This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.
In August, a cargo ship known as the Pyxis Ocean set sail—literally. The ship, about 750 feet long, had been outfitted with a pair of “sails” made of steel and fiber-reinforced plastic to harness wind power on the long voyage from Shanghai to Paranaguá, Brazil.
The Pyxis Ocean still uses its traditional engine but, along with careful routing decisions, its new sails will help to cut the amount of fuel burned on international voyages, says Simon Schofield, chief technology officer at BAR Technologies, the UK-based company that designed the sails.
“We are harnessing the same elements as we did hundreds of years ago, we’re just doing it in a more efficient way,” Schofield says.
Schofield, a veteran engineer of elite yacht-racing competitions, helped to found BAR Technologies in 2016, in the hopes that insights from shipping’s sexier cousin could be among the tools that help marine industries modernize to address climate change.
Shipping is a serious source of greenhouse gas emissions. Together, fishing and international and domestic shipping created over 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2018, which is close to 3 percent of all human-driven emissions, according to the International Maritime Organization, the UN agency that oversees the safety and security of the shipping industry.
Yet the voyages are the lifeblood of global trade: The UN Conference on Trade and Development estimated that in 2021, ships transported about 11 billion tons of goods, representing over 80 percent of world trade. The Pyxis Ocean, as one example, was chartered for its sail-assisted voyage by the US agricultural giant Cargill; upon arriving in Brazil, the cargo ship picked up about 63,000 metric tons of soybean meal to transport to Poland.
If the industry doesn’t change, emission numbers from shipping are likely to increase, says Benjamin Halpern, a marine ecologist…
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