Introductions

Kia ora!

My name is Juniper. I will be using this blog as a central landing place for my thoughts on various topics. The topics that tend to activate my special interest include:

• Agency

• Decolonisation

• Coordination problems

• Governance

• Tech futurism

• Queerness

• AI adaptation

• Clean energy transition

• Global shipping and trade

• Decentralisation and economics

• DWeb/Web3

• Neurodiversity

• Care and emotional liberation

• Political movements

• Parenting and alternative families

• Antifascism in our chaos era

My vibe is that a .000001% chance that we make an amazing new thriving world is world is 1000% effort. But, with the nuance that we’re all also fighting for our basic functioning as well.

Market collapse or Shipping Hard shift

A zero carbon shipping feasibility study via Aotearoa (NZ)

As long as I can remember I have been fascinated by and drawn to something embarrassingly nerdy: massive container ships. 

My weird little brain loves these big ol’ boats and their faded multicolour containers aesthetically. I’m also drawn to the human spirit that says “I’m gonna make a really freaking big boat so I can trade stuff with my friends.” I am the kind of dweeb that literally spends time reading scholarly papers on shipping container loss… in my free time. After a long day I calm down by watching videos about how supertankers deal with piracy (turns out, squirt guns). It’s so bad that, one time I was in a fancy restaurant with a friend and I warned her that the interest I was about to share with her IN CONFIDENCE was very very nerdy. She, a diva, flicked her hair and replied with a curious glint, “go on…”. Thinking that she was mentally prepared for what was to come (she was not), I glanced at my shoes and replied, “shipping container logistics.” At which point she laughed at me so uncontrollably that she started literally crying and falling out of her chair. The posh couple next to us passively aggressively said to each other, “my goodness it's a bit noisy in here isn’t it.” 

This special interest has lasted over a decade and as it‘s run its course I’ve stumbled on something that I think is not well understood and yet, will become completely earth-changing in our lifetimes.

The world in general, and Aotearoa in specific, need to completely rethink cargo shipping in order to survive climate change.However, deep and potentially intrinsic the obstacles appear, innovation is currently sweeping the globe.

We need trade but it can’t last as it is.

Everyone worth knowing agrees that climate change is repainting the world beyond recognition right in front of us. An implication of this is extreme price volatility for crude oil. At time of publishing, Iran is threatening to shut the Hormuz Strait as a result of US and Israeli bombing, which would single-handedly devastate the global oil trade. The term “peak oil” refers to the point at which conventional petroleum production will begin a permanent decline, leading to increases in scarcity and dirtier alternatives such as tar sands. Peak oil has even already come to pass in some countries such as the USA. This is further reflected in trends of people training to transfer from oil industry jobs into renewable industries. However promising this might be to a great energy shift, certain aspects of our economy are heavily if not completely reliant on oil. Juggernaut among these are the massive container ships carrying 1.7 billion tonnes of shipping containers per year (to say nothing of tankers with liquid cargo).

When I say these boats are big, if you haven’t seen them in person, it may be hard to conceptualise. A single small container ship might carry 1,100 shipping containers while the largest in service, such as the MSC Irina, have a capacity of up to 24,300 TEUs (each equivalent to a twenty foot shipping container). It carries up to 240,000 DWTs (Dead Weight Tons) of cargo. This ship is longer than the Auckland Sky Tower is tall. It’s 60 metres wide. It’s a marvel of human audacity that these behemoths even exist, much less that they float. And without them our economies are… well kind of screwed.

Supermassive Emma Maersk container ship.

Around 90% of goods are carried by sea. That’s a staggering figure. And sure, maybe along degrowth lines we don’t actually need a super-ship carrying bobbleheads from Mexico to London, or pineapples from Costa Rica to the Philippines (for canning) and then back to LA to be distributed by diesel jugging 18-wheelers across the continental US. Ideally we could also eliminate the somewhat ironic ship based transport of crude oil in tankers which constitutes nearly 30% of all maritime cargo. Containers on the other hand, carry some 23% of all dry cargo by volume, but account for 70% of the value of all shipped cargo. Bulk dry cargo is often manufacturing precursors like iron ore or coal but can be things like grain as well. Cargo ship goods range from electronics, heavy machinery, food, cars, steel, wood, textiles, humanitarian aid, to even potentially things like vaccines that can’t be easily produced in every individual nation or regionally within a single nation. 

But international (and regional) trade isn’t just good, it’s critical to the basic functioning of a cohesive economy. The methods by which globalisation of markets has been enacted in practice are often destructive and colonial beyond measure. This is particularly true of the complex legacies of maritime trade. Acknowledging the risks associated with doing international exchange poorly, an interconnected world makes us all richer, and not just economically. Populist ultranationalism and trade isolationism results in economic destruction. Through connectivity people are able to share not just goods, but also ideas and culture. Though there’s an immeasurable subjective boon to interconnected global populaces, economically alone, in 2019 annual global shipping trade was valued at $24.5 trillion NZD. New Zealand describes itself as a “trade dependent economy” and exported goods valued at nearly $70 billion NZD in 2022 alone. 

The oil burning cargo ships and tankers most of this trade happens via are still more energy efficient than rail, air, or road and getting more efficient over time. There are additional regulatory pushes to decrease greenhouse gasses from shipping. However, maritime shipping still accounts for 3% of global carbon emissions per year. Based on current growth patterns, it is expected to be closer to 10% by 2050. A single ship like the Emma Maersk might use the Heavy Oil equivalent of 6,500 tanks of gas in a car per day even if that is to move a proportionately much higher mass of goods than than the cars. 

In a world facing the terrifying precipice of climate change, this is obviously unsustainable.

Only an evolution in shipping can save us.

So why don’t we just make them all electric, wind, or even slap on a fun-sized nuclear reactor? It turns out, however, that this is one of the stickiest problems of our era. 

With regard to cute, little kawaii nukes, though there is work on small nuclear reactor engines for maritime, if you have a uranium hookup you should probably not be talking about it with anyone. 

Wind is great. Companies like Sail Cargo in Costa Rica are building sail boats that can move nearly 200 metric tonnes of goods (to say nothing of the elegant Haitian sloop). However, modern ports are tightly scheduled, making the time volatility of wind more complicated to coordinate. There are even cool hybrid ideas in practice such as Sky Sails who offer high-altitude kites above cargo ships, reducing the overall amount of fuel they need to burn. 

As for electricity, there are huge economies of scale that benefit the supermassive oil fueled cargo ship. Notably, the momentum they generate as well as their shape and weight, help them to efficiently wave break and travel long distances across the volatile deep sea. That means they are relatively fast, efficient, and reliable. But beyond just this there are other pesky aspects ordained by that old chestnut…. physics.

Critical among these engineering limits is the energy density problem. In short, oil is a highly energy dense (if dirty) energy source. If you add more oil and cylinders you get more power. However with batteries you quickly run into problems. Before you know it, the weight of the batteries you would need has become greater than the mass of the booty you’re trying to shepard across the isle. 

Because of this, even though electric engines themselves are said to be quite efficient, large electric vehicles are generally forced to be relatively short distance compared to their oil counterparts. There are already electric planes but they only do short regional trips (for now). Air New Zealand is heading an effort towards electric cargo flights between Wellington and Blenheim. There are already electric ferries and shipping container boats but they are generally only for short trips as well. The electric tugboat named Sparky that operates in Tāmaki Makarau (Auckland) is expected to save 465 tonnes of fuel annually. 

There are additionally electric ferries for cars and people, proliferating rapidly across the globe including the Ika Rere, built in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) by WEBBCo and Meridian Energy. Electric ferries like these are often made to be ultra-light in order to focus on speed for the human passengers on-board and compensate for the weight gains and energy density issues of electric batteries. Conversely, shipping can afford to move slower and are generally made of steel which are traditionally compensated for by increases in diesel engine size and fuel capacity. 

A representative of the NZ based company EV Maritime wrote to me:

“Batteries are heavy, and less energy dense than diesel, so for us to build fully electric fast passenger ferries, we must prioritise propulsive efficiency and minimising weight in all other aspects of the vessel. We have seen electric vessels around the world fail to hit their reported top speed, and often this is due to mismanaged weight gains, as such, going slow and being fully electric isn’t so difficult to achieve, but our goal is to go fast.”

Existing electric shipping container vessels are often not open sea ships but rather coastal or inland barges. Some, such as the Danish E-Ferry “Ellen” can gently and quietly pass through beautiful canals. Meanwhile in Tasmania the “worlds largest electric boat” is being built to act as a ferry in South America. Electric barges have another advantage over traditional container ships in that they can be RoRo (roll-on, roll-off) like an inter-island car ferry. This is simpler than relying on port authorities to coordinate use of the large cranes. Instead, a long range electric 18-wheeler such as the Windrose E1400 in NZ, can simply rock-up, get the goods, and be gone. There was even a proposal in Tāmaki to place imported cars on electric coastal barges but the company claims the costs to be “eye-watering.”

Despite the straightforwardness of barges, there are efforts to develop electric and hybrid container ships and tankers as well. The first zero-emission all-electric tanker was launched in Japan by Asahi Tanker in 2021. Not only is it carbon-zero, it also achieves zero emissions of NOx, SOx and particulates. All the while being quiet and smooth, no doubt to the delight of port and crew. 

In 2021 the “first” fully electric cargo ship, the Yara Birkeland, was completed in Norway boasting an impressive but relatively small, 120 TEUs. Building upon this success, in 2024 the Chinese state owned company COSCO Shipping launched a significantly larger 9,000 tonne, 700 TEU fully electric container ship with over 50,000 kWh in batteries! With the full stock of batteries on board it can travel lengths that would cost more than 13,000 tonnes of fuel in a traditional cargo ship. It currently runs a weekly service between Shanghai and Nanjing along the Yangtze river, more than 3 times the length of the ferry trip across Te-Moana-o-Raukawa (the Cook Strait). 

Although these quite large electric vessels are extremely exciting (to nerds), there’s something to be said for their tinier siblings as well. In Singapore, the Hydromover can ferry about 25 tonnes of cargo. Like their electric barge cousins, this raises considerations about the possibilities of swarms of smaller boats more agile for inland shipping where large-mass for wave breaking is less important. Many companies are even turning towards total automation of these systems.

Despite the progress, fully electric deep-sea shipping is still broadly considered to be not yet viable. However regional routes and hybrid solutions are considered to be not just possible but economically viable, controlling for real world economic and material conditions. On an island nation like Aotearoa, or any nation with a decent canal river system, you can imagine people converting something like a landing barge into a full electric craft capable of weaving the precarious thread between smaller towns without major ports. As well, domestic or regional shipping via a feeder size container ship with some deep water capability is completely viable given current technology. More research is needed in order to analyse the Total Available Market for interventions such as these. 

A potentially convertible small landing barge that would allow regional resilience in the face of climate change.

While pure electrification is a noble goal, hybrid power systems can integrate with existing “e-methanol” efforts which utilise a carbon neutral process to create a renewable synthetic methanol. Its production process uses captured carbon dioxide (CO2) and “green hydrogen.” The green hydrogen is produced via water electrolysis powered by renewable energy like wind or solar. However, battery-powered vessels are still significantly more energy efficient than those using e-fuels like methanol. Battery systems require up to 65% less renewable energy over their life cycle. 

While lithium-ion and hydrogen fuel cells are the most common EV batteries, they both come with serious issues. As a result of this, new contenders such as solid state batteries and the condensed battery by the inspirational CATL, are emerging with increased energy density, life-span, and charging speed. Even more of a boon, they’re less likely to go boom!

In order to truly glimpse a carbon-zero shipping future there are additional needs though. The first and most important is investment, both public and private. It is no coincidence that COSCO Shipping is state-owned. China is heavily investing in green technology and profiting handily from doing so. Similarly, the EU itself was the largest funder of the e-ferry Ellen. However, even juggernaut private companies like Maersk (spot them on seemingly every port or train around the world, look for an oogle hanging nearby) are extremely interested in green shipping, and willing to foot some of the financial risk. 

Aside from just investment in the ships themselves though, ports also need substantial upgrades to support high-power charging. CentrePort in Wellington has already made a humble start. As it stands Meridian already supplies the electric Ika Rere ferry with renewably generated power.

Additionally, current battery room designs limit energy density. In the future, swappable and containerised battery units could improve space and distance efficiency. Indeed, Japan is already building a 140 metre mobile battery tanker. In addition to all of these factors, low-carbon electricity isn’t always accessible on major shipping routes, posing a barrier to widespread adoption. 

As for Aotearoa, coastal shipping on barges or container ships is viable. Additionally, a fully electric container ship could already sail (so to speak) across Te-Moana-o-Raukawa (the Cook Strait). Though the trip to Australia is not currently realistic for a pure electric solution, even this could be targeted for both hybrid power systems and synthetic “e-methanol” produced domestically using renewable energy sources. Aotearoa already gets most of its electricity renewably, which could be used to power batteries or create e-methanol. Although maybe the baby was thrown out with the bathwater with regard to clean nuclear energy, these other alternatives could expand to provide unlimited energy to a post-oil Aotearoa. This would reduce our precarious foreign energy reliance and boost our domestic economy, all while presenting opportunities for various Iwi to hold sovereign control over clean energy production and trade (Iwi consultation desperately needed here). Aotearoa Circle has partnered with Australian organisations to green the trans-Tasman route using alternative fuels.

Right now in the global economy, there’s a green-tech arms race occurring alongside battles for AI and computing dominance. Both nation-state and private interests are vying for influence in a rapidly expanding marketplace. As carbon regulations catch the up-draft provided by rising and volatile petrol costs, a critical mass of VC investment will continue to converge on a range of solutions to these problems. Electric ferries, barges, container ships, and tankers are sure to be a part of this. 

So whether you’re motivated by fear of a climate change hellscape for you and your children, concerned for our responsibility as kaitiaki of the lands and seas, pure capitalist self-interest, or you’re just really invested in getting your foreign knick-knacks, you’ve got skin in the game.