Sometime next year, the world鈥檚 first all-battery-powered container ship, the Yara Birkeland, will slip its moorings in a Norwegian fjord and set sail on its maiden voyage. Its designers hope that the unique technology on board will eventually take shipping, one of the world鈥檚 filthiest industries, into far greener waters.
But the vessel will do much more than that. : the first cargo ship with the capability to run with no crew. That is going to put it in the crosshairs of the debate over artificial intelligence and job displacement. But in this case, there may actually be good reason to do it 鈥� and not just because problems of space and speed are much reduced at sea.
The ship is being built by Yara International, a fertiliser and chemicals manufacturer that makes 40,000 truck journeys every year, delivering shipping containers over land from its factory in Porsgrunn, southern Norway, to the ports of Larvik and Brevik. There, they are loaded onto the .
Advertisement
But because there is also a handy, coast-hugging sea route from Porsgrunn to those ports, Yara reasons that a battery-powered ship, charged up at the dockside from Norway鈥檚 largely hydropower-fuelled grid, could deliver up to to the ports, and slash the amount of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate-laden emissions its trucks belch out. And crucially, it won鈥檛 add to the appalling greenhouse gas toll from shipping emissions, set to amount to of global emissions by 2050.
Cost cuts
Yara is taking the opportunity to rid itself of crew costs on the Birkeland, too. Working with technology firm Kongsberg Group, Yara is arming the vessel with a battery of computers and sensors 鈥� such as radar, GPS and cameras, just like an aerial drone or driverless car 鈥� that will supposedly allow it to control and navigate itself.
The shows a CGI rendering of the vessel docking with the deftness of a modern car using self-parking technology. But can a massive ship really operate and navigate safely by itself in all weathers?
There is a precedent. SpaceX has already developed two autonomous flat barges, which it calls 鈥渄roneships鈥�. They putter out into the Atlantic or Pacific so that the company鈥檚 reusable rockets . So far, those vessels, named Of Course I Still Love You and Just Read The Instructions, have worked perfectly 鈥� and are playing a critical part in revolutionising the economics of commercial spaceflight.
Can Yara do likewise with the economics of shipping? Maybe. The says that building an autonomous, self-organising, self-repairing vessel will cost three times as much as for a regular container ship of equal size. But without the need for fuel oil or a crew, it will quickly pay for itself because annual operating costs should be 90 per cent less.
Job dilemma
If the technology does gain a foothold in massive container ships, though, we will have to face the issue of automation killing jobs in yet another area of endeavour. Governments are pressing ahead on funding research into autonomous vehicles with little discussion of what to do about the millions of driving jobs that will be displaced. But it is harder to argue that the fewer, gruelling jobs on container ships should be saved.
Writing on , the author Rose George, , quotes Filipino crew who variously call the lonely, punishing life onboard 鈥減rison with a salary鈥� or 鈥渄ollars for homesickness鈥�.
鈥淢any seafarers carefully calculate how many years they must spend at sea to earn enough to escape,鈥� George writes. Crew members are often isolated, too, without the funds to buy satellite internet or telephone time to communicate with family and friends. And in some parts of the world, they risk being captured by pirates and ransomed. Humans can be taken out of the firing line.
On top of all this, container vessels are already loaded by robotic cranes and are highly automated 鈥� so crews are tiny. We won鈥檛 have to wait long to find out whether the new tech works and makes them vanishingly small. The Yara Birkeland will sail as a crewed vessel next year, then under remote control in 2019, and fully autonomously by 2020.
