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.
I used to be a naval architect, and I completely agree with you. This type of design is extremely inefficient for cargo delivery. I think it is unrealistic to expect to be able to even remotely compete with diesel cargo ships. As another commenter said, the crew are in fact paying passengers (I have not verified this) which means this is actually a cruise ship, which makes a lot more sense. It must be a great experience.
In my mind, the only way sailing ships can come back as work boats is if a way is found to make them nearly automatic and space efficient. In my mind this means large steel ships, not dissimilar to regular cargo ships, but with automated kite sails (e.g. https://skysails-marine.com/) as they do not tend to tip the ship over like regular sails do.
Are there Kerbal Space Program like simulation for naval architect wannabe? I have always wanted to learn more about what it takes to design maritime crafts / structure.
Coffee is the perfect product for this because the farmers get paid peanuts and the actual coffee is sold to customers at like 1000x higher price, so there's probably a lot of room to pay a premium for "green logistics" while still making a tidy profit
I think that's a great way to look at it. Like those vertical farms that exclusively targeted luxury/high-margin crops. Incapable of competing with real logistical chains, but efficient enough to focus on capturing the cream of the market.
For what it’s worth, any sailing vessel beats any diesel container ship in ocean pollution. That, and ballast tank contamination, though that is not unique to any propulsion type, but instead to ship design.
> 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.
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.
It is something to sneeze at. That’s about 10 shipping containers. Current gen container ships can hold 15-25k twenty foot containers. Even inland barges are typically 10x bigger than this.
Definitely. Commercial pricing for a move of a container from ship to shore and vice versa ranges between 30 and 70 euros here in Europe (Rotterdam/Antwerp).
Even if you compare fuel usage against inland barges, which capacity-wise are much closer, they use something on the order of magnitude of 25 metric tons of fuel every 2 to 3 weeks or so, depending on cruising speed and number of stops of course. Assuming about a 208 TEU capacity, and 1.8 tons of fuel a day, that'd be roughly 2 or 3 gallons of fuel per container per day.
People tend to really underestimate how ridiculously efficient ships are per unit of cargo shipped.
Realistically, if you want to make a difference in emissions right now, figure out a way to move inland shipping (the port-to-actual-destination leg) from trucks onto trains and barges, only doing last-mile trucking. I don't think the barrier to that happening is actually technical, nor is it financial because those modes tend to be cheaper. The economics around these modes of transport are well established. It's primarily that they are slower, so you tie up a lot of cashflow into goods in-transit.
Because the cost of shipping is so low relative to the cost of the goods itself, it typically does not make sense to save pennies on the transport while tying up serious cashflow for longer. I'm honestly surprised there is no financial institution that has made a financial product around financing the cashflow gap created by greener modes of transport: the pay-off is predictable, and the risks are low.
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.
The size of the market doesn't really matter when your product is not competitive.
As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, shipping a 20ft container from Shenzhen to Los Angeles is about $1200 and takes about 14 days. Assuming you can sail at the same speed, and considering this sail ship has a capacity of about 10 containers, that is a revenue of $24000 / month. In reality you'll only be able to sail 100 to 150 miles a day, so crossing those 6500 miles will take you to 43 to 65 days - or a revenue of $5100-$7800 / month.
How are you going to run your ship for that little, considering you need 12 crew (and 12 additional "guest crew")?
Don't forget that included in that $1200 number there is also the rent of the container, which covers well over that 14 days since you need time to stuff and strip the container with cargo on both sides of the ocean leg.
Sure, given they can compete commercially against containerships. The baseline would be like launching a new containership which is just as good, except it has a couple of thousand crew instead of a dozen.
I assume the goal would be to automate the management of the sails so that the crew could still be only a dozen or so large. Replacing crew with computers and electric motors.
Otherwise I would be surprised if you could even make a good faith argument that this will be commercially viable.
I guess the question is how much R&D is actually involved in building schooners modelled on a 1907 design which was itself modelled on hundreds of years of what worked well in long-distance voyages under sail?
Tjose tea clippers are amazing ships, the peak of sail boat engineering. And yes, that includes modern foils boats, as clippers are significantly larger. So yes, R&D would be limited. Building a modern version of a clipper so might be expensive. And then, well, those clippers were replaced quite early by steam powered ships tgat can only be called tiney and slow by modern standards. That, and they didn't even carry containers. But hey, maybe there is still some VC money to be grabbed through fancy renderings and pitch decks.
actually, sail boats and steam boats coexisted for many decades. Sail boats were used for grain and coal transport well into the 20th century, though as steam engine technology developed, on fewer and fewer routes. But it's only the internal combustion engine that made sail boats obsolete for shipping.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Automate control of the sails and you're getting "free energy"
There have been auto pilots for sailing ships and motorized ships for decades, it's nothing new. Ocean sailing is usually keeping the same course and sails for days.
When I Google for "modern sailing ship", I only see CGI rendered ships. This ship looks like most other older sailing ships, which still have ship yards that can construct and repair them.
They started with buying an older ship from 1909 and improving it. Now building a similar one from scratch. I think these iterations fit the startup mentality of just starting and continuously improving.
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.
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
It definitely is still a thing but it has evolved substantially due to competition from containers, tankers, and dry bulk ships. Nowadays break bulk is almost exclusively for things that don’t have even a remote possibility of breaking down into container sized chunks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Maybe I'm wrong and people will pay absurd prices for coffee that's been shipped "green" and carbon free on a sailboat.