In February, 1912, Londoners packed a dock on the River Thames to gawk at the Selandia, a ship that could race through the water without any sails or smokestacks. Winston Churchill, then the minister in charge of the British Royal Navy, declared it “the most perfect maritime masterpiece of the twentieth century.” But, as the Selandia continued its journey around the world, some onlookers were so spooked that they called it the Devil Ship.
The Selandia, a Danish vessel that measured three hundred and seventy feet, was one of the first oceangoing ships to run on diesel power. So-called devil ships inaugurated a new age of petroleum on the high seas; by the twenty-first century, nearly ninety per cent of the world’s products spent time on diesel-powered vessels. The shipping industry created a mind-bending supply chain in which an apple from halfway around the world often costs less than one from a nearby orchard.
Diesel ships never entirely stamped out the sailing ships that once reigned supreme, however. In 1920, a Dutch shipbuilder fashioned a sailing schooner named the Avontuur and put it to work carrying cargo, which it did for the rest of the century. By 2012, the Avontuur was ferrying passengers on the Dutch coast; at more than ninety years old, it probably seemed destined for a maritime museum or a scrap heap. But that year a United Nations climate report warned that the planet was careening toward an era of extreme weather and disasters, in which escalating heat waves, fires, and storms could become the norm. Humans had the power to avert these crises—but only if they took rapid action to end their dependence on fossil fuels.
Two years later, Cornelius Bockermann, a German sea captain who had worked with oil companies, bought the Avontuur and made it the flagship of a company called Timbercoast. His mission was to eliminate pollution caused by cargo shipping. Bockermann had witnessed the harms of diesel ships; on the high seas, beyond the reach of most environmental regulations, the descendants of the Selandia burn millions of gallons of thick sludge left over from the oil-refining process. The shipping industry, he knew, was one of the dirtiest on the planet, spewing roughly three per cent of the world’s climate pollution—as much as the aviation industry. After having the Avontuur restored, he captained the ship, hired a small crew, recruited some volunteer shipmates, and put the vessel back to work. It could carry only about a hundred tons of cargo—a tiny amount compared with the more than twenty thousand tons that a container ship can carry—but customers hired Timbercoast to deliver coffee, cocoa, rum, and olive oil.
Bockermann’s company is one of several founded on a provocative idea: What if shipping’s history could inspire its future? For centuries, the cargo industry ran on clean wind power—and it could again. As the climate crisis has escalated, and the pandemic has exposed weaknesses in global supply chains, the movement to decarbonize shipping has spread. What was once the dream of a few enterprising idealists has become a business opportunity that startups and sprawling multinationals alike are chasing.
Christiaan De Beukelaer, an anthropologist who was researching the nascent field of eco-friendly shipping, came aboard the Avontuur as a shipmate in February, 2020. He was about three weeks into his voyage when, on March 17th, the ship’s temperamental dot-matrix printer spewed out an emergency message that Bockermann had sent from shore. “The world as you know it no longer exists,” the dispatch said. Coronavirus lockdowns had shut borders and ports in dozens of countries. De Beukelaer and the rest of the crew were now marooned indefinitely aboard the Avontuur.
In the Gulf of Mexico, they rediscovered the difficult realities of wind-powered transport. “We were going around in circles, taking the sails down and up again because of the squalls,” De Beukelaer told me. The ship zigzagged for weeks, and supplies dwindled. After the fruits and vegetables were gone, the crew ate short rations. The cook worried that they’d run out of gas for the stove. But elsewhere, the pandemic was revealing just how vulnerable the entire shipping industry might be.
In 2020, with so many ports clogged and ships stuck at sea, store shelves emptied, and customers waited months for items such as cars and refrigerators. The following year, the Ever Given, a container ship about the size of the Empire State Building, ran aground in the middle of the Suez Canal. It delayed shipping traffic between Europe and Asia for months, a seeming metaphor for a world held hostage by diesel-guzzling behemoths. Oil prices rose while tankers, carrying almost ten per cent of the world’s daily oil consumption, waited their turn. A meme christened the ship the Least Fucks Ever Given.
Shipping’s sudden visibility reinvigorated activist organizations, which have long pressured cargo owners to clean up their operations, De Beukelaer told me. Members from the environmentalist group Extinction Rebellion spun off a political-art collective called Ocean Rebellion; its inaugural demonstration projected messages like “TAX SHIPPING FUEL NOW” onto the side of a cruise ship. In 2021, a consortium of climate and public-health groups launched the Ship It Zero campaign, calling on big retailers, including Target and Walmart, to transport their products with cargo carriers that are “taking immediate steps to end emissions,” and to “sign contracts now to ship your goods on the world’s first zero-emissions ships.”
In January, De Beukelaer published “Trade Winds,” a book about his five months at sea during the pandemic. His story doubles as a plea to clean up the shipping industry. It takes “fifty thousand Londons worth of air pollution,” he writes, to ship eleven billion tons of cargo each year—about one and a half tons for each person on the planet. In his view, consumers and corporations must take responsibility for the environmental mayhem that they cause. And they can start to do that, he writes, if sailing ships make an epic comeback.
For wind power to push the shipping industry forward, it will need to reach the biggest players in the business. In 2018, Cargill, the largest privately held American company, pledged to cut its direct greenhouse-gas emissions by ten per cent within seven years. Five months later, the company’s maritime division, which manages a fleet of about six hundred ships, announced a CO2 Challenge. Inventors around the world were invited to propose novel ways to reduce carbon emissions of cargo vessels.
Cargill transports more than two hundred million tons of cargo, including soybeans, fertilizers, and iron ore, each year. It’s not easy to decarbonize such a sprawling business; in 2017, Cargill’s global operations emitted as much as several million cars. That same year, an environmental group, Mighty Earth, reported that the company was fuelling deforestation in South America, by buying soybeans in places where megafarms were swallowing woodlands. Because forests store carbon, deforestation has a major carbon footprint. (Cargill once pledged to eliminate deforestation from its supply chains by 2020, but says it is now working toward a target of 2030.)
The CO2 Challenge identified other areas in which Cargill could reduce its climate pollution. “We opened it up to everyone out there,” Jan Dieleman, the head of the division, told me. “We got something like a hundred and eighty ideas, including some crazy ones.” One proposal suggested freezing CO2 emissions into dry ice. Another recommended nuclear-powered ships. A third went so big on batteries that it left little room for cargo. Some of the winning entries sounded as daffy as the rejects. One of them, from a startup called BAR Technologies, imagined airplane-style wings rising nearly a hundred and fifty feet from the deck of a cargo ship.
The idea of powering ships with rigid wings dates back at least to the nineteen-sixties, when an English aeronautics engineer named John Walker spent his weekends in a cranky, old yacht. One day, he was hopping around the cockpit, trying to coax the mainsail to swing into position, and he failed to notice that a rope had wrapped around his ankles. When the sail caught the wind, the rope pulled him into the air. After that humiliating incident, he began to wonder why sailboats had evolved so little in hundreds of years. Wasn’t there some way to improve on this messy system of ropes and booms?
In 1969, news footage showed Walker—a trim and bearded Old Spice sort of man—at the helm of what he called the Plane-Sail Trimaran. Piloting the boat, he once said, felt like flying a plane. Where the mainsail should have been, four rigid sails stuck straight up into the air, like window blinds turned vertically; each one had the shape of an airfoil and generated forward thrust. They also allowed him to carve the wind with more control than a cloth sail would allow: instead of turning the entire boat at an angle to catch the wind, by either tacking or jibing, Walker could simply spin a crank, and the wings above his head would swivel into a configuration that would drive the boat forward, sideways, or even in reverse. He became obsessed with his creation. “My wife complained that I’m not the man she married and she is right,” he told a reporter, in 1970.
During the energy crisis of the nineteen-seventies, Walker wondered whether his winged yacht could also help to solve environmental problems. He founded a company called Walker Wingsails, built demonstration vessels, and, in 1989, advertised a “wingsail cruising yacht” with “fingertip control by a single person.” His vision of no-emissions shipping now seems far ahead of its time. “Using only the free clean ocean winds, the Walker wingsail technology can make a valuable contribution to the control of pollution and the greenhouse effect,” the ad declared. In 1991, the New York Times deemed his winged innovation “the most radical sailboat to ever slip into the harbor.” But not all the reviews were positive. A few years later, when a sailing magazine questioned the performance of his wings, Walker sued for libel and became tangled up in a high-profile case. Though he eventually won, his company went bust.
Around the turn of the twenty-first century, boat designers experimented with winglike sails for a different reason: they wanted to break speed records on racing yachts. Competitors in the America’s Cup, the most prestigious U.S. yacht prize, showed that a combination of rigid wing sails and hydrofoils, which work like underwater airplane wings, propels the yachts along the surface of the water. The winged catamarans, which looked like seabirds skimming for fish, proved to be so blazingly fast that in 2010 the Cup put them into a class of their own. After the Cup banned competitors from testing out their models in water tanks or wind tunnels, many of the teams embraced computer modelling and created elaborate simulations of yachts gliding across virtual oceans.
In advance of the 2017 America’s Cup, a British team hired a group of engineers and created one of the world’s most powerful wing sails. Their entry lost the race, but the designers weren’t ready to part ways and instead spun off BAR Technologies. The team decided, “We’re not going to lose all these great people, and we’re not going to lose all these simulation tools,” John Cooper, the company’s C.E.O., told me. A year later, it won a contract with Cargill to fit its proprietary wing sails, WindWings, onto a bulk carrier.
A diesel ship retrofitted with wing sails could reduce its fuel consumption by as much as thirty per cent, according to a BAR Technologies simulation. When I ran that figure by Elizabeth Lindstad, a chief scientist at SINTEF Ocean, an independent think tank that advises maritime companies, she described it as optimistic but possible, at least along trade routes with the right wind conditions. Paul Sclavounos, a professor of naval architecture and mechanical engineering at M.I.T., agreed. Savings on that scale, he said, could reshape the economics of shipping. Many multinational companies, including Cargill, lease their vessels from shipbuilders and pay for fuel expenses. It can cost more than twenty-four thousand dollars per day to fuel a bulk carrier; a company that adds wing sails to one ship could save thousands per day, and “pay back its investment in a year or two,” Sclavounos told me. The wings could then provide decades of propulsion for only the price of maintenance. “It’s clearly a relatively inexpensive technology,” he said. “It makes a lot of sense.”
Wind propulsion will help some ships more than others. Container ships are responsible for about twenty-three per cent of shipping emissions, according to a report from the International Council on Clean Transportation, but it’s difficult to squeeze sails onto a deck that’s cluttered with metal boxes. In contrast, bulk carriers, which are responsible for roughly nineteen per cent of shipping emissions, are perfect laboratories for wind propulsion, thanks to their open decks and relatively small size. The same goes for more specialized vessels that carry vehicles such as cars, trucks, and trains. These Ro-Ro ships—short for “roll on, roll off”—don’t need any help from cranes when they sail into port, and they tend to stash their cargo in a hold, leaving plenty of room on deck for sails.
Of course, you can’t just slap an airplane wing onto the deck of a ship and expect it to work. Airplane wings provide lift, but rely on jet engines to provide thrust; a wing sail, in contrast, must provide thrust of its own. Engineers are now studying how many wings they can cram onto the deck of a ship, and how high they can go without threatening the stability of the vessel. Some are building wing sails that fold or telescope so that they don’t bump into bridges or cranes. Cargill plans to try out its first set of WindWings on a commercial route in early July; BAR Technologies is also installing WindWings on a ship owned by Berge Bulk this year. Cooper told me, “If you fast-forward three or four years, we’re looking at building hundreds of wings.”
A diesel ship that’s retrofitted with wing sails will pollute much less than its peers—but it still won’t be clean. “We know that wind alone is not going to bring us to zero carbon,” Dieleman told me. In the future, ships will likely need to swap out dirty fuels for alternatives with low carbon footprints. Cargill has four vessels in production that run on methanol, which produces far lower emissions at sea. At the moment, though, most of the methanol on the market is “brown,” Dieleman said—in other words, made from fossil fuels. Bio-methanol can be made from agricultural waste or seaweed, and another fuel, green hydrogen, can be generated from water and clean electricity. But they are still a kind of Unobtanium, because no one has yet figured out how to produce trillions of gallons at low cost.
Then again, why not rethink cargo ships entirely—from the keel up—so as to squeeze as much power as possible from the wind? Lindstad, the scientist at SINTEF Ocean, and her research partners have argued that the ships of the future should combine wind propulsion with slender hulls that reduce drag. They estimate that some vessels designed in this way could cut down fuel use by as much as fifty per cent. Cargo ships may also need to chart new courses, following trade winds that were largely ignored in the age of diesel.
A few months ago, I travelled to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, a Canadian port town known for its fisheries and shipyards, to meet Danielle Southcott, a sustainable-shipping entrepreneur who’d recently moved there. On the day we met, in a loft that serves as an event space, she was introducing her company, Veer Group, to about fifty people, mostly from the local shipping community. The crowd was a blur of leather jackets, scruffy beards, interesting glasses, and knit caps: artsy, but also appropriately attired to carve a mizzenmast or hack some barnacles off a hull. Southcott, at thirty-three, fit right in—she wore all black, and her long, dark hair curtained her face each time she glanced down at her notes.
When she flashed a rendering of a sailing ship onto the screen, I could sense the collective puzzlement in the room. It looked like the ghost of a traditional three-masted clipper, with no visible cables or ropes.
A man raised his hand. “I don’t see any rigging,” he said.
Southcott explained that Veer was using a sailing system called the DynaRig, which had been tested on two luxury yachts, the Maltese Falcon and the Black Pearl. Though the sails are made from cloth rather than rigid panels, they have something in common with wing sails: they’re shaped much like broad airplane wings and are controlled through a computer. Each mast can rotate more than a hundred and eighty degrees.
The ideal cargo for Veer’s first ship, Southcott said, would be something like designer shoes: they have high markups and low weights, and customers pay a premium for the latest and greatest. Imagine the fashionistas, she went on, who would pay upmarket prices for net-zero delivery. According to design plans, the ship could attain speeds of eighteen knots, or more than twenty miles per hour, on wind alone. As she explained her stiletto-heeled business model to her steel-toe-boot audience, the mood seemed to shift from skepticism to glee. She was questioning a basic assumption in the shipping industry—the cheaper, the better—and imagining a new one: the better, the better.
Later that evening, some audience members decamped to a creaky wooden pub called the Knot, and I eavesdropped as two master mariners vented about the shoddiness of container ships. The ships would be more fuel efficient with rounded hulls, they observed, but they’re built like steel boxes to save money. The think tank at the bar agreed that a Veer-style ship would work just fine from a technical standpoint—one guy even assured Southcott that gantry cranes, which pluck boxes off of ships, would be able to maneuver around masts without knocking them over. But they wondered whether she could build a business in an industry that usually competes on rock-bottom prices.
In Southcott’s telling, the key variable for upscale retailers is not cost but speed. She’d learned that lesson in 2021, she told me, when she was running a company that built wooden sailing ships for freight delivery. Her potential clients were eager to lease a net-zero cargo vessel—but not if it plodded along so slowly that it added days or weeks to the delivery date. So she contacted a friend at Dykstra Naval Architects, a Dutch firm that designs classic and modern yachts. Southcott brought preliminary renderings of a Veer ship, to be built from composite materials and steel, to the COP26 climate conference, in Glasgow. Soon after she announced her venture, she raised six hundred thousand dollars from four investors. She used the money to hire Dykstra engineers to draw up technical plans for the first ship, and to assemble a startup team.
Southcott told me that her investors have now pledged more than two million dollars, enough for her to seek financing from a bank and submit bids to shipyards that could build Veer’s first ship. She hopes to build it in a country where she can use “green steel,” which is manufactured without fossil fuels. If she succeeds, she’ll be working in a new slice of the shipping sector—one that’s far smaller than the world of container ships and bulk carriers, but one with a clearer path toward zero emissions. The C.E.O. of Dykstra, Thys Nikkels, told me that, with souped-up sails and turbines that can charge batteries, it’s already possible to build a speedy ship with a small footprint. “On a sailing yacht, that’s quite feasible,” he said. “But it hasn’t been done on a commercially operated cargo vessel.”
There’s at least one other direction in which cargo ships could innovate: up. “The higher you go, the higher the wind velocity,” Mikael Razola, the technical director at Oceanbird, a Swedish company affiliated with the shipping company Wallenius Marine, told me. Oceanbird researchers have used lidar imaging to map wind pressure from the surface of the ocean to an altitude of nearly seven hundred feet. The company has designed wings for a Ro-Ro ship, set to launch next year, that will be outfitted with six towering wing sails that reach more than one hundred and thirty feet into the air. The wings will be paired with a special lightweight hull that is aerodynamic and reduces drag. The company claims that the design will reduce the ship’s emissions by a striking sixty per cent. But the trade-off for that efficiency is speed: on existing routes, the car carrier with sails will take days longer than other ships.
In February, I opened my laptop and beamed into a factory outside of Shanghai, where workers were hurrying to build WindWings for Cargill’s fleet. A representative of Yara Marine Technologies, which is leading the installation, had agreed to a virtual tour of the factory on the condition that I refrain from quoting the “cameraman”—a factory worker who walked me around the facility with his phone. As it turned out, the language barrier was big enough that my guide communicated mostly through gestures. He started his tour by pointing his phone at a simplified diagram of the wings, which looked like the instructions for some IKEA furniture. A mast—basically, a metal tube with arms—would be fitted with panels to catch the wind; this assembly would sit on a swivelling base that could turn the wings around. The IKEA vibes ended there. When my guide pointed his phone up, I saw the huge steel frame of a WindWing waiting to be filled with hydraulic piping and wiring for sensors, which will detect air pressure.
The guide walked me to a welding platform, where workers scurried around a mast that had been tipped onto its side. Laid horizontally, the steel frame turned into a kind of enormous hallway, with eight or ten feet of headroom for the welders who worked inside it. As I watched a man in white coveralls climb into the base of one of the masts, its scale sank in. The man looked like an action figure. The tour continued to a nearby dock, where the masts would be fitted onto ships. The wings would be so immense that they would block the sight lines across the deck, so, rather than navigating with the naked eye, the crew would depend on digital cameras.
One chapter in “Trade Winds,” De Beukelaer’s book about his voyages on the Avontuur, is titled “Ship Earth.” The planet, he writes, has something in common with a seagoing vessel. Earth is always at risk of a new emergency, and its inhabitants have little choice but to work together with finite resources. He quotes Ellen MacArthur, a British sailor who once set a world record for the fastest round-the-world voyage on a solo sailboat. “Your boat is your entire world,” MacArthur later said. “What we have out there is all we have. There is no more.” After retiring from sailing, in 2010, she created a foundation committed to creating a circular economy, which aims in part to eliminate waste and climate pollution.
De Beukelaer told me that when wind waylaid the Avontuur in the Gulf of Mexico, the crew agonized about dwindling supplies and looked for unconventional ways to use what they had. They tried reinforcing a sail with glue. They scoured the deck with a thermometer, looking for places where they might try solar cooking. When that failed, the bosun fashioned insulation pads for their cooking pots, which stretched out their limited supply of gas. At the end of their six-month voyage, the crew of the Avontuur published a joint statement. “We have learned—by stitching a patch on a torn sail, splicing together a frayed rope, being creative with limited resources—that nothing is ever truly broken,” they wrote. “Solutions and innovations abound when your whole world is contained within a steel hull.” ♦
