THERE is exciting news from the shipping industry. Large, fossil-fuel driven container ships have been the backbone of international shipping for decades. And while, pound for pound, these vessels are a smaller source of pollution than over the road trucking, their size and growth both in terms of individual ships and the shipping industry as a whole, continues to draw attention.
Container ships belch tons of unwanted carbon-based gases into the atmosphere at a worrying rate, and the industry has been exploring solutions, but few have shown much promise until now.
Norway has put to sea the world’s first all-electric, crewless container ship, the Yara Birkeland, and it promises to revolutionize shipping as surely as the shipping container itself. Here is what you should know.
Yara International, a chemical company is Norway, sent around 20,000 truckloads of products to its harbor facilities every year, where the goods were exported to customers around the world. This resulted in unwanted costs and pollution in the area around Oslo, and when a renewed commitment to cleaning up the environment grew, Yara decided it could do better. A company in Finland launched an autonomous ferry in 2018, by which time Yara’s plans for a container ship were well underway.
The vessel is completely electric, with lithium batteries powering two bow thrusters and two large, pivoting propeller pods in the stern. With no crew aboard, the ship will be controlled by three data control centers onshore.
The Yara Birkeland is small as container ships go, designed to haul around 120 twenty-foot units. But don’t be discouraged. If this ship proves successful, larger ships will be developed until all-electric, autonomous ships take over the container industry. Think what that would mean in terms of reduced pollution and operating costs, and therefore lower shipping costs. The need for crew members to operate large ships for months at a time would disappear, resulting in further cost savings.
Around 2016, when the Yara was just a concept drawing on a laptop computer, the shipping industry wondered from where the next leap forward would come. Something had to be done about pollution, about crew safety and well-being, and about spiraling shipping costs. Six years later, the Yara solves all three.
Dry runs have already been made. The next step is to carry a load from point A to point B, which should be right around the corner. When it comes to shipping, with the Yara Birkeland, the future is now.
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and has taught history for 20 years. He currently resides on the mainland U.S.
