When you tell people that sails could play a big part in decarbonising global shipping, it sounds almost absurdly old fashioned.
We spent the last century replacing wind with engines, building ever larger ships and burning enormous amounts of fuel to move most of the goods we consume around the planet. Yet after my conversation with OceanWings CEO Emmanuel Schalit, I came away thinking that perhaps the future of shipping is going to look rather more like its past than we imagined. Emmanuel has been sailing since he was five and that connection with the sea has stayed with him throughout his life. He understands just how much power is sitting there for free if you know how to use it. “I started sailing at the age of five, which is a long time ago… I sailed around my part of France, which is Brittany. Then you go further. And at this point, I’ve sailed pretty much anywhere from the northern tip of Scotland all the way to the Greek islands.”
His point is not that we somehow return to wooden ships and canvas sails. Modern wind propulsion is an entirely different beast, using huge automated rigid wings controlled by sensors and software and fitted alongside the ship’s existing propulsion system.
And Emmanuel is very clear that this is not about wind replacing everything else.
“With the way the global economy is structured today, what our business is about is hybrid vessels, like the steamships of the end of the 19th century. We provide part of the propulsion with wind and the other part has to come from something else. Today diesel, tomorrow it could be alternative low emission diesel, hydrogen, it could even be battery. But it’s really about combining both.”
That is what makes the concept so interesting to me. We spend an enormous amount of time debating whether shipping will eventually run on hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, batteries or some fuel we have not perfected yet. OceanWings starts from a much simpler place: whatever fuel you use, use less of it.
The technology can also be fitted to ships already operating, which matters when you consider how long commercial vessels remain in service.
“If you think about a global fleet of 100,000 ships, if we had to wait for them to be rebuilt, it’s likely that both you and I would be dead before,” Emmanuel told me. “So we need a better solution. And the solution is that on many large segments, tankers, bulkers, LNG carriers, we can retrofit existing vessels.”
Then you get to the carbon maths and suddenly this stops sounding like a romantic idea about harnessing the wind and starts looking like a serious decarbonisation tool.
“One tonne of fuel, on a well-to-wake basis, is equivalent to four tonnes of CO2,” Emmanuel explained. “So every time you save a tonne of fuel, that’s four tonnes of CO2 that will never reach the atmosphere. Very significant. That’s why we wake up every morning and go to work.”
One wing alone, he says, can make a remarkable difference.
“One of these wings, going back to what I said earlier, 1.3 tonnes of fuel per day, four tonnes, five tonnes of CO2 saved per day. You take an average ship that sails about 200 days per year. One wing sail saves about 1,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.”
Over its lifetime the numbers become even more striking. “The durability of that system is a minimum of 25 years. Every time we deliver one of these, we know that it has the potential, if it is used, to save 25,000 tonnes of CO2.”
I asked him the obvious question: what about the carbon involved in actually manufacturing the thing?
“The scope one, two, three cost of actually making one of these is 500 tonnes,” he replied. “We emit 500, we save 25,000. We are happy with that.”
But perhaps the most important argument is not environmental at all. It is commercial. Shipping companies are businesses and ultimately technology tends to scale when it saves them money as well as carbon.
Emmanuel put it better than I could. “Our mission is to reduce emissions but the product we sell is payback. The more expensive fuel gets, the more it makes sense to install those systems.”
That may ultimately be what takes wind propulsion from an interesting technology to something we see on ships everywhere.
Listen to my full conversation with Emmanuel Schalit of OceanWings on the Net Hero Podcast. Download the episode wherever you get your podcasts and please subscribe.
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