Shipping

The China State Shipbuilding Corporation has delivered its MSC Tessa megaship to the Mediterranean Shipping Company. With a deck area of about four football fields, it's capable of loading up to 24,116 TEU containers at a time, stacked up to 26 deep.

As the shipping industry moves to decarbonize, huge sails could be making a comeback. The China Merchant Energy Shipping company (CMES) has taken delivery of a new supertanker, whose four large sails will cut down average fuel consumption by nearly 10%.

Decarbonizing shipping is an enormous challenge, and green ammonia has some serious issues as marine fuel. It seems the industry is leaning toward methanol and dual-fuel setups as an early measure, so let's take a look at methanol's clean potential.

An huge natural gas tanker has become the first large ship to make an ocean passage of more than 10,000 km under autonomous control. During its record-breaking run, the 122,000-tonne Prism Courage was able to locate and avoid other ships over 100 times.

Several groups in Japan have been demonstrating fully autonomous ships in the last few months, and the latest, a 95-m container ship, has just completed a 790-km autonomous voyage starting and ending in the heavily congested waters of Tokyo Bay.

Shipping giant Maersk is teaming up with Danish energy company Ørsted to show off an offshore charging buoy that supplies power to ships moored overnight, with the first demonstration to take place at an offshore wind farm towards the end of the year.

French company Airseas has installed its first half-size automated Seawing kite to a cargo ship chartered by Airbus, and will commence six months of trials in January. The full-size kite is estimated to save up to 20 percent of fuel burn and emissions.

A future-focused ship designed as the world's first all-electric, autonomous cargo vessel has debuted in Norway, where it is intended to replace 40,000 diesel-powered truck journeys every year and significantly reduce NOx and CO2 emissions.

Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest has announced he's challenged his team to get the world's first ammonia-powered ship into service by 2022, following their rapid success with hydrogen mining trucks and ammonia-powered locomotives.

A Dutch company is deploying an innovative battery-swapping container ship on the country's inland shipping routes to take a bite out of the sector's sizable carbon emissions, setting sail for the first time this week carrying cargo for Heineken.

Researchers have proposed a fascinating way to eliminate CO2 in the notoriously hard-to-abate shipping sector. The ships would use existing marine fuels, run through solid oxide fuel cells, and all CO2 would be stored back in a partitioned fuel tank.

Back in 2019, New Zealand's Ports of Auckland commissioned the world's first full-size electric tug, which is expected to be delivered toward the end of this year. Now the first electric tug in the US is being built to serve the Port of San Diego.