The Shipping Industry Supersizes Container Carriers

I grew up as a boy in a seaside town, in a quiet street that was a few blocks away from one of the oldest ports in that part of the world. Roman coins are still found from time to time in Chennai (or Madras as the city was called when I was born and grew up, or Poompuhar if you want the original name for the region and Mylai for the specific town that later became one of the largest cities in India) and the Dutch, the British, the Danish, the Portuguese and french all came there seeking footholds in what was an ancient trading center for seafarers. The people of the region had themselves reached out and settled in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and other countries as we know them today, forming many of the vibrant Tamil and Telugu Chettiar communities around South and South East Asia. Other communities followed the Chettiar traders over the centuries and did equally well. I remember buying a fifty paise ticket to go to the port of Madras on Saturdays and walking around the docks in the old days. Most sailors were friendly and would get us boys some or the other goodies that they ahd brought back on their voyages to other lands - goodies like imported chocolate and Coca Cola which had been banned by the socialist government in India back then. There were steam ships and diesel ones and we learned to tell the difference from how they were named - SS for the Steam Ships and MV for the diesel ones in those not too old days. I even travelled to Sri Lanka in the TSS Irwin from Rameswaram to Talaimannar as a boy, a voyage that I have some lovely memories of even today.

And that brings me to this post - an article in the Wall Street Journal talks about some of the world's largest shipping companies investing to build huge container carriers: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123292489602813689.html While shipping is a very cost efficient method of carrying goods from one part of the world to another, sadly, today, there are no emissions regulations on ships anywhere. This is equally true of the huge oil tankers and container carriers as well as of small private yachts that are used by people for recreation in the world. While I do think that the businesses that are building these monster ships would try and use the most advanced technologies possible to make them cheap in operation, it would be nice if this were a time when governments around the world led by the various industries bodies that work in shipping push for greater efficiency by regulation and force the industry to adapt more green practices.

I personally think that this is also a good time to look at building advanced sailships especially to carry valuable agricultural produce in small quantities. There are French companies that deliver wine to European destinations in sail ships - I can't see why tea clippers cannot be built these days. The old tea clippers were faster than the fastest steam ships of their time. There is no reason why new ones that are even faster, larger and modern competition to the diesel ships cannot be designed. I did not see any sailships when I was a boy, but, boy, what would I not give to see them back before I die!

Could Sail Ships Make a Comeback?

Popular Mechanics, my favorite tech magazine (well Popular Science comes close) has an excellent article on the new Parasail Technology that promi9ses to reduce fuel consumption in shipsar: http://www.popularmechanics.com/outdoors/boating/4235055.html The German Skysail system http://www.skysails.info/index.php?L=1
featured in the article is designed to be fitted to virtually any of today's cargo ships and promises a reduction in fuel consumption of 35% on each voyage. The system is certainly good enough to be improved even further and the German engineers who have designed it must be hard at work fine tuning the technology or even designing vessels to be powered exclusively by it. There was already a move in Congress to impose fuel efficiency regulations on recreational boats, a very good idea if you ask me, and the IMO has been toying with similar recommendations for large ships. There are proposals to intriduce fuel cell driven ships but with fuel cells still some way away from commercial production that may be something for the future.

In the meantime, a French company has gone to the real thing: full fledged sailships carrying wines to other European markets as this article from Treehugger describes: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/08/slow-freight-joins-slow-movement.php
My feeling is that it is a question of time before goods that do not need to be rushed from one location to another are moved by sail. I have seen sailboats go nearly as fast as diesel powered ones on Lake Michigan and while I am no expert in this area and do not know how a particular engine displacement would compare with say a certain surface area for a sailboat's sails or whatever, the fact is that we have a centuries-old tradition of using wind power to deliver cargo. In her day, the last British Tea Clipper, the Cutty Sark http://www.cuttysark.org.uk/ often beat steamships hollow across the seas. Granted, there should be much faster vessels these days, they would hardly do what they do as cheaply as a sailship would. And with oil temporarily down but still expensive (yes, it cost me $ 41 for a tankful of gas today despite a "reduction" in pump prices) I think that it is a question of time before sailships become more common. Right now, some of the sailships use diesel gensets to keep food cargo cool. In the future, there could be one or another of the solar powered designs that are used. It is a question of integrating technologies and it is only a question of time before something very concrete comes out. Engineers are impatient and fiercely competitive people. I don't expect them to keep off fiddling with different energy-saving technologies in their rush to make the most advanced ships possible in the future.

Yes, I am a boy who comes from a seaside town where, in the mornings, children still go to the beach to watch fishermen bring their catch in and sell it to fishmongers. I have seen vessels from small catamarans (the name comes from the Tamil "kattu maram") to huge oil tankers at the port in Chennai. While I did see the last of the coal-fired steamships when I was a boy and even traveled from India to Sri Lanka by sea, the era of sail had died when I was growing up some four plus decades ago. I cannot, but, be excited about a future where sailships are visible on the horizon. What would I give to be outside Fort St George in Chennai looking out into the Bay of Bengal for sailships coming in to the port! As boys in school we were made to memorize John Masefield's "Sea Fever." I can feel it coming on as I wait for sail's second coming.