Sailing ocean transport re-introduced: Initiatives make way for large scale wind powered transport

Efforts to operate wind-powered vessels as a competitive mode of transport are taken all over the world. Not only idealists, also scientists and ship owners seriously study the possibilities. The first successfully operated sailing cargo vessel is Dutch – and it doesn’t even have an engine.

It is hard to beat the highly efficient Clippers that sailed the world’s oceans in the late days of sailing freight transport. These beautiful ships, carrying loads up to 750 ton payload, were able to reach speeds up to 20 knots and achieve day runs of 450 nautical miles. Values like these are quite acceptable, even in today’s world of shipping some 160 years later. Typically three-masted, square rigged with added triangle fore sails and often a gaff mizzen, these sailing freight carriers were optimised for swift ocean crossings.

Of course, the days of sailing sea trade are wiped away by motor vessels, that benefit from shortcuts like the Suez and Panama Canals -waters difficult to navigate with no engine. Yet, may they be visionaries or idealists, a growing community of seamen and trading companies foresees the revival of sailing freight transport in the next decades. The main asset: zero fuel consumption when sailing. Hybrid concepts may achieve up to 80% or 90% fuel savings port to port on longer ocean crossings, benefiting trade winds.

Numerous initiatives to make use of wind power in marine transport investigate the possibilities of sail freight in the modern-day supply chain. Some wind power innovations can be applied to existing ships. Most projects consist of purpose-built ships with combinations of engine and wind power. The boldest initiative is probably the general cargo vessel Tres Hombres, already sailing up and down the Atlantic Ocean taking rum, cocoa beans and wine from producers to distributors – and medicine plus a doctor back. This traditionally square rigged ship does not have an engine aboard. In business since spring 2009, the three pioneers from Fair Transport Shipping prove their business model viable.

Prototyping

The dawning new era of freight sailing intrigued universities, knowledge centres and innovation networks in the North Sea region to start the NSR Sail project, investigating possibilities and technologies for commercially operated wind powered or hybrid vessels. Wind propulsion aboard a prototype in 2015 is the ambitious goal for the project. Experts from Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France and the Netherlands have gathered to participate in a series of tasks, including technological research and engineering for the optimisation of hull forms, rigs and power plant lay-outs to achieve the optimal configuration of wind and engine propulsion.

Other tasks include studies into the economic prospects of sailing transport, political lobbies to support legislation in support of freight sailing and building business alliances to develop a competitive wind powered vessel.

NSR Sail is not the only study on the matter. Naval architects at GDNP (Gerard Dijkstra’s office) have developed the Ecoliner concept. This is a 138 metre long general cargo freight carrier with 18 metre beam, driven by a four mast Dynarig. The Dykstra-designed 21st century version of the Dynarig consists of unshrouded rotating masts, each carrying five square sails on curved booms. This rig type was initially developed for the epic 90 metre sailing yacht Maltese Falcon. Sail control is fully automated with this rig type. Setting the angles of mast rotation to achieve the best angle to the wind and maximise thrust and speed, is done by pushing buttons of the hydraulic system. When strong winds make reefing necessary, the sails fold in the mast automatically at a push of the button. The sails are never partially flown: with 20 sails on four masts, reefing is a matter of taking individual sails away, beginning at the ones in top of the masts. Engineers at GDNP hope to grant funds for wind tunnel testing of the Ecoliner from the NSR Sail project. Fair Transport Trading & Shipping, freighter of SV Tres Hombres is planning to build the first Ecoliner for transatlantic trade and handing out brochures looking for investors in the vessel. The company can not give details about dates for keel laying or launching of the large sailing general cargo ship.

Scientists and students at the University ofTokyo are progressing their studies into a large wind powered cargo ship, the UT Wind Challenger. This ship appears to have nine rotating rigid wing sails on a concept model that was tested during the research project. While this study is ongoing, no substantial plans have been made for construction in full size.

Open source

An other initiative that re-introduces wind power to transport is The Greenheart Project. Gavin Allwright has launched the plan to conceive a design for a sailing vessel that can establish trading connections between the isolated isles of Polynesia. The population there has very limited possibilities of trading. High oil prices and the long distances to the small islands, where only small amounts of trading goods are available from the limited resources, make transport so expensive that eventual profits of the trade are consumed by transport. The designed ship can be built at low cost with its hard-chined steel hull. Thanks to bilge keels it can beach at islands with no harbour, allowing to load and unload larger cargoes. The mast doubles as a crane, to get heavier loads aboard. Without extensive fuel costs, this ship can provide cheap transport. The aim of the sailing freight project is to allow the Polynesians to develop.

A remarkable aspect of the project is the way the design is established: through open source. Sailors and naval architects, both professionals and amateurs, each contributed – free of charge – some aspects of the total design. The design is therefore freely available to anyone that wants to build such sailing vessel – just like the open source software projects. The design is now ready to be built. Alwright is in the middle of a crowd funding project to finance construction of the first ‘Greenheart’ vessel in Bangladesh.

Beers at St. Lucia

Linking back to the final stages of worldwide maritime transport by sail power, the 1850s and 60s, three Dutch sailors are navigating the Atlantic with their schooner brig Tres Hombres. The ship is rigged according to guidelines of ‘sailing ship scientist’ Friedrich Middendorf, who deemed the schooner-brig rig most efficient for long passages. De hull is a steel-framed, wood planked, v-shaped- a coastguard vessel as developed by the German navy in World War 2. These ships were the first to be tank tested for their seakeeping and speed capabilities. Originally a fast motor vessel, the rig on it has been erected in 2008, so the three Dutchmen could start their enterprise early 2009. Acting as a business, but also driven by idealism, their first sail was from Den Helder, the Netherlands, to Copenhagen, Denmark, to be present at the World Summit on Climate Change. Following that visit, Tres Hombres started its trade of transporting freight, accompanied with taking guests for the sail trips.

The guests get a real trading sailing experience at moderate cost, while their contributions help make the business model profitable. During a recent voyage across the Atlantic, the crew picked up a German solo sailer, that had gotten adrift on his yacht after the rudder broke. The 70-year old man was exhausted and saw his life saved by the sailing vessel. He had been adrift for two weeks. Tres Hombres towed the yacht to the isle of Saint Lucia. When the sailor asked the crew what the cost for the life saving operation would be, he got the reassuring answer: “A beer at St. Lucia will do.”

Tres Hombres co-operates with the French company Trans Oceanic Wind Transport, that offers transport on three sailing vessels – the other two being Dame de Rumengol sailing the waters at the European Atlantic coast, and Leenan Head, having home port at the Grenadines in the Caribbean Sea.

Industrial size

Along with the work from these pioneers come initiatives at a more industrial scale. Enercon, a German company constructing windmills, operates the E-Ship 1. This ship uses hybrid propulsion from an LNG engine and wind propulsion from Flettner Rotors. The ship has successfully sailed from Hamburg to Dublin with half the fuel consumption of a comparable ship of the same dimensions. Still in the design stage is the E-Max Ultra Green Pure Care Carrier, a ro-ro vessel that takes wind power to the enormous dimensions of the largest oceangoing ships. To make sailing ships competitive in transport, size is also an advantage. Because of the large scale of the design, it is easier to install a range of energy saving devices and alternative sources of energy like solar panels.

German company Sky Sails provides automatically operated kites that are installed on conventional fuel-propelled vessels. The kites fly high from a pole on the fore deck and are steered in eight-shaped motions, to provide extra thrust for the vessels. In order to pick up stronger winds, kites are flown at altitudes of 100 up to 300 metres above the water. Fuel savings from 10% to 15% on port-to-port voyages are achieved in daily operation. The first Skysail in commercial operation was installed aboard the 6300 tons, 132 meter Beluga Sky Sails in 2007. The ship successfully crossed the Atlantic early 2008, claiming 20% of its propulsion power was generated by the kite, reducing fuel consumption accordingly. And this was with a 160 square metre test kite, later to be replaced with a kite twice that size. Sky Sails engineers argue that the power kite is the most efficient wind propulsion, claiming it generates five to 25 times more power per square metre of sail area as compared to conventional sails on a rig. Four vessels have been fitted with Sky Sails now, while some other four projects are at hand.

Hans Buitelaar