Sails make a comeback as shipping tries to go green

LONDON, Dec 6, (AP): As the shipping industry faces pressure to cut climate-altering greenhouse gases, one answer is blowing in the wind.

European and US tech companies, including one backed by airplane maker Airbus, are pitching futuristic sails to help cargo ships harness the free and endless supply of wind power. While they sometimes don’t even look like sails - some are shaped like spinning columns - they represent a cheap and reliable way to reduce CO2 emissions for an industry that depends on a particularly dirty form of fossil fuels.

“It’s an old technology,” said Tuomas Riski, the CEO of Finland’s Norsepower, which added its “rotor sail” technology for the first time to a tanker in August. “Our vision is that sails are coming back to the seas.”

Denmark’s Maersk Tankers is using its Maersk Pelican oil tanker to test Norsepower’s 30 meter (98 foot) deck-mounted spinning columns, which convert wind into thrust based on an idea first floated nearly a century ago.

Separately, A.P. Moller-Maersk, which shares the same owner and is the world’s biggest container shipping company, pledged this week to cut carbon emissions to zero by 2050, which will require developing commercially viable carbon neutral vessels by the end of next decade.

The shipping sector’s interest in “sail tech” and other ideas took on greater urgency after the International Maritime Organization, the UN’s maritime agency, reached an agreement in April to slash emissions by 50 percent by 2050.