The Chinese are taking up competition with Europe on developing wind power for ships:
https://splash247.com/dsic-and-china-merchants-test-landmark-sail-propulsion-system-on-vlcc/
Norsepower and Skysail have tested their systems for a few years now, but it doesn’t harm with some fresh eyes and ideas from other sources.
Not exactly of ocean crossing size, but it is another step in the development of autonomous ships of the future:
https://splash247.com/fugro-to-develop-autonomous-survey-vessels/
If you look at the numbers, autonomous vehicles are saving lives. Period. Sure there are some issues, like what you mention, that are good arguments for how these technologies may fail, in particular instances. Though we can predict and manage these issues.
The larger dilemmas come when we program risk reward software into these ships. How much data do we give the computer. Do we allow the computer to browse the internet on its own. Do we calculate all lives the same, or do we weight life based on X criteria.
For your example, technology is finding bodies at sea much more effectively than the human eye. We can program the ship to not sail on if it finds “a bit of jetsam” if we think it is beneficial to do so.
More proposals for wind driven/assisted ships in the offering:
https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/winds-of-change-global-shipping-decarbonisation-wind-propulsion/
The UK Gov. put some money into autonomous ship development:
Emission free Car Carrier of the future has been presented by NYK:
Good article on regulatory issues with autonomous vehicles, much of which is applicable to truly autonomous (i.e., not remote controlled) ships:
Cheers,
Earl
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Kongsberg select battery supplier for Yara Birkeland:
https://www.motorship.com/news101/ships-equipment/leclanche-power-for-hybrid-power-vessels
Leclanché – that’s a famous name in battery chemistry. Georges Leclanché in 1866 invented the cell that’s the basis of the zinc-carbon and alkaline dry cells used today.
An article in Fairplay today:
Here is an excerpt from the article:
Another contribution to the discussion about autonomous ships and shipping:
The biggest hurdle to overcome is what do we do with vessels that are at present burning HFO. We don’t know yet if low sulphur fuels from different suppliers will Perform the same. Scrubbers, separators are manual labour intensive. Changing fuels is hands on and changing parameters to use a new source of bunkers mid ocean after receiving a fuel analysis report would be from what I have read to be beyond automation.
I think that it will a long time before we see the autonomous ULCC or Cape size bulk carrier.
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Yes indeed, making a conventional ship with a large diesel engine burning HFO autonomous would be fairly difficult. But that is not likely to happen.
For commercial ships it is already starting with small units, such as ferries and coasters on short routes. These are initially going to be battery powered and operate in coastal waters only.
Most like this will develop into larger ships with fuel cells using hydrogen produced from hydro power and/or excess power from wind farms and large solar cell arrays and other renewable sources.
When will ULCCs (If they still exists) be crossing oceans autonomously??
I doubt that you and I will get to see it, so don’t worry about it.
for smaller ships my guess is it will be containerized power, gens sets or fuel cells etc.
just unload and reload at each port along with fuel.
Saying that my shipping buddies are saying the crew cost is no longer significant to warrant removing them
I can’t see how you’d really reliably automate the 2-stroke and multiple residual fuels paradigm, and that combination probably pays for most crews. I’m not even sure removing Americans would cover the cost of a more reliable propulsion option.
That’s a point I’ve been making for a long time. The crew costs are less than $50 per container. Who cares? It’s virtually nothing.
For foreign crew on a 20,000 TEU ship the crew cost is probably less than $1 per container.
The big labor cost is the longshoremen !
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And they just got a fat new contract in the US.
We can all have dreams of winning a lottery or becoming a container crane driver at LA.
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Yes but those Container cranes are getting automated rapidly around the world. There are probably less job security there than being Engineer on a ship with a single slow turning diesel. There will likely be some of those sailing the oceans until 2050, when the goal of zero pollution from ships are expected to be reached.
I wish you were right about that. I really do.
But the eff’in longshoremen have been successful at fighting off automation and grabbing most of the marine transportation dollars for a long time.
The typical longshoreman has an 8th grade education and make $144,000 per year plus lavish benefits. And he gets to go home every day. They have the last effective (far too effective) workers union in the US.
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