
Sail Freight Projects Around the World - privong
https://sailingdog.org/sail-freight-projects-around-the-world/
======
motohagiography
Labelling products that used these low carbon sail methods would be a product
differentiator for the commodities they shipped. A great lakes trading route
for regional craft products shipped by sail would be super interesting as
well, especially for breweries and distileries.

A retro "platform" company that facilitated this and authenticated the cargo
with labels akin to a fair-trade/organic and other effective luxury branding
could be a thing. The great lakes and the intracoastal waterways connect
markets large enough to support it, and companies could in effect audition
products for it. Doing sail deliveries could be a way to offset the cost of a
sailing trip as well.

Craziest idea ever.

~~~
alex_g
This would be super neat. There's got to be a big enough cross section of
craft product business owners & sailors that would at least have interest in
buying into this.

~~~
motohagiography
250+ craft breweries just in Ontario:
[https://www.ontariocraftbrewers.com/FactsAndFigures.html](https://www.ontariocraftbrewers.com/FactsAndFigures.html)

Then there's Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio,
Pennsylvania and New York, and that's not including the St. Lawrence seaway
that has Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, then New Hampshire and
Vermont. Intracoastal you can't really sail, as it's motor power, which would
be off brand, but enough in the region to try it anyway.

20+ distileries:
[https://www.ontariotravel.net/en/social/blog/article/8903](https://www.ontariotravel.net/en/social/blog/article/8903)

By linking it to the low carbon footprint of sails and the geography of the
waterways, the brands would be relatively resistant to pressure from
globalization given it's a luxury environmental product. I know people in both
sailing and heavy industry logistics who would think this was nuts, except.

Depending on trade treaties around these products, we could probably get
exceptions to them on environmental grounds. Ideally there are some existing
tariff protections or something that keeps these craft companies out of each
others markets already that we could use the environmental path as an
exception.

~~~
Kalium
It's worth bearing in that that beer specifically often does not travel
particularly well. Dry goods might be a better option.

~~~
motohagiography
Valuable data point. This idea of a premium green service is the key, and
beer/distileries were the examples of local products, but if there were dry
goods, that would make it. Also, we can solve the preservative issue with
refrigeration if it's worth it. Again, there's no ceiling on what people will
pay for a luxury item that is green/local/craft etc, and we could figure out
what's involved in making kegs/cans survive a great lakes transfer and price
it in.

~~~
brnt
If people would pay a premium for something local, by definition it wouldn't
need to travel far.

------
aidenn0
Interestingly enough, there were sail-powered cargo ships well into the 20th
century[1], hauling bulk cargo for cheap. The crews were severely underpaid
because some countries still had various licenses that required commercial
sailing experience to get.

The boats could sail from Austrailia to England in 3-4 months.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron-
hulled_sailing_ship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron-hulled_sailing_ship)

------
pureliquidhw
Not sail freight but in a similar vein, the flettner rotor is pretty neat:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flettner_rotor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flettner_rotor)

~~~
leoedin
That's fascinating - and kind of what I was hoping this article was about.

That lead to the E-Ship 1
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1))
- a wind turbine servicing ship with 4 Flettner Rotors.

There's a detailed breakdown of that ship here: [https://www.stg-
online.org/onTEAM/shipefficiency/programm/06...](https://www.stg-
online.org/onTEAM/shipefficiency/programm/06-STG_Ship_Efficiency_2013_100913_Paper.pdf)

That paper gives some interesting numbers - in one voyage spinning the rotors
gave a speed boost of 2.4 knots with a constant power going to the propellers,
which they calculated as a 1.7MW power boost (engine was running at 2.8MW).
Overall the rotors give - with favourable wind and sailing direction - a
maximum of about a 50% fuel reduction.

Obviously actual performance was much worse (you often want to go where the
wind isn't blowing) - for the test voyage they used around 85% of the fuel
they would have without the rotors.

------
gumby
If you like this stuff:’one of my all time favorite books is “The Last Grain
Race” by Eric Newby. He signed on as a sailor on the Last sail shipment of
grain from Rotterdam to Sydney in 1939 (just as WWII was breaking out in
Europe). As is typical for him he knew nothing about sailing when he signed
on. He’s a great writer and it’s an exciting story.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Grain_Race](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Grain_Race)

~~~
sriacha
Thanks for the recommendation. I really enjoyed "A Short Walk in the Hindu
Kush" by him some years ago.

~~~
gumby
The whole book is hair raising and hilarious but the very end when they run
into Thesiger is unforgettable.

------
caymanjim
Most of these seem pretty gimmicky. I love sailing, and I'd like to see a
reduction in the carbon footprint from sea freight, but it's already pretty
low per-pound. It's certainly better than flying cargo.

The total footprint from sea freight is high (3% of global carbon emissions),
and the fuel they use is terrible in other ways (it's dirty and carbon isn't
the only bad thing emitted). It can't be replaced by sailing, though. Maybe if
someone creates a sailing megafreighter, but not by schooners or smaller
vessels.

Of everything on that page, the Kwai seems the most pragmatic and the least
gimmicky; it's a large vessel and operates in an underserved market. While
Tres Hombres is also a large vessel, trans-Atlantic freight is just a silly
market to operate in. That's a gimmick to sell expensive "fair trade" goods to
niche markets. People are paying a premium to absolve themselves of consumer
guilt.

~~~
i_am_proteus
It literally could be replaced by sailing, but would be much more expensive,
more human-labor-intensive, and less efficient. But it's entirely technically
feasible, especially if motors or tugs are used for harbors and channels.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
Basically all sailboats that go out on the blue water have an engine for
safety reasons.

~~~
corty
Also, handling. Landing in a port under sails is extremely difficult, which is
why everyone who has a motor uses it for that.

------
cardamomo
Paolo Bacigalupi's shipbreaker novels and The Windup Girl take place in a
post-oil future with fleets of high-tech clipper ships. The ships transport
freight and people around the world using high-altitude kite-like sails.

------
hchz
Eliminating or mitigating the use of bunker fuel could be impactful towards
reducing harmful emissions. The use of conventional sailing power is not.

In 2015 cargo ships transported 70 trillion ton-kilometers. The largest vessel
here displaces 45 tons, so how many sailing vessels and sailors able to work
for such low wages do you need to make a dent?

~~~
newsclues
Do you need sailors or fleets of autonomous sailboats?

~~~
mabbo
This would be interesting.

Let's say you made a boat that could hold 4 standard cargo containers. Sail
powered, solar electric + batteries. Fully autonomous. Then have autonomous
loading and unloading of containers as well. Build a fleet of boats.

The beauty of it would be zero waiting. Boats are always ready to take the
next container, and loading takes only 5 minutes, then it leaves right away.
Even if it were slower than standard container ships, it's always moving.

~~~
LeChuck
Let's say a typical call is about 5000 moves. So that would mean about 625 of
your small vessels. It won't take 5 minutes to load the containers, because
the discharge containers need to be unlashed and the load units need to be
lashed (which you can't do during operations). It'll be more like 30 minutes
to discharge, load and get the next boat alongside (in the best case). You
could shift the boat along the quay for lashing (or shift the crane, but that
takes the same amount of time)and get the next boat working. Even then the
productivity will be at least half of what a typical terminal can do. The
overhead per boat is simply to high.

That's not even taking into account the seaworthiness of these small vessels
or the logistics of getting all these boats in and out of port without
congestion.

~~~
yourapostasy
If the ships only carry 4 TEU (or 4 FEU), then lashing is likely not needed if
they use Twistloc's welded to a boat deck that is designed for the dynamic
loads. With only four containers, I wouldn't even dock/undock the ships; keep
them continuously moving, and pick and place the containers dynamically as the
boats move through canal lock style controlled conditions. There are Twistloc
designs that are purpose-built to automatically work with the container cranes
with no manual intervention.

The idea is impractical because the fast turnaround is not going to offset the
overhead of a separate boat per 4 containers. People usually don't think of
container ships, but they're bean-counter-efficient designs, and the boat
overhead costs per container are absurdly low.

We're at multi-year highs now nearly touching $2590 USD per FEU Asia-West
Coast on the spot market, maybe around $4-5K if you're doing a one-off by your
lonesome through a freight forwarder [1]. But the opex cost per TEU per day
for the larger container ships is around the $10 USD zone [2].

Using super slow steaming numbers, which would be comparable to sailing
vessels' time, we're likely looking at 15-20 days for that Pacific voyage. Say
20 days to be generous to the case of the autonomous boats, so the opex cost
for that voyage works out to about $400 USD per FEU. Amortized capex works out
to maybe another $500 USD per FEU in normal economic conditions, plus overhead
for maintenance (the ocean is a real PITA), plus some profit off the top?

Whatever that capex really is, building and financing those autonomous
4-container boats have to squeeze into about that budget, plus whatever of the
opex they can skim over for not having to pay for bunker fuel (which is
absurdly cheap, yay externalities) and crew (a fraction of the opex) [3]. I'd
probably look into vanadium redox or iron batteries, since I'd want to
amortize out way longer than say a Panamax does. Everything that touches the
phrase "marine-grade" gets magic 10X cost pixie dust sprinkled on it giving
the bean-counters who buy the stuff micro-strokes every day (bean-counters on
the other side of the sale get hookers and blow, there's gonna be a Nobel for
the person who figures out how to replace 304 grade stainless with something
as cheap as pig iron and just as workable), so I find it hard to see how the
numbers pencil out wrapping lots of ship around so few containers, until the
global economy radically changes to a form we don't recognize today.

One last thing: sails at scale are freaking hard to recycle. These days with
sails mostly relegated to recreational markets, there is sufficient demand for
the bags and other stuff they make out of used sails. I think the Dacron-based
remnants that is in tatters can be sent into PET recycling streams, but the
more exotic stuff is going to be more challenging like windmill blades.
Commercial quantities of beaten sails would be an interesting problem to
solve.

[1] [https://www.freightwaves.com/news/carrier-capacity-cuts-
send...](https://www.freightwaves.com/news/carrier-capacity-cuts-send-trans-
pacific-rates-into-orbit)

[2]
[https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=5626](https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=5626)

[3]
[https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=2250](https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=2250)

~~~
LeChuck
>If the ships only carry 4 TEU (or 4 FEU), then lashing is likely not needed
if they use Twistloc's welded to a boat deck that is designed for the dynamic
loads. With only four containers, I wouldn't even dock/undock the ships; keep
them continuously moving, and pick and place the containers dynamically as the
boats move through canal lock style controlled conditions. There are Twistloc
designs that are purpose-built to automatically work with the container cranes
with no manual intervention.

on a ocean going vessel you wouldn't need to lash them, no. On a ship this
small I would most certainly do. We can probably devise a hypothetical
solution for this as well, though.

I tried to illustrate (badly) how hyper-efficient modern container operations
are. People don't really realize how much work has been put in optimizing all
this stuff.

------
praveen9920
This is interesting.

Not sure about the economics of this though. Sailing seems like slow way of
transport and may have higher cost because of more human crew. Why would any
business opt for this service unless there are no alternatives? Am I missing
something here?

But I see the appeal as a tourists. I would love to travel in one of these
beauties.

~~~
rvense
Slow is the wrong word, I think. Big container ships don't necessarily move a
lot faster than sailing ships, since speed = fuel usage, which is a big cost
in shipping. A big modern container ship might cruise at half it's maximum
speed for this reason.

The main thing is modern container ships are much, much bigger than any
traditional sail ship, which drives down the cost per shipped item. This
particular article shows wooden ships with (I assume) comparatively big crews
as you say, and I don't think those will be taking over international shipping
again this side of a major economic downturn, but that doesn't mean that sail
as a method of propulsion can't have a role to play in sustainable shipping.

You could construct sail ships with modern materials, and it's certainly
possible to automate them to keep crew sizes down. I imagine you'd need a lot
of fabric to move the Emma Mærsk when carrying 11,000 20' containers! But sail
doesn't have to mean traditional methods and materials.

It might not be practical to make ships exactly as large as with fossil fuel
propulsion. But if we're serious about efficiency and sustainability, in this
and many other cases, we need to take a serious look at using renewable energy
directly, rather than converting to electricity for storage and then back to
kinetic energy.

------
gandalfian
I've read that ammonia created from hydrogen & nitrogen using electricity from
wind turbines is currently the predicted shipping fuel of the future. A less
romantic way to harness the wind but rather more practical sounding. Less
chance of being caught on a lee shore too.

~~~
corty
Ammonia sounds very nasty. Wouldn't some artificial alcohol or other
carbohydrate be a better choice?

~~~
e12e
Energy density is a big issue. Bunker oil is nasty stuff, but
weight/volume/energy is very hard to beat. And it's redicoulsly cheap, thanks
externalities of local and global environmental impact/risk not being properly
priced in. But ammonia-hydrogen at least approaches the ballpark of diesel
fuel iirc (also much less concentrated energy - but a more "natural"
replacement for toxic bunker oil, which is finally being banned due to the
pollution from regular use and spills).

Some numbers here (Esp concerning energy density etc):

[https://sea-lng.org/our-work/comparison-of-alternative-marin...](https://sea-
lng.org/our-work/comparison-of-alternative-marine-fuels/)

------
audiometry
Has anyone here taken a freighter cruise? I like my imagination of what it
would be like, but I’ve no idea what the reality would be.

My conception is getting to see the industrial side of ocean going transport
without the amusement park atmosphere of a ‘consumer’ cruise line.

~~~
lreeves
There are many YouTube tours and breakdowns of freighter passenger trips.

------
RegW
Interesting, but a bit old (5 years). A number of these appear to be no longer
active.

~~~
azepoi
A chocolate maker has a small ship under construction to transport cocoa

[https://graindesail.com/content/14-voilier-
vootan-72](https://graindesail.com/content/14-voilier-vootan-72)

------
specialist
I'm also curious about wave glider technologies.

[https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/how-it-
works/](https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/how-it-works/)

It uses an under water "kite" to harvest the wave energy for propulsion.

I imagine using these for ocean cleanup. Like scooping up all the great
plastic gyre debris (or whatever we're calling the floating plastic).

Remember those river clean up barges? Make ocean faring versions. Use the wave
glider tech for navigation and station keeping.

------
akavel
Wow, so beautiful:
[https://youtu.be/YUtwJYVdUms?t=103](https://youtu.be/YUtwJYVdUms?t=103)

~~~
klank
Also very beautiful, the cargo ship Kwai:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0nz6pEhn80](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0nz6pEhn80)

~~~
walrus01
As a sort of thread topic derail, this video is a good example of the use of a
common consumer-grade easy to fly drone (DJI mavic 2 pro, mavic air, mavic air
2, etc) in the under $2000 category, used for travelogue type video, without
the drone shots being used excessively. It's a good way to show an overview of
a place from a different perspective.

Since drone video is without audio, you need some sort of audio track to
overlay on it to keep things interesting. The traditional singing and chants
work really well to set the tone of the piece.

------
solarpunk
Huh I wonder if freight ships could be converted to become electric/solar
powered

~~~
hadlock
There are some experiments with solar on boats for propulsion. Most recently I
saw a 40' catamaran in Canada with about 4kw of solar, replacing the sails.
The owner is claiming about sustained 60-70 miles a day during the long summer
months there.

The catamaran has relatively low displacement however, compared to both
traditional sailboats and freight ships.

Norway has been experimenting with battery powered ferries to make short,
sub-10 mile trips, with good success. The main problem they've seen is that
the power required to recharge the batteries can overwhelm local power
supplies, so they've added industrial size capacitors to assist with fast
charging.

I don't see 700'\+ container ships being converted to solar without a complete
redesign/rethink of their systems. Typically solar panels are mounted above
the ship, and on a container ship, the containers are craned into the hold
through the same airspace that any solar panels would occupy.

~~~
m-ee
There are roll on/roll off car carriers with solar panels on top so they can
use less port power when docked. Can spot them in SF from time to time.

~~~
hchz
You'd need 100-200 acres of utility solar to propel a panamax at cruising
speed.

~~~
missedthecue
And it couldn't move at night. And would have reduced speed on cloudy days

