The ship with holes and a sail – to save fuel

Tough emissions rules and industry overcapacity are prompting bold innovations
Danny Fortson

It may sound bizarre, but a plan to save the shipping industry involves poking big holes through the bottom of every cargo ship and tanker in the world’s 80,000-strong commercial fleet.
Jorn Winkler and his company, Rotterdam-based DK Group, have already tried it out on one vessel, with interesting results. The idea is to shoot compressed air through cavities bored into ship hulls. The trial vessel didn’t sink — quite the opposite: the airflow created a buffer of bubbles to reduce drag and, crucially, cut fuel consumption by 10%.
Winkler, DK’s founder and executive vice-president, is a former pilot and so understands aerodynamics. He has been working on the technology for a decade, but it is only recently that the industry has started to pay attention.
“Shipowners have been reluctant for a long time to embrace technology,” he said. “Now they’re realising they need it. Otherwise they’re all going to go bankrupt.”

The shipping industry, which delivers 90% of the world’s traded goods, is in trouble. Thanks to the recession, traffic flows and freight rates have plunged in the past year. At the same time, an unprecedented wave of new ships, ordered at the height of the boom, is about to flood the market. An even bigger problem looms: a global move to police the industry’s carbon emissions.
Shipping is the only industry apart from aviation that has not yet been ensnared by regulations limiting and fining polluters. It has accepted, grudgingly, that this will soon end. What form the new regime will take was debated at the climate change talks in Copenhagen. No deal was reached, but many eventually expect there will be a tax on bunker fuel, the sulphuric leftovers from petrol refining that power the world’s fleets. That could add $25 billion (£15.5 billion), by some estimates, to the industry’s yearly running costs.
That, combined with the already dire financial straits of large parts of the industry, has stoked an urgent search to cut emissions and fuel bills. A growing number of companies are coming up with offers, from aerodynamic paint and rubberised propellers to Winkler’s air-cavity system.
“Ship design hasn’t changed since the industry was moved to Asia 30 years ago,” Winkler said. “The only way out for the industry now is efficiency.”
Reliable figures on the carbon output of shipping are elusive. The International Maritime Organisation, the UN agency that oversees the industry, estimated in a report two years ago that it accounts for 2.7% of global emissions. Icap, one of the largest shipbrokers, argues that the total is more like 4%. “Despite all approximations, the consensus is that the figures are already exceeding a billion tonnes a year and can only rise from here,” it said in a recent report.
What is certain is that shipping’s slice of the pollution pie is already significant, is getting bigger, and will inevitably face regulation in the near future. Every day about 7.5m barrels of oil is burned by cargo ships, tankers and dry-bulk carriers — about 9% of global consumption.
According to Clarkson, the shipping services group, within the next two-and-a-half years the global fleet will increase by 40%, a rise never before seen in the industry. Yet the monster tankers and cargo vessels now being churned out of the shipyards of South Korea and China are not very different from those built decades ago. Martin Stopford, head of research at Clarksons, said: “The last real wave of innovation was in the 1950s and 1960s.”
The situation has opened a window of opportunity for new technologies — such as giant kites. SkySails, a small firm based in Hamburg, will next year begin production of computer controlled kites that can be fitted to the bow of a ship. With a 300-metre tether, a kite can capture stronger winds than those close to the sea’s surface.
SkySails boss Stephan Wrage said in the right conditions they can cut fuel use by 35%. It is early days, though. So far the loss-making firm has sold “about a dozen” and needs cash to go into volume production.
Even so, ideas like Wrage’s are gaining pace. Japan’s Ocean Policy Research Foundation predicts that by 2050 more than half the world fleet will be carbon-free. It envisages solar panels, fuel cells, wind power and other measures all working together.
For now, however, most owners are concentrating on incremental measures. Researchers are experimenting with slicker paint, for example, that can lop 10% off the fuel bill by reducing friction.
Maersk, the Dutch shipping giant, found that by cutting its speed by 1.5 knots a container ship from Barcelona to Los Angeles reduces its carbon output 16%. It has also pioneered the use of seawater to keep goods on board frozen rather than using conventional power-hungry refrigeration units. Nils Andersen, chief executive, has pledged to cut emissions across its fleet 20% by 2017.
Like past innovations, the flurry of activity is being driven by economic necessity. Some parts of the sector such as container shipping, which rely directly on consumer spending, are in “full recession”, Stopford said. “There is a lot of new tonnage arriving at an inconvenient time. The low rates mean that many shipowners are making just enough to meet running costs,” he said.
For some, the reversal of fortune has been spectacular. In the summer of 2008 bulk carriers, which deliver commodities such as wheat and coal, were charging $300,000 a day. By November rates had collapsed to just $2,000 a day.
While rates have recovered, to between $40,000 and $50,000, market experts expect the deluge of new ships to mute the recovery. “We’ll have 60% overcapacity for the next five years. That’s bad for pricing,” said one company executive. “We need to bring down our fuel consumption.”
Meanwhile, there is also a public relations fight to be won. For decades the industry has enjoyed its anonymity, toiling away deep in the machine room of the global economy. In the past couple of years, though, the climate change debate has dragged it into the harsh light of day. Not long ago it was a rarity for people to consider the carbon impact of the trainers on their feet or the television set in their living rooms. Increasingly, they do.
The similarities between shipping and aviation are many. Both industries have launched big public relations drives in the past few years as environmental awareness has intensified.
Shipowners rightly point out that they emit less than 2% of the pollution that would be generated if the same goods were sent by air. The aviation industry, in return, points to shipping’s less than stellar track record of spills and the releasing of harmful chemicals into the oceans — ships dump vast amounts of sulfur dioxide, a known carcinogen.
The mud-slinging is part of the negotiations. At Copenhagen at least eight proposals to regulate emissions were tabled — from plans to include shipping, like aviation, in Europe’s carbon-trading scheme from 2012, to a straight bunker-fuel levy that would then be used to fund carbon-cutting projects elsewhere.
Shipping lobbyists are pushing for a global deal because the global nature of the business means that any regional schemes would simply push shipowners to operate from less regulated countries. Wrage said: “The most important thing for us is that clear targets are set and a price is put on carbon at Copenhagen. If they don’t get a result, it’s bad for all of us.”
In the meantime, ideas large and small are germinating. “We are servants of global trade,” said Simon Bennett of the International Shipping Federation, the London-based trade group. “Imposing caps on our emission would effectively be putting a brake on economic growth.”