Business
Flying boats and other tech for shipping
The Pioneer of Belfast glides above the water, quiet and smooth, leaving little wake behind it.
“Even in big waves and wind, we can see the benefits of flying above the waves,” says Katrina Thompson, programme director at Artemis Technologies.
The Pioneer, developed by Artemis Technologies, is the world’s first electric foiling workboat to be brought to market.
The foil, a wing-like structure underneath the boat, lifts the hull out of the water, greatly reducing drag.
Combine with an electric motor and you have, according to Artemis, a vessel which reduces fuel costs by 90% and is emission-free.
“It’s such a transformative technology,” says Dr Thompson.
Dr Thompson grew up in Sailortown, Belfast, in amongst the bustle of heavy industry. She spent her childhood playing on the docks while her parents worked on the boats.
She left Belfast to become an aeronautical engineer, designing aircraft for Rolls-Royce and Bombardier. Then, she went back to her roots – taking her expertise with her.
“My dad couldn’t understand it,” says Dr Thompson. “Then I showed him the underneath of the boat. He said, ‘Well, it’s a wing’.”
Artemis brings together motorsports experts, aeronautical engineers, specialists in flight controls and physics modelling, as well as naval architects.
The Pioneer measures 11.5m and is well suited to transporting crew to and from offshore wind farms, says Dr Thompson.
“They have to push against the wind to get out to the farms and stay there while the crew disembark. It’s a power- hungry manoeuvre.”
Wake caused by maritime traffic causes coastal degradation, shore erosion and loss of habitats. Artemis is allowed to operate close to the harbour, at higher speeds than other vessels, due to the lack of wake, promising significantly reduced journey times too.
“We are working in an industry that is traditionally slow to adopt new technologies,” says Dr Thompson. “If we start now, we can make a smoother journey towards decarbonisation.”
About 90% of global trade is transported by sea. The international maritime sector is responsible for almost 3% of total global emissions. If it were a country, it would be the world’s sixth highest emitter.
In 2018, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) set a target of 2050 to slash emissions by 50% compared with 2008. However, experts argue that to limit global warming to 1.5C, the target should be 100%.
So, can the shipping industry clean up its act?
Over short distances, boats can be powered by battery, but for international shipping green hydrogen-based fuels are tipped to play a central role in decarbonising the industry.
Moving to hydrogen, however, would require changes to fuelling infrastructure. Storage and cost are significant challenges, as well as the adaptation of the ships themselves to enable them to run on hydrogen.
To tackle the problem, some researchers are working on radical technologies.
Experts at Cambridge University say syngas produced by artificial photosynthesis could bridge the gap between fossil fuels and clean hydrogen.
“Syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, is an important industrial intermediate in the production of conventional fuels like gasoline,” says Dr Virgil Andrei, research fellow at the University of Cambridge. “If we can produce syngas sustainably, we won’t need fossil resources.”
Tourists chatter as a punt floats down the River Cam, under the Bridge of Sighs, past St John’s College. Sunlight sparkles on the water, the surface speckled with the golds and reds of autumn leaves.
One leaf looks out of place. Dr Andrei shields it from a hungry looking duck.
“It won’t eat it,” he assures me.
The plastic cover, he says, should be strong enough to prevent animals from consuming this unusual leaf.
“In fact, covering the water surface up to a certain extent, around 50%, does not affect wildlife, and may even provide benefits – like preventing water evaporation from irrigation canals,” Dr Andrei adds.
Dr Andrei and his team at Cambridge University have developed artificial leaves that generate clean fuels from sunlight and water, and could eventually operate on a large scale at sea.
The leaves have two kinds of light absorbers which harvest sunlight. One uses light from the blue end of the spectrum to produce oxygen from the water. The other uses light from the red end of the spectrum to convert carbon dioxide and protons to syngas or hydrogen.
The ultra-thin, flexible devices are low-cost, autonomous and float, says Dr Andrei, meaning they could be used to generate a sustainable alternative to petrol without taking up space on land.
“You could have decentralised fuel production in remote areas – on shorelines, on lakes, near islands. We could have refuelling stations for ships.”
This is the first time that clean fuel has been generated on water and, if scaled up, the artificial leaves could be used on polluted waterways, in ports or at sea – and reduce the global shipping industry’s reliance on fossil fuels.
While that technology is still a long way from being deployed, others are reviving ways to ship cargo that have been around for centuries.
Julia Milmore is chief executive of Sailcargo, which was founded in 2014 in the mangroves of Costa Rica.
Its flagship, the Ceiba, is being built at its shipyard in the Central American nation. It is due to set sail in 2024.
The 45m long ship has three masts, which makes it a schooner in the sailing world.
It can carry 250 tonnes of cargo, which is roughly equivalent to nine standard shipping containers.
“Once built, she will be the largest clean cargo vessel in the world,” says Ms Milmore.
“The crew know that with every strike of a hammer or pull of a rope they are contributing to a much larger mission – bigger than the ship itself.”
Another refurbished vessel, the Vega Gamley, bought from a Swedish family who had owned the ship for decades, is ready to transport Fair Trade organic coffee between the Americas.
Travelling between Santa Marta, Colombia and New Jersey in the US, the Vega will make up to eight trips per year. Each voyage will take 16 days, with a further six days in ports.
“We can’t compete with the speed of fossil-fuelled transport, but it only takes one look at the map of active ships to see the weeks-long waiting times outside of ports across the world,” says Ms Milmore.
Her sailing ships can only carry a tiny fraction of the cargo of a modern container ship – some of which carry more than 20,000 containers.
But Ms Milmore says her smaller boats can avoid the bottlenecks that plague the shipping industry.
“Consumerism has grown beyond the infrastructure. Our ships are able to bypass this due to our flexible unloading and loading operations. We are detaching ourselves from the market that has let our environment down.”
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The prospective new owner of Royal Mail has said he will not walk away from the requirement to deliver letters throughout the UK six days a week, as long as he is running the service.
“As long as I’m alive, I completely exclude this,” Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky told the BBC.
Mr Kretinsky has had a £3.6bn offer for Royal Mail accepted by its board.
Shareholders are expected to approve the deal in the coming months, but the government also has a say over whether it goes ahead.
Currently the Universal Service Obligation (USO) requires Royal Mail to deliver letters six days a week throughout the country for the same price. But questions have been raised over whether the service could be reduced in the future.
In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Mr Kretinsky also said he would be willing to share profits with employees, if given the go-ahead to buy the group.
However, he appeared to reject the idea of employees having a stake in Royal Mail, which unions have called for in exchange for their support.
The Royal Mail board agreed a £3.6bn takeover offer from Mr Kretinsky in May for the 500-year-old organisation, which employs more than 150,000 people. Including assumed debts, the offer is worth £5bn.
But because Royal Mail is a nationally important company, the government has the power to scrutinise and potentially block the deal.
As well as keeping the new government on side, Mr Kretinsky also faces the task of convincing postal unions that the proposed deal will benefit employees.
The USO is a potential sticking point for both the government and unions.
Royal Mail is required by law to deliver letters six days a week and parcels five days a week to every address in the UK for a fixed price.
How well this has actually been working in practice is a different matter. Ten years ago, 92% of first class post arrived on time. By the end of last year it was down to 74%, according to the regulator Ofcom.
Last year the regulator fined Royal Mail £5.6m for failing to meet its delivery targets.
Royal Mail has been pushing for this obligation to be watered down. It wants to cut second class letter deliveries to every other weekday, saying this will save £300m, and lead to “fewer than 1,000” voluntary redundancies.
‘Unconditional commitment’
Mr Kretinsky has committed in writing to honouring the USO, but only for five years.
And after that, in theory, the new owners could just walk away from it.
However, Mr Kretinsky told the BBC: “As long as I’m alive, I completely exclude this, and I’m sure that anybody that would be my successor would absolutely understand this.
“I say this as an absolutely clear, unconditional commitment: Royal Mail is going to be the provider of Universal Service Obligation in the UK, I would say forever, as long as the service is going to be needed, and as long as we are going to be around.”
Mr Kretinsky added that the written five-year commitment was “the longest commitment that has ever been offered in a situation like this”.
Another potential stumbling block for the deal, however, is how the company will be structured.
Unions would like to see the company renationalised, but Dave Ward, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), told the BBC that would be “difficult in the current political and economic environment”.
Instead, what the CWU is pushing for is “a different model of ownership” – that is, where the employees part-own the business.
To get its support for the takeover, the union wants employees to share ownership of the company, along with other concessions including board representation for workers.
It says profit sharing is “not going to be enough to deliver our support and the support of the workforce”.
If the union doesn’t get what it wants, it won’t rule out industrial action, Mr Ward said. Its members went on strike in 2022 and 2023.
Although Mr Kretinsky said he is “very open” to profit sharing, he is not in favour of shared ownership.
“I don’t think the ownership stake is the right model,” he said. “The logic is: share of profit, yes, [but an] ownership structure creates a lot of complexity.
“For instance, what happens if the employee leaves? He has shares, he is leaving, he is not working for the company, he [still] needs remunerating.”
Mr Kretinsky said he didn’t want to create “some anonymous structure” but instead “remunerate the people who are working for the company, and creating value for the company”.
The union is also concerned about job losses and changes to the terms and conditions of postal workers’ contracts.
Mr Kretinsky has guaranteed no compulsory redundancies or changes in terms and conditions but only until 2025.
“If we are more successful, and we have more parcels to be delivered, we need not less people, but we need more people,” he said. “So really, job cuts are not part of our plan at all.”
He said if the management, union and employees work together, “we will be successful”.
Another concern is the potential break-up of the business.
The profit for Royal Mail’s parent company last year was entirely generated by its German and Canadian logistics and parcels business, GLS. Royal Mail itself made a loss.
Mr Kretinsky has promised not to split off GLS or load the parent company with excessive debt, although borrowings will rise if the deal goes through.
But he has a way to go to convince the CWU.
“I can’t think of any other country in the world that would just just hand over its entire postal service to an overseas equity investor,” Mr Ward of the CWU said.
However, Mr Kretinsky said that the postal unions “do understand that we are on the same ship, and that we need this ship to be successful, and that if we are there, we don’t have any real problems to deal with, because the sky is blue, and it’s blue for everybody.”
The union cannot stop this deal but the government can block it under the National Security and Investment Act.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds has said he will scrutinise the assurances and guarantees given and called on Mr Kretinsky to work constructively with the unions.
Mr Kretinsky may say that he and the unions are ultimately on the same ship but, as things stand, they are not on the same page.
Who is Daniel Kretinsky?
Daniel Kretinsky started his career as a lawyer in his hometown of Brno, before moving to Prague.
He then made serious money in Central and Eastern European energy interests.
This includes Eustream, which transports Russian gas via pipelines that run through Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
He then diversified into other investments, including an almost 10% stake in UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s and a 27% share in Premier League club West Ham United.
The Czech businessman is worth about £6bn, according to reports.
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