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You'd be surprised at how few are the people involved in the decision making process in the Shipping industry.

• kyllo 12y ago
  And also how poor the market intelligence informing their decision making is. After China joined the WTO in 2001 and their exports and exploded, steamship lines extrapolated that growth indefinitely and ordered as many new ships as they could finance. Since it takes about 5 years from order to delivery, a glut of capacity hit at about the same time as the 2008 global financial crisis. So in 2009 all the major steamship lines lost upwards of a billion dollars each. I doubt any of them have made that money back since, and many have been dependent on a series of emergency equity sales and government bailouts.
  • jacksonwds 12y ago
    I don't think these ships run on steam. They use gas turbines, which produce hot air and not steam, which generate electricity which goes into electric motors connected to the propellers.
    • mikeyouse 12y ago
      Ships of this size just use diesel engines. The Triple-E is using a pair of MAN 32MW diesels. http://marine.man.eu/applications/container http://marine.man.eu/applications/container
      • 30thElement 12y ago
        To expand a little, most container ships use bunker crude, which is borderline sludge. It even needs to be heated before being pumped out. But it's cheap and at the size, pressure, and speeds these engines run at they get most of the energy out of just about any fuel.
        • orbitingpluto 12y ago
          Obligatory link: How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-16-ships-create-pollution-cars-world.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...
          • saalweachter 12y ago
            An important note: as much sulfuric pollution as all the cars in the world. Which is bad enough, but -- for instance -- cars are (probably) still winning on CO2 emissions. For those who don't follow the link, the 16 ships in question burn the sludge that's left over after refining all the cleaner burning bits out of petroleum. So it's not so much a "quantity of fuel burned" problem as it is that they're burning the worst possible thing you can burn, as far as this sort of pollution goes.
            • Already__Taken 12y ago
              And yet seems like such a good candidate for nuclear power use.
              • darkmighty 12y ago
                I concur, it's an almost perfect application. So much that most aircraft carriers already use it, not sure what's holding back the private sector (probably safety concerns).
                • kyllo 12y ago
                  Nope, it's definitely cost. Bunker is still very very cheap.
        • sanoli 12y ago
          I read somewhere that container ships' fuels are the dirtiest of all fuels used everywhere, which made buying electronics really non-green (since they're all come in ships from the other side of the globe). Anyone here knows how accurate this is?
    • kyllo 12y ago
      It's a historical industry term, they used to run on steam, and they're still referred to as steamship lines within the logistics industry today.