Drone ships would be safer, cheaper and less polluting for the $375 billion shipping...
In an age of aerial drones and driver-less cars, Rolls-Royce (RR/) Holdings Plc is designing unmanned cargo ships.
Rolls-Royce’s Blue Ocean development team has set up a virtual-reality prototype at its office in Alesund, Norway,
that simulates 360-degree views from a vessel’s bridge. Eventually, the
London-based manufacturer of engines and turbines says, captains on dry
land will use similar control centers to command hundreds of crewless
ships.
Drone ships would be safer, cheaper and less polluting
for the $375 billion shipping industry that carries 90 percent of world
trade, Rolls-Royce says. They might be deployed in regions such as the
Baltic Sea within a decade, while regulatory hurdles and industry and
union skepticism about cost and safety will slow global adoption, said
Oskar Levander, the company’s vice president of innovation in marine
engineering and technology.
“Now the technology is at the level
where we can make this happen, and society is moving in this direction,”
Levander said by phone last month. “If we want marine to do this, now
is the time to move.”
The European Union is funding a 3.5 million-euro ($4.8 million)
study called the Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in
Networks project.
The researchers are preparing the prototype for simulated sea trials to
assess the costs and benefits, which will finish next year, said
Hans-Christoph Burmeister at the Fraunhofer Center for Maritime
Logistics and Services CML in Hamburg.
Source: Rolls-Royce Holdings
Developing Designs
Even so, maritime companies,
insurers, engineers, labor unions and regulators doubt unmanned ships
could be safe and cost-effective any time soon.
While the idea
of automated ships was first considered decades ago, Rolls-Royce started
developing designs last year. Marine accounts for 16 percent of the
company’s revenue, data
compiled by Bloomberg show. Descended from the luxury car brand now
operated by Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, Rolls-Royce also makes plane
engines and turbines.
The company’s schematics show vessels
loaded with containers from front to back, without the bridge structure
where the crew lives. By replacing the bridge -- along with the other
systems that support the crew, such as electricity, air conditioning,
water and sewage -- with more cargo, ships can cut costs and boost
revenue, Levander said. The ships would be 5 percent lighter before
loading cargo and would burn 12 percent to 15 percent less fuel, he
said.
Safety Standards
Crew costs of $3,299 a day
account for about 44 percent of total operating expenses for a large
container ship, according to Moore Stephens LLP, an industry accountant
and consultant.
The potential savings don’t justify the
investments that would be needed to make unmanned ships safe, said Tor
Svensen, chief executive officer of maritime for DNV GL, the largest
company certifying vessels for safety standards.
“I don’t think
personally that there’s a huge cost-benefit in unmanned ships today, but
technologically it’s possible,” Svensen said Feb. 4 at a conference in
New York. “My prediction is that it’s not coming in the foreseeable
future.”
While each company can develop its own standards, the 12-member International Association of Classification Societies in London hasn’t developed unified guidelines for unmanned ships, Secretary Derek Hodgson said.
“Can
you imagine what it would be like with an unmanned vessel with cargo on
board trading on the open seas? You get in enough trouble with crew on
board,” Hodgson said by phone Jan. 7. “There are an enormous number of
hoops for it to go through before it even got onto the drawing board.”
Regulating Ships
Unmanned
ships are currently illegal under international conventions that set
minimum crew requirements, said Simon Bennett, a spokesman for the
London-based International Chamber of Shipping, an industry association
representing more than 80 percent of the global fleet. The organization
isn’t seriously considering the issue, he said by phone Feb. 6.
The
country where a ship is registered is responsible for regulating
vessels within its own waters and for enforcing international rules,
said Natasha Brown, a spokeswoman for the International Maritime
Organization, the United Nations agency in London that has overseen
global shipping for almost 70 years.
The IMO hasn’t received any
proposals on unmanned, remote-controlled ships, she said in a Feb. 6
e-mail. IMO regulations apply to seagoing vessels trading
internationally and exceeding 500 gross tons, except warships and
fishing boats.
As long as drone ships don’t comply with IMO
rules, they would be considered unseaworthy and ineligible for
insurance, according to Andrew Bardot, secretary and executive officer
of the London-based International Group of P&I Clubs, whose 13
members cover 90 percent of the global fleet.
Union Opposition
The
International Transport Workers’ Federation, the union representing
about 600,000 of the world’s more than 1 million seafarers, is opposed.
“It
cannot and will never replace the eyes, ears and thought processes of
professional seafarers,” Dave Heindel, chairman of the ITF’s seafarers’
section in London, said in an e-mailed statement.
“The human element is
one of the first lines of defense in the event of machinery failure and
the kind of unexpected and sudden changes of conditions in which the
world’s seas specialize. The dangers posed to the environment by
unmanned vessels are too easily imagined.”
Levander of
Rolls-Royce said the transition will happen gradually as computers
increase their role in navigation and operations. Container ships and
dry-bulk carriers will probably be the first to forgo crews, he said.
Tankers hauling hazardous materials such as oil and liquefied natural
gas will probably remain manned longer because of the perception that
having people on board is safer, he said.
Redundant Systems
Crews
will offer no safety advantage after ships evolve equipment for remote
control, preventive maintenance and emergency back-ups, Levander said.
Unmanned ships will need constant and comprehensive computer monitoring
to anticipate failures in advance and “redundant” systems to kick in,
similar to those on airplanes, he said.
The computers would also
be constantly analyzing operations data to improve efficiency and save
money, he said. Cameras and sensors can already detect obstacles in the
water better than the human eye.
“It’s a given that the
remote-controlled ship must be as safe as today,” Levander said. “But we
actually think it can be even much safer than today.”
Human
error causes most maritime accidents, often relating to fatigue,
according to Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty AG. Total losses
are declining, with 106 in 2012, 24 percent below the 10-year average,
according to the most recent data from the unit of the Munich-based insurer.
Repatriating Sailors
Unmanned
ships would also reduce risks such as piracy, since there would be no
hostages to capture, Levander said. It would also eliminate liability
for repatriating sailors when owners run out of money or abandon crews,
which has stranded at least 2,379 people in the past decade.
Drone
ships would become vulnerable to a different kind of hijacking: from
computer hackers. While the technology may never be fully secure, it
needs to be so difficult to break that it’s not worth the effort,
according to Levander.
Unmanned ships would still require
captains to operate them remotely and people to repair and unload them
in port. These workers would have better quality of life compared with
working at sea, Levander said.
Academic Debate
Currently
the debate is more academic than operational, said Peter Sand, an
analyst at the Bagsvaerd, Denmark-based Baltic and International
Maritime Council, whose members control about 65 percent of the global
fleet. None of them have raised the question of drone ships with the
trade group, he said.
Levander is accustomed to chilly
receptions. When he broached the subject at an industry conference in
London last May, the audience audibly scoffed, and other speakers on
Levander’s panel dismissed the idea.
“If everybody in the
industry would say, ‘Yes, this is the way to go,’ then we are too late,”
Levander said. “I expect ship owners to be conservative, but it will
change.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Isaac Arnsdorf in New York at iarnsdorf@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Millie Munshi at mmunshi@bloomberg.net
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