enstai

BERLIN - Oil at more than $90 a barrel is concentrating minds in the shipping
industry. Higher fuel costs and mounting pressure to curb emissions are leading
modern merchant fleets to rediscover the ancient power of the sail.

The world's first commercial ship powered partly by a giant kite set off on a
maiden voyage from Bremen to Venezuela on Tuesday, in an experiment that inventor
Stephan Wrage hopes can wipe 20 percent, or $1,600, from the ship's daily fuel bill.

"We aim to prove it pays to protect the environment," Wrage told Reuters. "Showing
that ecology and economics are not contradictions motivates us all."

The 10,000-ton 'MS Beluga SkySails' — which will use a computer-guided kite to
harness powerful ocean winds far above the surface and support the engine —
combines modern technology with know-how that has been in use for millennia.

German-based Beluga Shipping has already ordered two more vessels and Wrage's
company has a total of five orders in hand.

If the maiden voyage is a success, Wrage hopes to double the size of its kites
to 320 square meters, and expand them again to 600 square meters in 2009. The
company hopes to fit 1,500 ships by 2015.

But if Skysails is a relatively elaborate solution, another development shows
the march of progress is not always linear: shipping companies seeking immediate
answers to soaring fuel prices and the need to cut emissions are, simply, slowing
down.

The world's 50,000 merchant ships, which carry 90 percent of traded goods from oil,
gas, coal, and grains to electronic goods, emit 800 million metric tons of carbon
dioxide each year. That's about 5 percent of the world's total.

Also, their fuel costs rose by as much as 70 percent last year.

That dramatic increase has ship owners clambering onto a bandwagon to reduce speed
as a way to save fuel and cut the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, said
Hermann Klein, an executive at Germanischer Lloyd classification society.

"The number of shipping lines reducing speed to cut fuel costs has been growing
steadily," Klein, whose organization runs safety surveys on more than 6,000 ships
worldwide, told Reuters.

Big savings in lower speeds
"Slowing down by 10 percent can lead to a 25 percent reduction in fuel use. Just
last week a big Japanese container liner gave notice of its intention to slow down,
" he added.

Shipping was excluded from the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol to slow climate change, and
many nations want the industry to be made accountable for its impact on the climate
in the successor to Kyoto, which runs to 2012.

The company in the second half of last year reduced the standard speed of its
ships to 20 knots from 23-1/2 knots, and said it saved a "substantial amount"
of fuel.

The calculation used in shipping is complex: longer voyages mean extra operating
costs, charter costs, interest costs and other monetary losses. But Hapag-Lloyd
said slowing down still paid off handsomely.

"We've saved so much fuel that we added a ship to the route and still saved costs,
" said Klaus Heims, a spokesman at the world's fifth-largest container shipping
line. "Why didn't we do this before?"


Climate change was an additional motivating factor.

"It had the added effect of cutting carbon dioxide emissions immediately," Heims
said. "Before, ships would speed up to 25 knots from the standard 23-1/2 to make
up if time was lost in crowded ports. We calculated that 5 knots slower saves up
to 50 percent in fuel."

Slowing down has not involved a decrease in capacity for the company. For container
ships carrying mainly consumer goods from Hamburg to ports in the Far East, the
round-trip at 20 knots now takes 63 days instead of 56, but to make up for this it
added a vessel to the route to bring the total to nine.

Hapag-Lloyd board member Adolf Adrion told a news conference in London on Jan. 10
speeds are now being cut further, to 16 knots from 20, for journeys across the
Atlantic: "It makes sense environmentally and economically," he said.

'Only appropriate on certain routes'
The world's largest container shipping operator, Danish group A.P. Moller-Maersk,
is also going slower to cut emissions — although Eivind Kolding, chief executive
of the group's container arm, told the January event this would mean a delay to
clients of 1-1/2 days. He added he believed that was a price customers were willing
to pay for the sake of the environment.

"We reduce speeds where it makes sense," said Thomas Grondorf, Moller-Maersk
spokesman in Copenhagen. "It entails careful planning and is only appropriate on
certain routes."

At Germanischer Lloyd, Klein said the classification body has urged ship owners to
explore other simple ways to save fuel, including using weather forecasts to pick
optimum routes for vessel performance, regularly cleaning their vessels' hull and
propeller to remove sediments that cause resistance, and using fuel additives to
improve combustion efficiency.

He also saw scope for designers to create slower speed engines with better fuel
efficiency rather than just having ship owners operate fast-propulsion engines
at reduced speeds.

"Ship efficiency is of paramount importance considering a fuel bill for a big
container ship over a 25-year lifespan adds up to nearly $900 million," he said.