ago
    Cheers! Are you familiar with Bucky Fuller's concept of "tensegrity"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity https://mymodernmet.com/tensegrity-architecture/ https://mymodernmet.com/tensegrity-architecture/ He pointed out that the struts could recursively be made out of tensegrity structures. Or you can make them out of balloons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensairity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensairity I was being a little coy in my previous comment. The structures I'm thinking of are more like kites than sailing ships. They would "dip a toe" in the water to tack, perhaps, but they would be aerial not marine in nature. A. Bell lifted a man with his cellular geodesic kites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEA_Cygnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEA_Cygnet In any event, I hope my dream does come true one day. :) Cheers!
    - _carbyau_ 5y ago
      While not aware of the phrase tensegrity I have rarely seen various forms of "floating tables". Initial thoughts: - seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect. - could be nice from a packaging point of view. Collapsible objects, the wiki link mentions the nasa ball robot. - maybe it could shift Bill-of-Materials costs through smaller amounts of expensive extremely high compression/tensile capable materials to be offset by savings on larger amounts of cheaper other capable sections. - I am not convinced it would allow the superstructures much sci-fi requires as the basics of tensile strength, compression strength are still in play. - As mentioned in the tensairity article, if humanity could make a pressure withstanding, airtight object, say a sphere, around a vacuum with less mass than the air it displaces, we could have architectural "anti-gravity". Including an airship with a toe in the water. :-) Finally, I simply don't know enough.(Do we ever?) It looks cool and is worth investigating further. I am going to lose lots of time thinking about, checking out and printing out occasional bits from thingiverse now!
      - carapace 5y ago
        Cheers! > - seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect.- seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect. I recommend building physical models. It's hard to convey how strong and light these structures can be. Very "against intuition". :) > - could be nice from a packaging point of view. Collapsible objects, the wiki link mentions the nasa ball robot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoberman_sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoberman_sphere https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/origami-style-solar-power-20140814 https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/origami-style-solar-power-2014... Yes. :) > - maybe it could shift Bill-of-Materials costs through smaller amounts of expensive extremely high compression/tensile capable materials to be offset by savings on larger amounts of cheaper other capable sections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization Bucky again. (Kevlar tendons and carbon fiber struts...) > - I am not convinced it would allow the superstructures much sci-fi requires as the basics of tensile strength, compression strength are still in play. I'm not an engineer, but we can already build some impressive structure w/o advanced materials. Cf. "bamboo scaffolding" (DDG image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=%22bamboo+scaffolding%22&atb=v60-1&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=%22bamboo+scaffolding%22&at... ) I'm imagining swarm cellular kite robots that can self-organize to create whatever size lifting body is needed. I'm thinking about things like how to move millions of people at a time (which we might want to do due to climate change, etc.) Have you read Vinge's "Rainbows End" (sic)? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End ) There are buildings in the story that are too flimsy to stand up without active control and feedback, something like that could work with these kite-bots. > - As mentioned in the tensairity article, if humanity could make a pressure withstanding, airtight object, say a sphere, around a vacuum with less mass than the air it displaces, we could have architectural "anti-gravity". We don't have to go that far (although it would be neat if we could, diamond vacuum bubbles?) Did you read about "Cloud Nine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_(tensegrity_sphere) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_(tensegrity_sphere) I've thought about this a lot but not yet gotten my act together enough to do it. I wrote up some of it here: https://lists.sr.ht/~sforman/heliotrope.pajamas/%3C20201229033906.670AF8106BA%40smtp.hushmail.com%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sforman/heliotrope.pajamas/%3C202012290... ("heliotrope.pajamas" is my mailing list if you want to reach me in re: this stuff) Well met!
- nradov 5y ago
  I think you're joking and talking nonsense. There are practical limits to the size of a planing or foiling vessel. This is just basic physics. Adding more sail area isn't helpful; at some point it's counterproductive and actually slows the vessel down.
- nickserv 5y ago
  Take the idea just a notch further and you've got yourself an ekranoplan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan
krasin 5y ago
I hope we get rid of cargo ships that burn matter. But sails are too high maintenance to be scalable. Last year, as an experiment I've launched a tiny solar-powered boat ([1]). Ultimately, it was too small and underpowered only making ~900km ([2]) before dying. I hope to build a bigger drone boat next, hopefully with an ability to move up to 1 tonne of cargo. Apparently, it's possible, but (unfortunately) requires very delicate engineering. For bigger boats solar does not seem to scale. It appears that nuclear is the ultimate future for megaships. 1. https://imgur.com/a/eKlLCNg https://imgur.com/a/eKlLCNg 2. https://storage.googleapis.com/samofly/track/index2.html https://storage.googleapis.com/samofly/track/index2.html
- gabereiser 5y ago
  Larger sailing vessels (10m+) are actually moving towards solar + hydroelectric with lithium batteries (48v) to power electric engines and generators. Sailing with wind power uses the hydroelectric generators and solar. Motor sailing uses solar and you regen a little bit from hydro or a wind turbine. https://www.sailinguma.com/ https://www.sailinguma.com/
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    The article essentially dismisses lithium batteries as non-sustainable.
    - coryrc 5y ago
      Which is dumb, because the "saltwater" batteries have manganese cathode and titanium phosphate anode... doesn't sound radically different than lithium iron phosphate.
      - cfn 5y ago
        There were a number of fires in boats at the beginning of using lithium batteries that put off many people from using them.
oska 5y ago
Book recommendation if you found this article interesting (and haven't already read the book, a classic) : Eric Newby, The Last Grain Race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Grain_Race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Grain_Race
p1mrx 5y ago
I would expect a 21st century sailing ship to have sails built like wind turbine blades, positioned autonomously.
why_only_15 5y ago
Does anybody have a good book or good resources for nuclear powered merchant marine? Naively it makes sense that nuclear power could support much larger ships and go much faster than diesel, but i don't know how true that actually is.
- coryrc 5y ago
  Large cargo ships are displacement hulls (because they are 10x more efficient than planing hulls) but are limited to a top speed proportional to the square root of the length, so they will not be "much faster".
- hindsightbias 5y ago
  https://www.amazon.com/Story-Savannah-Labor-Management-Publications-Industrial/dp/0674839617 https://www.amazon.com/Story-Savannah-Labor-Management-Publi... https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63584 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63584
- helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  Apart from (Soviet) ice breakers Nuclear powered merchant ships haven't had a successful history. I guess politically most states don't want nuclear technology to spread or let nuclear material into the wrong hands - by their nature cargo ships travel and would be an easy target for hijacking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Civilian_nuclear_ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Civi...
- klondike_ 5y ago
  The US tried this concept at one point with the nuclear powered NS Savannah, which was a cargo/passenger ship. Unfortunately it was already outdated by the time it was built, unable to accommodate the modular containers taking over the shipping industry. It was mostly a novelty at the time and was expensive to run. Still though it seems nuclear would be a good fit for shipping. Most large ships use electric motors for their propellers anyways, and the US Navy has extensive experience deploying reactors in submarines. Theoretically you would only need to refuel such a ship every 10 years or so. Fears about terrorism or contamination will probably prevent such a ship from being made any time soon, not to mention the lack of infrastructure.
patrickyeon 5y ago
Two of the last paragraphs: > All of this is technically possible, and as we have seen, it would produce less in emissions than the present alternatives. However, it’s more likely that a switch to sailing ships is accompanied by a decrease in cargo and passenger traffic, and this has everything to do with scale and speed. A lot of freight and passengers would not be travelling if it were not for the high speeds and low costs of today’s airplanes and container ships. > It would make little sense to transport iPhones parts, Amazon wares, sweatshop clothes, or citytrippers with sailing ships. A sailing ship is more than a technical means of transportation: it implies another view on consumption, production, time, space, leisure, and travel. For example, a lot of freight now travels in different directions for each next processing stage before it is delivered as a final product. In contrast, all sail cargo companies mentioned in this article only take cargo that cannot be produced locally, and which is one trip from producer to consumer. This speaks to me. I see much more conversation around "how can we use technology to remove the negative environmental impacts from our lifestyles?" than I do around "how can we change our lifestyles to cause fewer negative impacts?"
- kortilla 5y ago
  Because the latter isn’t a sustainable solution to the problems we are facing. The environment can’t support all of the current population at any kind of modern lifestyle. Unless “changing lifestyles” is “give up all daily transportation, heating, cooling, meat, and 99 percent of electricity”, it’s not gonna cut it.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Better zoning could eliminate a huge amount of commuting emissions. A cultural shift away from in-person meetings as signalling, and travel as a substitute for personality, could eliminate a huge amount of air travel emissions. Meat consumption can be drastically reduced. The changes we need aren't actually all that big.
  - cfn 5y ago
    I believe you are over estimating the amount of change required. Fifty years ago, or so, consumption was much lower without doing away many of those things.
aviat 5y ago
monohull sailing ships need to heel modern shipping is designed around stacked containers
ReptileMan 5y ago
>The EcoClipper500 has a carbon footprint of 2 grammes of CO2 per tonne-kilometre, which is five times less than the carbon footprint of a container ship. And if that is not a testament how stupidly efficient container megaships are, I don't know what it is.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Animats 5y ago
A natural gas powered container ship would probably have lower emissions per unit of cargo moved than the proposed "eco" sailing ship, which has low cargo capacity by modern standards. The big problem with cargo ships from a pollution standpoint is that they run on really crappy "bunker oil C", which is about halfway between jet fuel and asphalt. Heavier than seawater. One of the biggest sources of preventable pollution. And, come on, then want to haul sails by hand on a ship of that size? And use rowing machines to generate electric power? They'd need a huge crew. Liquid natural gas carriers often run on their own natural gas. There a few natural gas powered freighters now, but they're built in the US for the run to Puerto Rico, which, under the Jones Act, is limited to American ships.
- nickserv 5y ago
  The latest ships used by CMA-CGM use LNG, and they're not planning on using heavy fuels anymore. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Saad%C3%A9-class_container_ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Saad%C3%A9-class_con...
- Roark66 5y ago
  Exactly. Also, they didn't seem to mention the speed difference between typical diesel ship and their proposed "Eco" ship. If it takes a week more that might be fine, but if it takes 5 times as long no one will use it for large scale commercial goods (perhaps there is a niche for transporting "Eco" products)
- TotempaaltJ 5y ago
  Natural gas has its own issues https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/6/22422824/natural-gas-infrastructure-methane-emissions-climate-change-air-pollution https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/6/22422824/natural-gas-infra...
  - TheBill 5y ago
    90% of that is burying the lead that leaking methane is an issue. No shit, but moving from Bunker>LSFO>LNG is going to cause a net decrease in GHG emissions. Operators that have to focus on profit margins, not maintaining artificial monopolies can't afford to subsidize leaking equipment. Aliso Canyon caused a substantial investment in methane detection hardware thats in use. Next step is getting E&P co's to pay into a perpetual fund that monitors old wells.
WalterBright 5y ago
The best solution is to simply tax bunker fuel, at a rate that approximates its pollution cost. Then the market will sort it out to find another optimum.
gh55 5y ago
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned rotor sails yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship?wprov=sfla1
kisamoto 5y ago
Okay it's not cargo, but I've seen some innovative "eco" developments in the personal yacht space. Take Daedalus yachts[0] for example, a USA built, lightweight (carbon fibre) sailing yacht with the aim of being zero emissions. They use a combination of solar, wind and hydrogen re/generation to get power for both the cabin and the drive system. Perhaps a similar combination of technologies could be used to scale up commercial/cargo sailing ships? [0] https://www.daedalusyachts.com/ https://www.daedalusyachts.com/
robomartin 5y ago
Not so easy. I did a deep dive into the container ship industry many years ago in order to understand unit economics and how certain technologies could improve the ecologic impact of this massive industry. It was very interesting. I learned a lot. I see a lot of comments about going electric, hydrogen, solar, sail, some kind of hybrid, etc. I don't think any of this is near any time horizon I can name or recognize. Why? Cargo ships use something called "Bunker Fuel" [0]. What is bunker fuel? Well, to put it simply, it is what's left after you take petroleum and distill it into various grades of gasoline, diesel, industrial oils, etc. It is often referred to as "the bottom of the barrel". Another way to think of it is that bunker fuel is the waste product. Some grades of bunker fuel are so thick you can walk on it and will only flow if heated. This should not come as surprise, asphalt is the next level down and that stuff is solid enough to make roads out of it. Why did I say "not so easy"? Because these ships are effectively burning the waste product from the manufacturing process that leads to all the fuels and lubricants we consume in massive quantities. What does this mean? If we stopped using bunker fuel next Monday, what would we do with the absolutely massive amounts of bunker fuel produced every year? Think about that for a moment. Sure, hydrogen and electric sound "clean", but you would have a potentially larger ecologic disaster in having to dump bunker fuel somewhere. The bottom of the barrel isn't going to magically disappear just because we transition cargo ships to something else. What to do then? It's a tough problem. One solution, maybe, I don't know, is to evaluate how efficiently and cleanly we might be able to burn bunker fuel on land vs. on a ship. My point is that we might be able to extract and use this energy in a super-clean way, to charge batteries or whatever. I haven't studied this at all. I would imagine that if we set out to truly create a super-clean process to burn bunker fuel on land for energy generation it could be a good path forward. I don't know how much better we could do on land (in terms of clean burning) than on a ship. I'd like to think we could do a lot better. I do think the future is electric, in some form. What I can't see or predict is how we transition from today's reality to that reality. This isn't a case of just having to solve the containership problem, you have to solve the entire oil/fuel ecosystem because, if you don't, you are going to have astronomic amounts of bunker fuel (waste product) to contend with. This is how shifting cargo ships to electric could actually be worse for the environment than letting it be and working to make them as clean as possible. Weird, isn't it? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil

85 points by rudenoise 5y ago

fouc 5y ago

> The amount of cargo that was traded across the oceans in 2019 equals the freight capacity of 22.4 million EcoClippers. Assuming the EcoClipper500 can make 2-3 trips per year, we would need to build and operate at least 7.5 million ships, with a total crew of at least 90 million people. Those ships could only take 0.5 billion passengers (12 passengers and 8 trainees per ship), so we would need millions of ships and crew members more to replace international air traffic. Interesting article but I'd like to hear about other large scale sail boat designs, perhaps even mega-catamaran sailboats..

hindsightbias 5y ago
These people are really serious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2WKJtbm8yM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2WKJtbm8yM IDK how many forrests have to be cut down though.

carapace 5y ago

Make it big, get it up out of the water. The larger your ship is the more efficient it can be, and the less of it in the water the less energy is needed to push it. So make big big ships with really really big sails. You want the ships to fly with just the keel in the water to steer against the wind. You might think I'm joking or talking nonsense, but look up Alexander Bell's cellular geodesic kites, and Bucky Fuller's "Cloud Nine" floating city.

_carbyau_ 5y ago
Well ok. But my limited understanding of material science says no. For now at least. Material strength doesn't scale well to go "properly big big" in the sci-fi sense. OTOH, I am constantly amazed by what material science keeps managing to do, so I have hopes that maybe one day your dream will be true.
- carapace 5y ago
  Cheers! Are you familiar with Bucky Fuller's concept of "tensegrity"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity https://mymodernmet.com/tensegrity-architecture/ https://mymodernmet.com/tensegrity-architecture/ He pointed out that the struts could recursively be made out of tensegrity structures. Or you can make them out of balloons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensairity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensairity I was being a little coy in my previous comment. The structures I'm thinking of are more like kites than sailing ships. They would "dip a toe" in the water to tack, perhaps, but they would be aerial not marine in nature. A. Bell lifted a man with his cellular geodesic kites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEA_Cygnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEA_Cygnet In any event, I hope my dream does come true one day. :) Cheers!
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    While not aware of the phrase tensegrity I have rarely seen various forms of "floating tables". Initial thoughts: - seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect. - could be nice from a packaging point of view. Collapsible objects, the wiki link mentions the nasa ball robot. - maybe it could shift Bill-of-Materials costs through smaller amounts of expensive extremely high compression/tensile capable materials to be offset by savings on larger amounts of cheaper other capable sections. - I am not convinced it would allow the superstructures much sci-fi requires as the basics of tensile strength, compression strength are still in play. - As mentioned in the tensairity article, if humanity could make a pressure withstanding, airtight object, say a sphere, around a vacuum with less mass than the air it displaces, we could have architectural "anti-gravity". Including an airship with a toe in the water. :-) Finally, I simply don't know enough.(Do we ever?) It looks cool and is worth investigating further. I am going to lose lots of time thinking about, checking out and printing out occasional bits from thingiverse now!
    - carapace 5y ago
      Cheers! > - seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect.- seems like a manner of construction to swap tensile strength in certain spots, thus allowing for an awesome "against intuition" visual effect. I recommend building physical models. It's hard to convey how strong and light these structures can be. Very "against intuition". :) > - could be nice from a packaging point of view. Collapsible objects, the wiki link mentions the nasa ball robot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoberman_sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoberman_sphere https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/origami-style-solar-power-20140814 https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/origami-style-solar-power-2014... Yes. :) > - maybe it could shift Bill-of-Materials costs through smaller amounts of expensive extremely high compression/tensile capable materials to be offset by savings on larger amounts of cheaper other capable sections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization Bucky again. (Kevlar tendons and carbon fiber struts...) > - I am not convinced it would allow the superstructures much sci-fi requires as the basics of tensile strength, compression strength are still in play. I'm not an engineer, but we can already build some impressive structure w/o advanced materials. Cf. "bamboo scaffolding" (DDG image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=%22bamboo+scaffolding%22&atb=v60-1&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=%22bamboo+scaffolding%22&at... ) I'm imagining swarm cellular kite robots that can self-organize to create whatever size lifting body is needed. I'm thinking about things like how to move millions of people at a time (which we might want to do due to climate change, etc.) Have you read Vinge's "Rainbows End" (sic)? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End ) There are buildings in the story that are too flimsy to stand up without active control and feedback, something like that could work with these kite-bots. > - As mentioned in the tensairity article, if humanity could make a pressure withstanding, airtight object, say a sphere, around a vacuum with less mass than the air it displaces, we could have architectural "anti-gravity". We don't have to go that far (although it would be neat if we could, diamond vacuum bubbles?) Did you read about "Cloud Nine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_(tensegrity_sphere) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_(tensegrity_sphere) I've thought about this a lot but not yet gotten my act together enough to do it. I wrote up some of it here: https://lists.sr.ht/~sforman/heliotrope.pajamas/%3C20201229033906.670AF8106BA%40smtp.hushmail.com%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sforman/heliotrope.pajamas/%3C202012290... ("heliotrope.pajamas" is my mailing list if you want to reach me in re: this stuff) Well met!
nradov 5y ago
I think you're joking and talking nonsense. There are practical limits to the size of a planing or foiling vessel. This is just basic physics. Adding more sail area isn't helpful; at some point it's counterproductive and actually slows the vessel down.
nickserv 5y ago
Take the idea just a notch further and you've got yourself an ekranoplan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan

krasin 5y ago

I hope we get rid of cargo ships that burn matter. But sails are too high maintenance to be scalable. Last year, as an experiment I've launched a tiny solar-powered boat ([1]). Ultimately, it was too small and underpowered only making ~900km ([2]) before dying. I hope to build a bigger drone boat next, hopefully with an ability to move up to 1 tonne of cargo. Apparently, it's possible, but (unfortunately) requires very delicate engineering. For bigger boats solar does not seem to scale. It appears that nuclear is the ultimate future for megaships. 1. https://imgur.com/a/eKlLCNg https://imgur.com/a/eKlLCNg 2. https://storage.googleapis.com/samofly/track/index2.html https://storage.googleapis.com/samofly/track/index2.html

gabereiser 5y ago
Larger sailing vessels (10m+) are actually moving towards solar + hydroelectric with lithium batteries (48v) to power electric engines and generators. Sailing with wind power uses the hydroelectric generators and solar. Motor sailing uses solar and you regen a little bit from hydro or a wind turbine. https://www.sailinguma.com/ https://www.sailinguma.com/
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  The article essentially dismisses lithium batteries as non-sustainable.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    Which is dumb, because the "saltwater" batteries have manganese cathode and titanium phosphate anode... doesn't sound radically different than lithium iron phosphate.
    - cfn 5y ago
      There were a number of fires in boats at the beginning of using lithium batteries that put off many people from using them.

oska 5y ago

Book recommendation if you found this article interesting (and haven't already read the book, a classic) : Eric Newby, The Last Grain Race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Grain_Race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Grain_Race

p1mrx 5y ago

I would expect a 21st century sailing ship to have sails built like wind turbine blades, positioned autonomously.

why_only_15 5y ago

Does anybody have a good book or good resources for nuclear powered merchant marine? Naively it makes sense that nuclear power could support much larger ships and go much faster than diesel, but i don't know how true that actually is.

coryrc 5y ago
Large cargo ships are displacement hulls (because they are 10x more efficient than planing hulls) but are limited to a top speed proportional to the square root of the length, so they will not be "much faster".
hindsightbias 5y ago
https://www.amazon.com/Story-Savannah-Labor-Management-Publications-Industrial/dp/0674839617 https://www.amazon.com/Story-Savannah-Labor-Management-Publi... https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63584 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63584
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
Apart from (Soviet) ice breakers Nuclear powered merchant ships haven't had a successful history. I guess politically most states don't want nuclear technology to spread or let nuclear material into the wrong hands - by their nature cargo ships travel and would be an easy target for hijacking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Civilian_nuclear_ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Civi...
klondike_ 5y ago
The US tried this concept at one point with the nuclear powered NS Savannah, which was a cargo/passenger ship. Unfortunately it was already outdated by the time it was built, unable to accommodate the modular containers taking over the shipping industry. It was mostly a novelty at the time and was expensive to run. Still though it seems nuclear would be a good fit for shipping. Most large ships use electric motors for their propellers anyways, and the US Navy has extensive experience deploying reactors in submarines. Theoretically you would only need to refuel such a ship every 10 years or so. Fears about terrorism or contamination will probably prevent such a ship from being made any time soon, not to mention the lack of infrastructure.

patrickyeon 5y ago

Two of the last paragraphs: > All of this is technically possible, and as we have seen, it would produce less in emissions than the present alternatives. However, it’s more likely that a switch to sailing ships is accompanied by a decrease in cargo and passenger traffic, and this has everything to do with scale and speed. A lot of freight and passengers would not be travelling if it were not for the high speeds and low costs of today’s airplanes and container ships. > It would make little sense to transport iPhones parts, Amazon wares, sweatshop clothes, or citytrippers with sailing ships. A sailing ship is more than a technical means of transportation: it implies another view on consumption, production, time, space, leisure, and travel. For example, a lot of freight now travels in different directions for each next processing stage before it is delivered as a final product. In contrast, all sail cargo companies mentioned in this article only take cargo that cannot be produced locally, and which is one trip from producer to consumer. This speaks to me. I see much more conversation around "how can we use technology to remove the negative environmental impacts from our lifestyles?" than I do around "how can we change our lifestyles to cause fewer negative impacts?"

kortilla 5y ago
Because the latter isn’t a sustainable solution to the problems we are facing. The environment can’t support all of the current population at any kind of modern lifestyle. Unless “changing lifestyles” is “give up all daily transportation, heating, cooling, meat, and 99 percent of electricity”, it’s not gonna cut it.
- lmm 5y ago
  Better zoning could eliminate a huge amount of commuting emissions. A cultural shift away from in-person meetings as signalling, and travel as a substitute for personality, could eliminate a huge amount of air travel emissions. Meat consumption can be drastically reduced. The changes we need aren't actually all that big.
- cfn 5y ago
  I believe you are over estimating the amount of change required. Fifty years ago, or so, consumption was much lower without doing away many of those things.

aviat 5y ago

monohull sailing ships need to heel modern shipping is designed around stacked containers

ReptileMan 5y ago

>The EcoClipper500 has a carbon footprint of 2 grammes of CO2 per tonne-kilometre, which is five times less than the carbon footprint of a container ship. And if that is not a testament how stupidly efficient container megaships are, I don't know what it is.

deleted 5y ago
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Animats 5y ago

A natural gas powered container ship would probably have lower emissions per unit of cargo moved than the proposed "eco" sailing ship, which has low cargo capacity by modern standards. The big problem with cargo ships from a pollution standpoint is that they run on really crappy "bunker oil C", which is about halfway between jet fuel and asphalt. Heavier than seawater. One of the biggest sources of preventable pollution. And, come on, then want to haul sails by hand on a ship of that size? And use rowing machines to generate electric power? They'd need a huge crew. Liquid natural gas carriers often run on their own natural gas. There a few natural gas powered freighters now, but they're built in the US for the run to Puerto Rico, which, under the Jones Act, is limited to American ships.

nickserv 5y ago
The latest ships used by CMA-CGM use LNG, and they're not planning on using heavy fuels anymore. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Saad%C3%A9-class_container_ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Saad%C3%A9-class_con...
Roark66 5y ago
Exactly. Also, they didn't seem to mention the speed difference between typical diesel ship and their proposed "Eco" ship. If it takes a week more that might be fine, but if it takes 5 times as long no one will use it for large scale commercial goods (perhaps there is a niche for transporting "Eco" products)
TotempaaltJ 5y ago
Natural gas has its own issues https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/6/22422824/natural-gas-infrastructure-methane-emissions-climate-change-air-pollution https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/6/22422824/natural-gas-infra...
- TheBill 5y ago
  90% of that is burying the lead that leaking methane is an issue. No shit, but moving from Bunker>LSFO>LNG is going to cause a net decrease in GHG emissions. Operators that have to focus on profit margins, not maintaining artificial monopolies can't afford to subsidize leaking equipment. Aliso Canyon caused a substantial investment in methane detection hardware thats in use. Next step is getting E&P co's to pay into a perpetual fund that monitors old wells.

WalterBright 5y ago

The best solution is to simply tax bunker fuel, at a rate that approximates its pollution cost. Then the market will sort it out to find another optimum.

gh55 5y ago

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned rotor sails yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship?wprov=sfla1

kisamoto 5y ago

Okay it's not cargo, but I've seen some innovative "eco" developments in the personal yacht space. Take Daedalus yachts[0] for example, a USA built, lightweight (carbon fibre) sailing yacht with the aim of being zero emissions. They use a combination of solar, wind and hydrogen re/generation to get power for both the cabin and the drive system. Perhaps a similar combination of technologies could be used to scale up commercial/cargo sailing ships? [0] https://www.daedalusyachts.com/ https://www.daedalusyachts.com/

robomartin 5y ago

Not so easy. I did a deep dive into the container ship industry many years ago in order to understand unit economics and how certain technologies could improve the ecologic impact of this massive industry. It was very interesting. I learned a lot. I see a lot of comments about going electric, hydrogen, solar, sail, some kind of hybrid, etc. I don't think any of this is near any time horizon I can name or recognize. Why? Cargo ships use something called "Bunker Fuel" [0]. What is bunker fuel? Well, to put it simply, it is what's left after you take petroleum and distill it into various grades of gasoline, diesel, industrial oils, etc. It is often referred to as "the bottom of the barrel". Another way to think of it is that bunker fuel is the waste product. Some grades of bunker fuel are so thick you can walk on it and will only flow if heated. This should not come as surprise, asphalt is the next level down and that stuff is solid enough to make roads out of it. Why did I say "not so easy"? Because these ships are effectively burning the waste product from the manufacturing process that leads to all the fuels and lubricants we consume in massive quantities. What does this mean? If we stopped using bunker fuel next Monday, what would we do with the absolutely massive amounts of bunker fuel produced every year? Think about that for a moment. Sure, hydrogen and electric sound "clean", but you would have a potentially larger ecologic disaster in having to dump bunker fuel somewhere. The bottom of the barrel isn't going to magically disappear just because we transition cargo ships to something else. What to do then? It's a tough problem. One solution, maybe, I don't know, is to evaluate how efficiently and cleanly we might be able to burn bunker fuel on land vs. on a ship. My point is that we might be able to extract and use this energy in a super-clean way, to charge batteries or whatever. I haven't studied this at all. I would imagine that if we set out to truly create a super-clean process to burn bunker fuel on land for energy generation it could be a good path forward. I don't know how much better we could do on land (in terms of clean burning) than on a ship. I'd like to think we could do a lot better. I do think the future is electric, in some form. What I can't see or predict is how we transition from today's reality to that reality. This isn't a case of just having to solve the containership problem, you have to solve the entire oil/fuel ecosystem because, if you don't, you are going to have astronomic amounts of bunker fuel (waste product) to contend with. This is how shifting cargo ships to electric could actually be worse for the environment than letting it be and working to make them as clean as possible. Weird, isn't it? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil