The huge wing sitting in a corner of the Scottish port of Hunterston does not look like part of a ship — but the 20m-long device could be one of the shipping industry’s weapons to fight carbon emissions.
When bolted to a vessel’s decks and sitting upright, the wing, called FastRig, will act as a sail capturing the wind. Smart Green Shipping (SGS), the company that has developed the device, and some of the world’s leading shipowners are convinced that it can provide clean power to supplement ships’ engines.
The International Maritime Organization, the UN’s maritime body, is meant to introduce new, stricter emissions rules to come into force from 2027. Shipping currently accounts for around 3 per cent of global carbon emissions annually.
Di Gilpin, SGS’s founder and chief executive, argues that FastRig stands out among scores of efforts to reduce shipping’s carbon emissions because its technology has been developed in particularly close collaboration with shipowners.
The company’s backers include the bulk shipping arm of Japan’s Mitsui OSK Lines, one of the world’s biggest operators of ships for carrying commodities such as coal and iron ore. Denmark’s Ultrabulk, another big shipping company, and Drax, the UK power generator, are also shareholders.
SGS expects to be able to cut ships’ fuel consumption by as much as 30 per cent. That is more than some of the other wind-propulsion technologies being developed — a six-month trial by commodities trader Cargill on a bulk carrier fitted with sails by another developer, achieved average emissions savings of 14 per cent.
Among other means being tested to cut shipping emissions are the uses of methanol, ammonia and hydrogen as fuel. But in the absence of anything that created no emissions at all, Gilpin said FastRig represented vital progress for the sector.
The question is whether SGS can persuade enough ship operators to purchase or lease the company’s products. The start-up expects the system to be attractive to owners of ships and, potentially, to companies hiring them long-term. The wings could be bolted to the deck of the ship temporarily, for the duration of a charter.
While she declined to estimate the eventual price for each FastRig, Gilpin said each wing-sail should pay for itself through fuel savings. The aim, she said, was for the cost to be paid off in four years.
“After that, the energy harvested from wind is free at the point of use,” she added.
Equity investors have so far put £3.5mn into SGS, on top of the £5mn the company has received in public-sector grants. It is about to embark on a fundraising round seeking another £6mn in investment and valuing the company at £25mn.
Arsenio Dominguez, secretary-general of the IMO, stressed that the organisation was including wind power among the technologies it was considering as a means of cutting the sector’s emissions.
“We’re technology-agnostic on all of the options that are out there,” Dominguez said. “Wind propulsion is one.”
However, Jan Rindbo, chief executive of Norden, a big Copenhagen-based operator of dry bulk carriers, said the technology was likely to make financial sense for his company only once there were stricter regulations. Those could include a tax on ships’ carbon emissions.
“If you add carbon tax then it’s a technology that could have some significance,” Rindbo said.
The key moment in SGS’s genesis, according to Gilpin, came in 2015, when she met a group of shipowners at the Paris Climate Conference all concerned about the risks of buying ships reliant on new, untested green technologies.
As well as zero-carbon fuels for internal combustion engines, some naval architects advocate powering ships with nuclear reactors — a technology used in some submarines and aircraft carriers, as well as Russian icebreakers. What the ship owners wanted was retrofittable solutions, Gilpin said.
The prototype FastRig has been set up at Hunterston, 30 miles south-west of Glasgow, so that shipowners could see testing on the device, to be reassured about how it will work.
Four FastRigs should be fitted in September to the Pacific Grebe, a vessel used to transport spent nuclear fuel and other highly radioactive material around the world. The ship — owned by an arm of the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority — is one of the few suitable vessels that fly the UK flag: UK Innovation and Science funding specified the initial test installation had to be on a British vessel.
“In many ways, it’s ideal because it’s the most demanding ship in the world for installing safely and quickly,” Gilpin said.
FastRig has been designed to address many of the concerns among owners and mariners, according to Gilpin. The devices are now retractable after owners had raised questions about whether FastRigs might interfere with loading and unloading in ports.
They also queried how long a vessel would be out of action without earning for FastRig installation. The devices are relatively light aluminium, to ensure only minimal, time-consuming drilling into a vessel’s decks is needed. Installation time for different vessels would vary, Gilpin said, partly because bigger vessels would need more wing-sails.
The technology would be marketed mainly to operators of dry bulk ships and tankers because theirs were the main vessel types with enough clear deck space for the sails.
“The design was driven by the market need, rather than what we could achieve,” Gilpin said. “Having the shipowners at the table was crucial.”
Rindbo said he remained “sceptical” of the idea of putting sails on vessels. He pointed out that bulk carriers and tankers traded in a similar way to taxis, travelling wherever in the world customers needed cargoes delivered. That made it hard to predict how a novel propulsion method would work in different places.
However, Stuart Nicoll, a director at Maritime Strategies International (MSI), a London-based consultancy, insisted that wind power had clear benefits given steady growth in taxes on shipping emissions. Since the start of the year, ships entering EU ports have had to pay for the emissions on their journey under the bloc’s emissions-trading scheme.
“The context is that people need to do something now to reduce the fuel consumption,” Nicoll said. “There’s a lot of interest in little wins.”
On top of the sophisticated electronic controls to optimise the use of flaps and other controls, the company is developing technology that allows a ship to use wind power better by deviating slightly from the most direct route, according to Gilpin. Eventual savings might be still be higher than the projected 30 per cent, she suggested.
“We might improve that,” she said, adding: “This is a first iteration.”
