OIL AT more than $90 a barrel is concentrating minds in the shipping industry. Higher fuel costs and mounting pressure to curb emissions are leading modern merchant fleets to rediscover the ancient power of the sail.
The world's first commercial ship powered partly by a giant kite sets off on a maiden voyage from Bremen to Venezuela tomorrow, in an experiment which inventor Stephan Wrage hopes can wipe 20 per cent, or $1,600 (about £820), from the ship's daily fu
el bill.
"We aim to prove it pays to protect the environment," Mr Wrage said. "Showing that ecology and economics are not contradictions motivates us all."
The 10,000-tonne MS Beluga SkySails – which will use a computer-guided kite to harness powerful ocean winds far above the surface and support the engine – combines modern technology with know-how that has been in use for millennia.
German-based Beluga Shipping has already ordered two more vessels and Mr Wrage's company has a total of five orders in hand. If the maiden voyage is a success, inventor and chief executive Mr Wrage hopes to double the size of its kites to 320sq m, and expand them again to 600sq m in 2009. The company hopes to fit 1,500 ships by 2015.
But if SkySails is a relatively elaborate solution, another development shows the march of progress is not always linear: shipping companies seeking immediate answers to soaring fuel prices and the need to cut emissions are, simply, slowing down. The world's 50,000 merchant ships, which carry 90 per cent of traded goods, from oil, gas, coal, and grain to electronic goods, emit 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, equivalent to around 5 per cent of the world's total. Also, their fuel costs rose by as much as 70 per cent last year.
The dramatic increase has ship owners clambering on to a bandwagon to reduce speed as a way to save fuel and cut the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, said Hermann Klein, an executive at the Germanischer Lloyd classification society.
"The number of shipping lines reducing speed to cut fuel costs has been growing steadily," Mr Klein, whose organisation runs safety surveys on more than 6,000 ships worldwide, said. "Slowing down by 10 per cent can lead to a 25 per cent reduction in fuel use. Just last week, a big Japanese container line gave notice of its intention to slow down."
Shipping was excluded from the UN's Kyoto Protocol to slow climate change, and many nations want the industry to be made accountable for its impact on the climate in the successor to Kyoto, which runs to 2012. In Hamburg, the Hapag-Lloyd shipping company is not waiting for 2012. It reacted to rising fuel prices by cutting the throttle on its 140 container ships travelling the world's oceans, ordering its captains to slow down.
The company in the second half of last year reduced the standard speed of its ships to 20 knots from 23½ knots, and said it saved a "substantial amount" of fuel.
The calculation used in shipping is complex: longer voyages mean extra operating costs, charter costs, interest costs and other monetary losses. But Hapag-Lloyd said slowing down still paid off handsomely.
"We've saved so much fuel that we added a ship to the route and still saved costs," said Klaus Heims, press spokesman at the world's fifth-largest container shipping line. "Why didn't we do this before?"
Hapag-Lloyd board member Adolf Adrion told a news conference in London earlier this month that speeds are now being cut further, to 16 knots from 20, for journeys across the Atlantic: "It makes sense environmentally and economically," he said.
