9 ms·

Sailcargo

101 points by jmacd 3y ago

api 3y ago
Autonomous sailing ships are entirely possible today. I wonder how cost competitive that would be for less time sensitive cargo, which is the largest amount of cargo by mass.
- hedgehog 3y ago
  Counterintuitively wind power could be faster than oil. Oil burning ships are optimized for efficiency because fuel is a major expense, wind energy is use it or lose it at zero marginal cost so there's no reason not to go as fast as possible.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - darksaints 3y ago
    It could be, but it’s not. Optimal speeds for cargo ships are going to be their hull speeds, which are usually between 12 and 18 knots, but these ships are typically traveling 25+. Ships often exceed their hull speeds because short times from port to port is more profitable than saving fuel. They could save 2-4x on fuel costs, but lose far more than that in revenue.
- TomK32 3y ago
  Just to make this clear, you are not suggesting unmanned cargo ships?
- duxup 3y ago
  The thing is that it’s not like less time sensitive cargo isn’t being shipped. It is, and it’s still pretty fast and cheap.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Good question, why hasn't Saildrone made a cargo version yet...
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  It might be tough for it to work, because piracy is a thing. Pirates would probably love unmanned, unarmed sailboats full of high value trading commodities.
mlhpdx 3y ago
Which is faster, crossing the Pacific in the best foiling sailboat or one powered by petroleum (i.e. excluding reactor power)? We know what’s cheaper and cleaner. Edit: The question is a little facetious but I’m really interested in the technology here. Sailboats aren’t what they used to be, and while building then as they were is charming there is nothing practical about it. And, yes, I actually know my “futtocks”.
- hef19898 3y ago
  If a foil sail boat can carry 10k+ TEUs those two are comparable.
samwillis 3y ago
I love the concept of this, I really do, but I'm struggling with the implementation and economics of it. Surly they should be building ships with more modern materials and technologies - lighter fibre glass, modern sail technology. It feels like a plaything for the team (and investors) to justify building a beautiful sailboat rather than a serious play at at green shipping. Maybe I'm wrong and people will pay absurd prices for coffee that's been shipped "green" and carbon free on a sailboat.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  > Maybe I'm wrong and people will pay absurd prices for coffee that's been shipped "green" and carbon free on a sailboat. Perhaps, but the economics aren't the only side, there's also the total impact. While there might be a profitable business in this idea, is there a real positive climate impact as suggested, or would the effort be put to better use on projects that can scale.
- nimbius 3y ago
  My honest question is does the economics of a larger crew impact the competitivity of the offering? 250 tons is nothing to sneeze at for things like gulf seafood shipping Edit: this is a huge deal for seafood in my opinion because your total fuel is impacted by the need to maintain a balance between range and what you dedicate to running walk in freezers on the ship for your catch.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    I forget the calculations, but there would have to be like hundreds of thousands of these ships at all times with millions of crew to make a dent the cargo carried in container ships.
    - gpm 3y ago
      Aren't you just say "the total addressable market is huge"? That sounds like a good thing for the company trying it.
gabereiser 3y ago
As a sailor myself, the fact that we don’t use wind like we used to for shipping is a huge mistake. So I love this project!
Jalad 3y ago
It seems like the lack of shipping containers would be a big bottleneck? Almost all ports around the world have standardized on shipping containers for various port logistics, so how can these sailing ships integrate with existing ports? Otherwise though it's an elegant idea. It would be pretty cool to see more wind powered ships
- throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  It's not like this is alien technology. You park the boat along a pier and you hoist a crane over it. There are a lot of ships that still need to use ports that are not cargo ships. Cargo ships are just one aspect of regular maritime traffic.
  - gpm 3y ago
    I'm not in the industry, but modern ports seem to me to be optimized for offloading ships with cargo stacked high in shipping containers on deck without significant obstructions interfering with cranes. Not ships with a bunch of masts for sails.
    - jamiek88 3y ago
      While that is true, 'break bulk' is still very manually handled thus expensive. Things that don't fit in containers basically. Often its roll on roll off rather than crane. So there are non container options but if they could use containers for break bulk they would so the efficiency of this is probably not very high.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Of course it's not alien technology, it's just obsolete technology.
- elchief 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbulk_cargo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbulk_cargo is still a thing
strongpigeon 3y ago
It's a little hard to see this as more than a pet project to have a beautiful ship given that it's not carrying containers. I wonder how long it takes to load and unload... There is a plan to eventually build a container sailboat [0], but it's just a rendering. I could be wrong, but I'm getting strong "just ~~give us your money~~ invest and we'll totally spend it on container ships" vibe. I don't like sound too negative and would love to be wrong. https://www.sailcargo.inc/future-fleet https://www.sailcargo.inc/future-fleet
duxup 3y ago
I’ve zero understanding of the ship part of shipping but just reading the website I get the vibe of someone passionate about ships trying to marry that passion to a business in order to pay for their hobby.
gpm 3y ago
I can probably buy that a modern sailing ship could make sense. Automate control of the sails and you're getting "free energy" in an energy intensive industry, with the extra cost just being some hopefully minor maintenance. I might be able to buy that "actually, wooden ships are a good idea", though it's going to be a hard sell. This company appears to be trying both at once though, that strikes me as a quite unlikely to be a good business decision - unless there is some synergy between "wooden ship" and "sailing ship" that I'm completely missing. That said, I know very little about the industry.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nathannecro 3y ago
  Yep, in the last few years, there's been quite a lot of movement in the shipping industry to add wind-assist devices to existing/new ships. Michelin [1] is basically doing what you suggest. Maersk and Cargill [2] are also working on technologies that harness wind to decrease fossil fuel use. Oceanbird [3] is working on wing-style sails that they claim can basically move a cargo ship along at ~10kts. 1: https://spectrum.ieee.org/michelin-puffy-sails-cargo-ships-improve-fuel-economy https://spectrum.ieee.org/michelin-puffy-sails-cargo-ships-i... 2: https://www.cargill.com/the-future-of-shipping-is-sails https://www.cargill.com/the-future-of-shipping-is-sails 3: https://www.theoceanbird.com https://www.theoceanbird.com
  - everforward 3y ago
    How does one even attach a sail to a cargo ship that would move it at 10 knots? I'm not an engineer so it might even be obvious, but it seems like the mast would have to exert an incredible amount of force on the ship. Then again, I guess the same applies to old sailing ship and they figured it out. It just boggles my mind.
    - gpm 3y ago
      Traditionally I believe the masts were held vertical by ropes, I imagine the force transferred through them (by tension) not the stiffness of the mast. But I'm far from an expert.
mhb 3y ago
This seems like the place to recommend Tally Ho: https://www.youtube.com/@SampsonBoatCo/videos https://www.youtube.com/@SampsonBoatCo/videos I’m on a mission to rebuild a 1910 English sailing yacht called Tally Ho. Designed by Albert Strange in 1909, she is a well-known and important historic vessel – but after many adventures she was left in a remote port in Oregon to rot for decades, despite some valiant attempts to rescue her. I bought her and moved her to the Olympic Peninsular earlier this year, and am now rebuilding her from the keel up. Eventually I hope to sail her back to the UK.
psychlops 3y ago
I wonder why they wouldn't use a catamaran for a more modern version giving the ship more speed. Perhaps the center support would be prohibitively heavy?
ThinkBeat 3y ago
This seems like an extreme niche product. There is enough oddity here that it sniffs a bit like a scam to me. Perhaps unintentional. Probably because they have a proper businessplan and I dont yet understand it. You would need something small, low volume with a giant markup run by someone willing to pay a huge premium for virtue signaling. (or something else the US market really craves from Columbia) >. Crew 12 crew + 12 guest crew They also need a supply of people who wish to work for free (?) since free workers make up 50% of the crew? Using wood to construct the boat does not seem like a sensible idea apart from the optics. Are there any laws governing the safety of merchant cargo vessels? I would want a proper engine for this thing. But perhaps they will always sail close enough to shore that they won't need more than what they have. Which may indicate that delivery times might be less predictable than other freight and the danger of loss higher. Insurance costs might become a problem. "Sorry we will be two weeks late due to weather"? Perhaps I should get a startup going providing cargo services with copies of old viking ships? Renewable power, either ship or oars. At least one allegedly made it ot the US and back. On raids they often came back with a ship filled with loot or so I think I have heard. Dont trust me on this.
- vasco 3y ago
  > Insurance costs might become a problem I believe this was the first big use of insurance too, sailing cargo across the world in ships.
crazygringo 3y ago
Is this... safe? For the crew? I was under the impression that vessels of that relatively small size can get lost at sea in storms with huge waves when traveling between continents.
gregatragenet3 3y ago
Just did some napkin math on this, just the carbon footprint of the crew for this ship nets out to almost the total carbon footprint of 16.14g-co2/ton/km for container shipping.. Take the average person's footprint of 7co2-ton/yr, math that out with the 80 ton cargo capacity, the short daily distances ~250km/day, 14 crew, and you come out with about 12g-co2/ton/km just for crew for these schooners. easy to see another 4g-co2/ton/km being in just upkeep for a vessel of wood and canvass. So yeah if someone wants to virtue-signal, then go for it ship your stuff this way but don't think you are actually netting out a smaller carbon footprint then a container ship here.
- zokier 3y ago
  You can probably add some extra also from it not being standard container ship so loading and unloading it is likely to be less efficient than containers.
ladino 3y ago
compared to a mega container ship, i bet the carbon footprint of this sailing boat is much much greater! Please compare the sails, antifouling, boat paint per load compared to a container ship, its much uglier than you think when you compare it to a big size petrol container ship! Just do the math! Its has more a symbolic "green thing" character, which is good! :) Even an automatically controlled boat is too expensive concerning insurance, fire and so compared to a megaboat with a small amount of people.
mikl 3y ago
I guess we’re ignoring the fact that human labour is not exactly “zero emissions”, and old-school shipping like this is a lot more labour intensive. If you factor that in, I wouldn’t be surprised if the climate impact is higher than modern shipping.
oliwarner 3y ago
The largest container ship moves over 24 thousand 20-foot containers (TEU) with 34 crew. Sailcargo's Vega Gamleby carries fewer than 4 TEU with 14 crew. I think if you want to make an impact in cargo environmentalism, you need better power sources. I'll admit I've only just seen how much power we're talking about. 12MW to move a large container ship. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe we should buy less tat from the other side of the planet.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > buy less tat According to the below link, trash per human per day ranges from: 0.74 kilogram but ranges widely, from 0.11 to 4.54 kilograms. That ship carries more than a human makes in waste in a lifetime, but not by a huge margin (if you are in a wealthy country). That’s rather depressing. https://datatopics.worldbank.org/what-a-waste/trends_in_solid_waste_management.html https://datatopics.worldbank.org/what-a-waste/trends_in_soli...
Lazare 3y ago
A Panamax cargo ship (which is small by today's standards...) can carry ~5100 20-foot containers (TEUs) with a crew of perhaps 20. Sailcargo's under-construction flagship can carry 9 TEUs with a crew of 24. So replacing a single Panamax cargo ship means building around 560 of these ships, which will sail with a crew of 13k people. (Or to put it another way, carrying 9 TEUs might earn you $10k for a trip at current cargo rates. Let's assume you can double that due to charging people a green premium, that's $20k a trip. At traditional sail speeds, you can earn that every 2 months, meaning each ship earns $120k/year, which needs to pay for building the ship, maintenance, food, power, sattelite internet, salaries, etc. With a listed crew of 24 people, that's $5k of revenue per person, per year.) This isn't remotely economic or scalable, but I'm not sure it's even better environmentally. The amount of resources (especially lumber) that would go into making a fleet of almost six hundred, 150ft long sailing vessels is immense. And then youi think about the cost of having 13k people sailing around - the salaries, the food they'd eat, the medical care they'd consume, the waste they'd generate. And all that to replace just one of the smaller cargo ships still operating, out of the thousands and thousands operating. There may well be a lucrative niche here; people will pay money for the damndest things! It's entirely possible you can make good money charging people to LARP as a 19th century sailboat crew, sure, why not? But whatever this is, it's certainly not the future of cargo shipping. (Now the idea of using wind power on cargo ships is potentially promising. Just...not this kind of ship.) Edit: I should emphasise, the ships they're building and planning to build use quite a lot of of very old trees. You're not building these things from radiata pine! Sailcargo stresses they're using lumber from sustainable forestry, which is great, but they're building one schooner, and replacing just a dozen container ships means building maybe 8,000 schooners. If you were hoping to have them operating anytime this decade, you're going to need to start clearcutting. But it's okay, you can use the land you clear to build the training schools needed for the 200,000 new sailors those ships will need. Because there absolutely aren't 200k crew who know how to sail a tall ship just waiting for a call. Oh, and in case anyone was thinking, "well, maybe we should just ship less cargo", shipping freight by sea is actually the most environmentally friendly option. If sending cargo by sea becomes more expensive - and it would have to, given the economics of these ships - cargo will start being sent by land or (even worse) air. That does mean you'd need to build fewer schooners, but unfortunately means the environmental impact would be even more negative on balance. I do love the idea of seeing the the Port of LA swarming with tends of thousands of tall ships. Aesthetically it sounds amazing! But in reality it couldn't possibly work.
joshuahaglund 3y ago
Smaller scale, but Schooner Apollonia has been operating sail freight on the Hudson River since 2020. Their 12th roundtrip starts in May and past cargo manifests can be seen here: https://www.schoonerapollonia.com/cargo-manifest https://www.schoonerapollonia.com/cargo-manifest https://www.instagram.com/schooner_apollonia/ https://www.instagram.com/schooner_apollonia/
emsimot 3y ago
The napkin-math contrarians are out in full force today! I urge folk to consider why folk would come from around the world to help build and sail these ships. We build container haulers to live but there are folk that live to build sailing ships.
Stealthisbook 3y ago
I kept reading to try and find where the design innovation was that allowed containers on these traditional schooner sailing ships. It seems they're not meant for containerized cargo, and that's a big problem. Loading and unloading these things is going to be a lengthy and expensive process.
ianburrell 3y ago
I had realization that shipping is one of the easiest industries to decarbonify. Even if wind doesn’t work out, ships are perfect candidate for hydrogen. Ships have lots of space which means can carry pressure vessel or cryogenic storage.
pimlottc 3y ago
“We operate a world-leading fleet of sailing cargo ships” … “our fleet”: lists two ships, one still under concentration
- detaro 3y ago
  Not hard to be world-leading in a category that's (very close to?) empty.

101 points by jmacd 3y ago

api 3y ago

Autonomous sailing ships are entirely possible today. I wonder how cost competitive that would be for less time sensitive cargo, which is the largest amount of cargo by mass.

hedgehog 3y ago
Counterintuitively wind power could be faster than oil. Oil burning ships are optimized for efficiency because fuel is a major expense, wind energy is use it or lose it at zero marginal cost so there's no reason not to go as fast as possible.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- darksaints 3y ago
  It could be, but it’s not. Optimal speeds for cargo ships are going to be their hull speeds, which are usually between 12 and 18 knots, but these ships are typically traveling 25+. Ships often exceed their hull speeds because short times from port to port is more profitable than saving fuel. They could save 2-4x on fuel costs, but lose far more than that in revenue.
TomK32 3y ago
Just to make this clear, you are not suggesting unmanned cargo ships?
duxup 3y ago
The thing is that it’s not like less time sensitive cargo isn’t being shipped. It is, and it’s still pretty fast and cheap.
moffkalast 3y ago
Good question, why hasn't Saildrone made a cargo version yet...
BizarroLand 3y ago
It might be tough for it to work, because piracy is a thing. Pirates would probably love unmanned, unarmed sailboats full of high value trading commodities.

mlhpdx 3y ago

Which is faster, crossing the Pacific in the best foiling sailboat or one powered by petroleum (i.e. excluding reactor power)? We know what’s cheaper and cleaner. Edit: The question is a little facetious but I’m really interested in the technology here. Sailboats aren’t what they used to be, and while building then as they were is charming there is nothing practical about it. And, yes, I actually know my “futtocks”.

hef19898 3y ago
If a foil sail boat can carry 10k+ TEUs those two are comparable.

samwillis 3y ago

I love the concept of this, I really do, but I'm struggling with the implementation and economics of it. Surly they should be building ships with more modern materials and technologies - lighter fibre glass, modern sail technology. It feels like a plaything for the team (and investors) to justify building a beautiful sailboat rather than a serious play at at green shipping. Maybe I'm wrong and people will pay absurd prices for coffee that's been shipped "green" and carbon free on a sailboat.

danpalmer 3y ago
> Maybe I'm wrong and people will pay absurd prices for coffee that's been shipped "green" and carbon free on a sailboat. Perhaps, but the economics aren't the only side, there's also the total impact. While there might be a profitable business in this idea, is there a real positive climate impact as suggested, or would the effort be put to better use on projects that can scale.
nimbius 3y ago
My honest question is does the economics of a larger crew impact the competitivity of the offering? 250 tons is nothing to sneeze at for things like gulf seafood shipping Edit: this is a huge deal for seafood in my opinion because your total fuel is impacted by the need to maintain a balance between range and what you dedicate to running walk in freezers on the ship for your catch.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  I forget the calculations, but there would have to be like hundreds of thousands of these ships at all times with millions of crew to make a dent the cargo carried in container ships.
  - gpm 3y ago
    Aren't you just say "the total addressable market is huge"? That sounds like a good thing for the company trying it.

gabereiser 3y ago

As a sailor myself, the fact that we don’t use wind like we used to for shipping is a huge mistake. So I love this project!

Jalad 3y ago

It seems like the lack of shipping containers would be a big bottleneck? Almost all ports around the world have standardized on shipping containers for various port logistics, so how can these sailing ships integrate with existing ports? Otherwise though it's an elegant idea. It would be pretty cool to see more wind powered ships

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
It's not like this is alien technology. You park the boat along a pier and you hoist a crane over it. There are a lot of ships that still need to use ports that are not cargo ships. Cargo ships are just one aspect of regular maritime traffic.
- gpm 3y ago
  I'm not in the industry, but modern ports seem to me to be optimized for offloading ships with cargo stacked high in shipping containers on deck without significant obstructions interfering with cranes. Not ships with a bunch of masts for sails.
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    While that is true, 'break bulk' is still very manually handled thus expensive. Things that don't fit in containers basically. Often its roll on roll off rather than crane. So there are non container options but if they could use containers for break bulk they would so the efficiency of this is probably not very high.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Of course it's not alien technology, it's just obsolete technology.
elchief 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbulk_cargo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbulk_cargo is still a thing

strongpigeon 3y ago

It's a little hard to see this as more than a pet project to have a beautiful ship given that it's not carrying containers. I wonder how long it takes to load and unload... There is a plan to eventually build a container sailboat [0], but it's just a rendering. I could be wrong, but I'm getting strong "just ~~give us your money~~ invest and we'll totally spend it on container ships" vibe. I don't like sound too negative and would love to be wrong. https://www.sailcargo.inc/future-fleet https://www.sailcargo.inc/future-fleet

duxup 3y ago

I’ve zero understanding of the ship part of shipping but just reading the website I get the vibe of someone passionate about ships trying to marry that passion to a business in order to pay for their hobby.

gpm 3y ago

I can probably buy that a modern sailing ship could make sense. Automate control of the sails and you're getting "free energy" in an energy intensive industry, with the extra cost just being some hopefully minor maintenance. I might be able to buy that "actually, wooden ships are a good idea", though it's going to be a hard sell. This company appears to be trying both at once though, that strikes me as a quite unlikely to be a good business decision - unless there is some synergy between "wooden ship" and "sailing ship" that I'm completely missing. That said, I know very little about the industry.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nathannecro 3y ago
Yep, in the last few years, there's been quite a lot of movement in the shipping industry to add wind-assist devices to existing/new ships. Michelin [1] is basically doing what you suggest. Maersk and Cargill [2] are also working on technologies that harness wind to decrease fossil fuel use. Oceanbird [3] is working on wing-style sails that they claim can basically move a cargo ship along at ~10kts. 1: https://spectrum.ieee.org/michelin-puffy-sails-cargo-ships-improve-fuel-economy https://spectrum.ieee.org/michelin-puffy-sails-cargo-ships-i... 2: https://www.cargill.com/the-future-of-shipping-is-sails https://www.cargill.com/the-future-of-shipping-is-sails 3: https://www.theoceanbird.com https://www.theoceanbird.com
- everforward 3y ago
  How does one even attach a sail to a cargo ship that would move it at 10 knots? I'm not an engineer so it might even be obvious, but it seems like the mast would have to exert an incredible amount of force on the ship. Then again, I guess the same applies to old sailing ship and they figured it out. It just boggles my mind.
  - gpm 3y ago
    Traditionally I believe the masts were held vertical by ropes, I imagine the force transferred through them (by tension) not the stiffness of the mast. But I'm far from an expert.

mhb 3y ago

This seems like the place to recommend Tally Ho: https://www.youtube.com/@SampsonBoatCo/videos https://www.youtube.com/@SampsonBoatCo/videos I’m on a mission to rebuild a 1910 English sailing yacht called Tally Ho. Designed by Albert Strange in 1909, she is a well-known and important historic vessel – but after many adventures she was left in a remote port in Oregon to rot for decades, despite some valiant attempts to rescue her. I bought her and moved her to the Olympic Peninsular earlier this year, and am now rebuilding her from the keel up. Eventually I hope to sail her back to the UK.

psychlops 3y ago

I wonder why they wouldn't use a catamaran for a more modern version giving the ship more speed. Perhaps the center support would be prohibitively heavy?

ThinkBeat 3y ago

This seems like an extreme niche product. There is enough oddity here that it sniffs a bit like a scam to me. Perhaps unintentional. Probably because they have a proper businessplan and I dont yet understand it. You would need something small, low volume with a giant markup run by someone willing to pay a huge premium for virtue signaling. (or something else the US market really craves from Columbia) >. Crew 12 crew + 12 guest crew They also need a supply of people who wish to work for free (?) since free workers make up 50% of the crew? Using wood to construct the boat does not seem like a sensible idea apart from the optics. Are there any laws governing the safety of merchant cargo vessels? I would want a proper engine for this thing. But perhaps they will always sail close enough to shore that they won't need more than what they have. Which may indicate that delivery times might be less predictable than other freight and the danger of loss higher. Insurance costs might become a problem. "Sorry we will be two weeks late due to weather"? Perhaps I should get a startup going providing cargo services with copies of old viking ships? Renewable power, either ship or oars. At least one allegedly made it ot the US and back. On raids they often came back with a ship filled with loot or so I think I have heard. Dont trust me on this.

vasco 3y ago
> Insurance costs might become a problem I believe this was the first big use of insurance too, sailing cargo across the world in ships.

crazygringo 3y ago

Is this... safe? For the crew? I was under the impression that vessels of that relatively small size can get lost at sea in storms with huge waves when traveling between continents.

gregatragenet3 3y ago

Just did some napkin math on this, just the carbon footprint of the crew for this ship nets out to almost the total carbon footprint of 16.14g-co2/ton/km for container shipping.. Take the average person's footprint of 7co2-ton/yr, math that out with the 80 ton cargo capacity, the short daily distances ~250km/day, 14 crew, and you come out with about 12g-co2/ton/km just for crew for these schooners. easy to see another 4g-co2/ton/km being in just upkeep for a vessel of wood and canvass. So yeah if someone wants to virtue-signal, then go for it ship your stuff this way but don't think you are actually netting out a smaller carbon footprint then a container ship here.

zokier 3y ago
You can probably add some extra also from it not being standard container ship so loading and unloading it is likely to be less efficient than containers.

ladino 3y ago

compared to a mega container ship, i bet the carbon footprint of this sailing boat is much much greater! Please compare the sails, antifouling, boat paint per load compared to a container ship, its much uglier than you think when you compare it to a big size petrol container ship! Just do the math! Its has more a symbolic "green thing" character, which is good! :) Even an automatically controlled boat is too expensive concerning insurance, fire and so compared to a megaboat with a small amount of people.

mikl 3y ago

I guess we’re ignoring the fact that human labour is not exactly “zero emissions”, and old-school shipping like this is a lot more labour intensive. If you factor that in, I wouldn’t be surprised if the climate impact is higher than modern shipping.

oliwarner 3y ago

The largest container ship moves over 24 thousand 20-foot containers (TEU) with 34 crew. Sailcargo's Vega Gamleby carries fewer than 4 TEU with 14 crew. I think if you want to make an impact in cargo environmentalism, you need better power sources. I'll admit I've only just seen how much power we're talking about. 12MW to move a large container ship. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe we should buy less tat from the other side of the planet.

lostlogin 3y ago
> buy less tat According to the below link, trash per human per day ranges from: 0.74 kilogram but ranges widely, from 0.11 to 4.54 kilograms. That ship carries more than a human makes in waste in a lifetime, but not by a huge margin (if you are in a wealthy country). That’s rather depressing. https://datatopics.worldbank.org/what-a-waste/trends_in_solid_waste_management.html https://datatopics.worldbank.org/what-a-waste/trends_in_soli...

Lazare 3y ago

A Panamax cargo ship (which is small by today's standards...) can carry ~5100 20-foot containers (TEUs) with a crew of perhaps 20. Sailcargo's under-construction flagship can carry 9 TEUs with a crew of 24. So replacing a single Panamax cargo ship means building around 560 of these ships, which will sail with a crew of 13k people. (Or to put it another way, carrying 9 TEUs might earn you $10k for a trip at current cargo rates. Let's assume you can double that due to charging people a green premium, that's $20k a trip. At traditional sail speeds, you can earn that every 2 months, meaning each ship earns $120k/year, which needs to pay for building the ship, maintenance, food, power, sattelite internet, salaries, etc. With a listed crew of 24 people, that's $5k of revenue per person, per year.) This isn't remotely economic or scalable, but I'm not sure it's even better environmentally. The amount of resources (especially lumber) that would go into making a fleet of almost six hundred, 150ft long sailing vessels is immense. And then youi think about the cost of having 13k people sailing around - the salaries, the food they'd eat, the medical care they'd consume, the waste they'd generate. And all that to replace just one of the smaller cargo ships still operating, out of the thousands and thousands operating. There may well be a lucrative niche here; people will pay money for the damndest things! It's entirely possible you can make good money charging people to LARP as a 19th century sailboat crew, sure, why not? But whatever this is, it's certainly not the future of cargo shipping. (Now the idea of using wind power on cargo ships is potentially promising. Just...not this kind of ship.) Edit: I should emphasise, the ships they're building and planning to build use quite a lot of of very old trees. You're not building these things from radiata pine! Sailcargo stresses they're using lumber from sustainable forestry, which is great, but they're building one schooner, and replacing just a dozen container ships means building maybe 8,000 schooners. If you were hoping to have them operating anytime this decade, you're going to need to start clearcutting. But it's okay, you can use the land you clear to build the training schools needed for the 200,000 new sailors those ships will need. Because there absolutely aren't 200k crew who know how to sail a tall ship just waiting for a call. Oh, and in case anyone was thinking, "well, maybe we should just ship less cargo", shipping freight by sea is actually the most environmentally friendly option. If sending cargo by sea becomes more expensive - and it would have to, given the economics of these ships - cargo will start being sent by land or (even worse) air. That does mean you'd need to build fewer schooners, but unfortunately means the environmental impact would be even more negative on balance. I do love the idea of seeing the the Port of LA swarming with tends of thousands of tall ships. Aesthetically it sounds amazing! But in reality it couldn't possibly work.

joshuahaglund 3y ago

Smaller scale, but Schooner Apollonia has been operating sail freight on the Hudson River since 2020. Their 12th roundtrip starts in May and past cargo manifests can be seen here: https://www.schoonerapollonia.com/cargo-manifest https://www.schoonerapollonia.com/cargo-manifest https://www.instagram.com/schooner_apollonia/ https://www.instagram.com/schooner_apollonia/

emsimot 3y ago

The napkin-math contrarians are out in full force today! I urge folk to consider why folk would come from around the world to help build and sail these ships. We build container haulers to live but there are folk that live to build sailing ships.

Stealthisbook 3y ago

I kept reading to try and find where the design innovation was that allowed containers on these traditional schooner sailing ships. It seems they're not meant for containerized cargo, and that's a big problem. Loading and unloading these things is going to be a lengthy and expensive process.

ianburrell 3y ago

I had realization that shipping is one of the easiest industries to decarbonify. Even if wind doesn’t work out, ships are perfect candidate for hydrogen. Ships have lots of space which means can carry pressure vessel or cryogenic storage.

pimlottc 3y ago

“We operate a world-leading fleet of sailing cargo ships” … “our fleet”: lists two ships, one still under concentration

detaro 3y ago
Not hard to be world-leading in a category that's (very close to?) empty.