This article originally ran on June 6, 2024 in Sherwood News.
On a morning in May, an 78-year-old, 64-foot schooner named the Apollonia raised its sails and cast off from Hudson, New York. As it sailed south it was borne along the half-mile-wide river by a falling tide. The wind was not favorable. The Apollonia could make progress only by tacking at angles to the wind, a process that required three crew members to haul ropes pulling in the sails as the ship turned, before letting them out again once the ship reached its new heading. The ship zigzagged a hundred times before the crew called it quits and tied up for the night.
In the following days other challenges awaited. At Poughkeepsie the crew was becalmed; at Ossining they had to wait for the tide to rise until the water was deep enough to dock. The most difficult stretch of the voyage lay at World’s End, a narrowing of the river near West Point, where the current runs strong and mountain slopes funnel the wind unpredictably. To get through, said the vessel’s captain, Sam Merrett, “you really have to understand the Hudson.”
A week after it set out, and a hundred miles downriver, the Apollonia at last docked at the One°15 Brooklyn Marina. A morning shower had soaked the deck and in the cabin rain gear was hung to dry. The crew looked tired but happy. What they’d accomplished was not much from a practical standpoint — unloading barrels of barley malt at breweries along the way and picking up assorted goods like grain, flour, beer, whiskey, and preserves to deliver to customers downstream — but from a symbolic perspective it could be seen as epic. The Apollonia is the first sail-powered vessel in decades to run cargo along the US coast, and while the ship and its technology are old, its goal is new and ambitious: to demonstrate effective ways to decarbonize the maritime transport industry by 2050.
The sailboat is part of an international movement that’s been gathering steam and now includes a half-dozen ships from North America and Europe with more on the way. “We have relied on wind propulsion for thousands of years,” Christiaan De Beukelaer, a professor of cultural policy at the University of Melbourne, said. De Beukelaer spent five months aboard a cargo schooner in 2020. “The wind is there, so we can use it.”
As international resolve to combat the climate crisis has grown, particular attention has focused on the shipping industry, which generates 3% of global carbon emissions. Unlike trucking and rail, which have always relied on fossil fuels, shipping for most of its history has been carbon-neutral, with goods carried across the sea by wind and muscle power since the Bronze Age. The globe-spanning mercantile empires of the colonial era were built on sail power. But the know-how they perfected has largely vanished, with the last of the great sailing ships broken up during the Depression. Since then, the majority of the world’s merchant fleet has run on bunker fuel, a foul sludge that emerges as the dregs of petroleum refining.
That’s something many would like to change. “The idea of reviving wind propulsion has been around since at least the oil crisis of the ’70s,” De Beukelaer said. “Even then people were already saying, ‘We should just return to sailing — it’s a no-brainer.’” While the idea has appeal, the economics are shaky. Sailing ships are small compared to modern cargo ships and tankers, and not only slow but unpredictably slow, dependent on the vagaries of the weather.
The trend in shipping, meanwhile, has been for vessels to get ever more gargantuan, with ever more powerful steam and diesel engines. The first generation of container ships, which emerged in the 1950s, carried fewer than 1,000 containers; by the 2010s they were carrying over 20,000. This gigantism drove down the marginal cost of shipping goods to the point that it became negligible, giving rise to a new kind of global economy.
Nevertheless, the dream of wind power endured. In 2007, three friends from the Dutch city of Delft bought a derelict, 103-foot brigantine built in 1943 and renamed it the Tres Hombres. After restoring it to sailing condition, they used it to carry cargo — mostly coffee beans — between the Caribbean and Europe.
Others followed their example. In 2010, twin brothers Olivier and Jacques Barreau began laying plans for a wind-powered cargo empire. The pair had just developed and sold a wind-turbine project in France and they wanted to tap into enthusiasm for renewable energy in a new way. The underlying idea of their company, Grain de Sail, was not only to operate a cargo sailboat but to create an economic framework it could operate profitably in. “They started thinking about what type of products would be transported,” Pierre Maruzzi, Grain de Sail’s export director, said. “And in order to de-risk the whole operation, they started by actually importing and producing the products that would eventually be transported.”
In 2013, the brothers began importing cocoa and coffee beans from Central America and the Caribbean and processed them for sale in Europe. In their marketing, they emphasized that a portion of the proceeds would go toward the construction of a cargo sailboat. (The rate was ~10 cents per product sold, which the company calculated to be the additional cost of shipping by sailboat.) Their pitch was so successful that by 2018 they began building an 80-foot twin-masted vessel, the SV Grain de Sail.
Though a conventional sailboat in appearance, Grain de Sail was designed by a team of naval architects to include the latest technology, including solar-powered navigational equipment and passive climate control to keep wine cool. Launched in 2020, it uses satellite weather tracking and computerized routing to maximize performance. “The main innovation and main difference with sailing a few centuries ago,” Maruzzi said, “is that we have direct communication with the crew, and that can basically assist the crew to optimize speed and efficiency.”
Able to carry 35 tons of cargo, it sails a round-trip transatlantic voyage twice a year, bringing wine and chocolate from Saint-Malo in France to New York and then cocoa and coffee beans from Guadeloupe to France. Its success prompted the company to build a bigger, faster vessel that could hold nearly 10 times as much cargo and, because of its higher speed, sail five round trips a year instead of two. “We basically multiplied our annual capacity by 40,” Maruzzi said.
Today the company not only ferries its own goods across the Atlantic but also sells surplus capacity to other producers who want to capitalize on net-zero shipping. With business booming, Grain de Sail plans to order three new ships in 2025 and 2026. “The idea,” Maruzzi said, “is to streamline sail freight so as to provide the most sustainable alternative for international transportation.”
For all the romance of a ship under sail, there are significant and unavoidable limitations to wind-powered shipping. For one, it’s nowhere near as economically efficient as today’s massive cargo ships. Even with its heightened efficiency, Grain de Sail II is about twice as expensive as conventional shipping. That extra cost might be worth it to high-end retailers who can market to environmentally minded consumers, but it’s not clear how widely that niche can be expanded.
Then there’s the fact that pure-sail cargo ships can be scaled up only so far. “Right now we are almost at the current design limit for being a pure sailing vessel,” Maruzzi added.
Given that the shipping industry’s 50,000 vessels transport 11 billion tons of goods each year, replacing them with cargo sailing ships would mean increasing the size of the world’s shipping fleet by more than a millionfold.
A more scalable idea is to retrofit existing cargo ships with devices that allow them to harvest at least a portion of the wind passing over them. Wind-assisted propulsion systems, or WAPS, can involve flexible structures like kites or rigid structures bolted onto the deck. The latter can take a variety of forms, including rotating cylinders and wing-like airfoils. Unlike traditional sails, which need to be managed carefully by a skilled crew, these instruments can turn automatically to respond to shifts in wind direction. According to a study by the European Maritime Safety Agency, WAPS can save fuel by up to 30%.
The idea is already being explored. About 30 vessels have been outfitted with WAPS, EMSA reported, with many more on the way. Mitsui OSK Lines, a Japanese shipping company with a fleet of 800 vessels, said that by the mid-2030s 10% of its ships will be equipped with WAPS.
“Realistically, in the next 10 years from now, retrofits will be absolutely crucial to bring down the demand for fossil fuels,” De Beukelaer said. “I would like to see wind be a default feature. You’d have to justify why ships don’t have wind power.”
With improvements in routing software and other features, innovations like WAPS can reduce the shipping industry’s carbon footprint, but can’t get it all the way to zero. To close the gap, another technology will be needed: sustainable fuel. This is a hydrocarbon liquid similar to kerosene that can be derived either from biological sources or synthesized from carbon dioxide and water using electricity. Because sustainable fuel can be burned in the same engines as traditional bunker fuel, you don’t need to radically retrofit existing ships.
The disadvantage is that sustainable fuel is considerably more expensive, and will likely become more so as demand increases; experts estimate that by 2030 it will be three to five times costlier.
Left to free-market forces alone, then, the global shipping industry will never get to net zero. Government regulations will have to be applied. “There are two main tools,” Jan Hoffmann, head of the United Nations Trade and Development Commission, said. “You either enforce rules on efficiency and emissions, or you set a price on the emission of carbon.” He thinks the latter will be more effective. Charging a price for the burning of greenhouse-gas-generating fuels will put net-zero alternatives at economic parity. “A price on carbon will make the truly alternative fuels competitive,” he added.
Will the economic pain be worth it to avoid unchecked climate change? The International Maritime Organization, the arm of the UN that coordinates shipping regulation around the world, seems to think so. Last year the agency officially established a goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. “Currently IMO member states are negotiating a package of measures that, once adopted, will be incorporated into a legally binding framework that sets the criteria for emissions from ships, which it will then fall on member states to enforce,” De Beukelaer said. “That’s how the shipping industry always enforces its rules. So in that sense, they are really quite serious.”
Dockside at the One°15 Brooklyn Marina, Captain Sam Merrett showed visitors and well-wishers around the boat as a misty drizzle fell from a gray afternoon sky. The steel ship is rugged and time-worn, with masts and tackle blocks made of wood and natural-fiber rope that wouldn’t have been out of place on Henry Hudson’s Half Moon. Over the next five months, until the sailing season ends in October, the Apollonia will sail back and forth between the city and its home base, in Hudson, carrying artisanal foods and raw materials for customers who care deeply about product authenticity and their role in the health of the environment. Some of its cargo will be transferred to a Grain de Sail ship and sent across the Atlantic.
Even within the small crew of the Apollonia, there’s disagreement on purely economic grounds whether their ambitions are realistic. “I’m a sailor, not a businessman,” Merrett said. “We don’t make a profit.” The goal, he said, is to make people think about climate change and what they can do to fight it. “We’re very mission-driven.”
Brad Vogel, Apollonia’s supercargo — an old industry term for the person in charge of a ship’s cargo — is more financially optimistic. “It’s a mission-driven business, but it is absolutely a business,” he said. “The whole point here is to try to get to profitability so that we can show that this is something that’s viable, so that others will then seek to get into it as well.” (He declined to provide revenue or profit figures to Sherwood News.)
What both agree on is that just by showing the feasibility of net-zero shipping, they’re paving the way toward the world they want to live in. “Sometimes you just have to do it so people can see it’s possible,” Vogel said. “Then things begin to fill in and form up behind that reality.”