When you think of cutting edge technology
at sea, you might be thinking of stuff like this.
But there's an incoming revolution on the high seas
that isn't quite as sexy,
but could be significantly more impactful.
Container shipping is the key component of global trade.
About 80 or 90% of all the world's goods are transported
at sea at some point.
And these ships carry trillions of dollars of goods on them
and without them, there would be no globalization.
But there's a significant unseen cost
to the modern era of global commerce.
About 3% of all the world's CO2 emissions come
from shipping.
3% may not sound like a lot,
but that's roughly comparable to the entire CO2 output
of Germany, or in other words around the same amount
of emissions from all forms of aviation combined.
Since reducing trade isn't a likely option,
what about a technological improvement to help reduce
the emissions from these well-stocked maritime behemoths?
Transport by the sea has always been the most
cost-efficient method of moving.
It was like that in the Stone Age
and it's still like that today.
In the more recent history it was in the 1970s
that the big breakthrough came when the use
of the standard-sized containers became the norm.
That's really what revolutionized trade
and made globalization as we know it today possible.
Today, we are used to buying things in Europe
and the U.S that's made in China.
50 years ago, that was not the norm.
That's the containers that made that possible.
Only about six or 7,000 container ships handle
this big conveyor belt of goods.
They have doubled in size many times over
during the last couple of decades
and now the biggest container ships there are can carry
more than 20,000 containers
and they're longer than 400 meters.
So why not electrify a fleet of cargo ships
and take advantage of the emissions cuts that come with it?
Well, some are trying.
Take Yara, a fertilizer company in Norway,
and their electric autonomous ship, The Birkeland.
And we can start by addressing the question,
why is a fertilizer company building ships at all?
We have a lot of focus of making sustainable products,
producing food for the whole population
in the sustainable way is one of important tasks
that we as a company see.
And transportation and the supply chain is also part
of the environmental load that we put on the society.
The Birkeland, it's unique because it is electric
and then also emission-free and it's going to be autonomous,
without any ship crew on board.
We are exporting about 20,000 containers a year,
so that will then eliminate 40,000 truck drives
through the town of Porsgrunn.
The Birkeland isn't going to be any cheaper
to operate than a traditional vessel, at least for now.
But according to Yara, that's not its purpose.
It is more the effect on the environment,
reducing CO2 emission and also an important factor
that this ship has got a lot of attention
and it's been the kind of a catalyst for the others also
to develop green maritime transport.
But the Yara Birkeland has
a significant limitation, range.
A similarly-sized vessel with a diesel engine can travel
up to 5,000 nautical miles, the Yara Birkeland, around 80.
They will use it for a very specific route in Norway
between two sites fairly close to each other.
The ship can carry about 120 containers
and you would need about 200 of these small ships to match
one of the very large container vessels
that's out out there.
So the Yara Birkeland has a solid,
but niche potential application.
For longer range ships, the technology faces the same issues
that were common to early road-going EVs.
If you look at a Tesla,
Tesla has a battery that weighs 1,200 pounds.
If you should fit a battery into a container ship
that's 400 meters long, it would just be massive.
Because of these limitations,
the industry's heavy hitters are turning elsewhere
for carbon cutting.
Maersk, the world's largest shipping company
by vessels owned, currently consumes around 12 million tons
of oil per year, which is
about what the entire world produces every day.
In order to reach its goal of being carbon neutral by 2040,
the company is looking to change up what's in the tank.
The power requirements are just too high
for battery technology at the moment.
You're talking about ships with an engine on
with more than a hundred thousand horse power.
In the marine industry, the only real way to reduce
emissions is to actually change the fuel.
To begin that change, Maersk turned to
MAN Solutions.
MAN Energy Solutions is part of the Volkswagen group
and the oldest industrial company in Germany founded
in 1758.
We're a little bit different to the car industry
because we operate in the marine industry.
With A.P. Moller-Maersk, we'll receive an order
for 12 methanol fuel ships.
So the idea is to have a carbon neutral ship,
completely carbon neutral.
Methanol's quite an interesting fuel
because, of course, it's very CO2 neutral.
The second thing is it's liquified at ambient temperature,
so actually it's relatively simple to store and use.
the genius thing about the engines that we produce is
because of our modular design, we can actually modify
the engines fairly simply to run on different fuels.
And actually, a lot of our engines are supplied
in a dual fuel mode,
so they can run on one fuel today
and a different fuel tomorrow.
There's many types of new fuels that will allow us
to decarbonize the industry.
But of course, what we need is a kind of transition
and you can go to liquid natural gas
or even synthetic natural gas, which give us
good reductions in CO2.
We intend to have a vessel operating in 2024 on ammonia,
which, of course, is the absolute game changer
in terms of emissions.
Some of these alternative fuels,
however, have drawbacks.
We're looking at ammonia,
which is a highly toxic chemical,
but a it's also CO2 neutral.
Obviously the disadvantage is that it's very dangerous
both for humans and marine life.
Liquified natural gas, some shipping lines are looking
at that.
The problem with that is obviously that it's
not CO2 neutral, it just reduces the CO2 emissions
from the ships.
But another solution is methanol,
which is sourced from green electricity.
Methanol is readily available today
and really is carbon neutral.
Of all the technologies, I think methanol is for sure
the short or medium-term future.
There's an infrastructure around methanol.
I think methanol, at the moment, seems to be more available
and, of course, the technology's proven.
Although switching
to alternative fuels is expected to add 10 to 12%
to shipping costs, this could be the perfect time
for shipping companies to add in a buffer for that premium.
In the last two years, the industry has been
in great shape.
And the reason why they're in great shape is
while many are aware of that the world suffers
from supply chain issues, but it's actually an advantage
for the companies that own the ships
because they can charge higher prices at the moment.
So there's a lot of cash flow
in the container shipping industry right now
and that should enable the companies
and the ship owners to invest in new technologies
that reduce global emissions.
While these mammoth vessels make
incremental progress in decarbonizing,
smaller ships are more readily adopting new technologies.
Take Promare's Mayflower vessel.
Using hybrid solar, wind, and diesel propulsion,
it's equipped to travel autonomously with no crew to conduct
research on marine health.
It's designed to cruise around the oceans
and collect scientific data.
So climate data, water quality data,
data about marine mammals, and bring back samples
and also transmit samples off the boat
into the ether for consumption by the scientific community.
According to Promare, the advantages
of the Mayflower being unmanned and AI driven will be
both in its increased efficiency
and its ability to go where most ships never do.
One of the things to bear in mind
with these vessels is once you remove all the people stuff,
they become extremely efficient
in the sense that the power it takes to move this vessel
over long distances is absurdly low by comparison
to a vessel the same size carrying people on it.
It's very, very green because it just sips on the fuel,
but it's a dual electric motors that are driven
by lithium iron phosphate battery systems,
similar to what you'd find in the Tesla.
And then there are solar panels that charge
emergency batteries and then also charge the main batteries
so that if we lose main propulsion for some reason,
the solar power and battery systems that are adjacent
to the primary batteries will keep the navigation, lights,
and communications and position data live.
Then the main batteries that drive the engines and run
all the sophisticated systems are periodically charged
by a biodiesel generator.
So we can use biofuel or we can use straight diesel,
whichever we prefer.
It doesn't replace ships with people on it,
but it sort of democratized the ability to collect data
and produce information that we can all share
so that when we do send a very expensive ship
with people on it out for very long voyages
into the middle of nowhere,
that those people are best spending their time
on the areas that will produce the most results
in terms of answering the big questions
that boats like this help to ask.
The dream would be to have many, many, many ships like this.
So if you look at where we get our data about the ocean,
it's almost completely biased
to the commercial shipping channels,
ships going back and forth on major trading routes.
Ships like Mayflower and many others like it,
both very small ones, even larger ones are what we need
to kind of reduce the cost of collecting
that fundamental data and producing
that sort of first tier of information.
Promare plans to send the Mayflower
on its first trans-Atlantic voyage in April.
Across the pond in Alameda, California,
another company is looking to commit swarms
of electric autonomous drones to the seas.
That company is Saildrone.
The first vehicles were designed to be
data-gathering robots that really gather atmospheric
and oceanographic data, which is kinda the critical piece
of the puzzle we need to understand climate change
and the rate of change.
So we started gathering data on fish stocks,
on water column itself.
That led us to ocean mapping, so mapping the sea bed.
What we excel at with the robot is kind of the long,
monotonous, or dangerous things
that people shouldn't be doing.
So persistent present operations in the high Arctic,
Southern Ocean, where it's just too rough to go
with a human.
Hurricane exploration is a great example.
The boats are electric vehicles so they run
on battery power.
It is wind-powered propulsion and solar-powered
for the electricity for the computers and so on.
Electrification of marine systems is key,
but I'll go further than that saying
it's not just electrification,
it's harnessing renewable sources of wind and solar to power
those vehicles along.
The real challenge for any maritime vessel is having
enough power on board to propel you.
So if you don't harvest power along the way,
you have to carry that as stored power,
either a huge amount of batteries
or an alternative fuel source, diesel, hydrogen, or other.
So for us, we try and maximize each fuel
to renewable sources and obviously that's wind,
sailing ships, kind of one of the oldest technologies
on the planet and a true, reliable,
and sustainable form of power.
So we utilize that a lot
and that reduces the amount of fuel you have to take
and it reduces the amount of mechanical load
on the vehicles.
Less time you can run an engine for,
the longer that's gonna last.
But there are areas of the world where you don't have
a lot of sunlight.
Northern hemisphere in the winter and up in the Arctic.
Obviously, a little bit's frozen,
but in the unfrozen area where where we operate,
you have very very low light levels.
Very short days, very short summers.
And that means we struggle for power in the winter months.
Right now we're using high-efficiency small diesel engines
that run at kind of a very efficient RPM to charge batteries
in a very short period of time.
So like a diesel-electric system on a ship
where you use engines to charge batteries
and then you run the ship off batteries.
Having backup combustion engines proves
just how hard it will be for ocean-going vessels
to completely ditch carbon-emitting fuels.
Regardless, stakeholders in the industry seem to agree
that progress must continue and fast.
If we can decarbonize this industry
and we need to act very, very quickly
because it's not just about the new ships,
it's about the existing ships,
then we can have a dramatic impact to make sure
we hit the targets that been set out.
We needed to act yesterday, not tomorrow,
we needed to act yesterday.
So the quicker we can get this moving,
then the better for everybody.