March 2007

Interesting item today in the International Herald Tribune, pegging the long-term market value of this year’s America’s Cup in Valencia, Spain, at $8 billion.  I’m not sure how exactly that was tallied up - or by whom - but at face value that’s a big surprise, considering (a) next year’s summer Olympics, a much bigger event, are expected to generate just $3 billion; (b) sailing gets hardly any revenue from television advertising - in fact it’s pretty hard to find coverage of it at all. For other comparisons to the market value of top sporting events, check out this recent piece from Forbes.  I dunno. Sounds like fuzzy math to me. Here’s the Tribune clip:

VALENCIA, Spain: The America’s Cup will generate €6
billion (US$7.96 billion) and 61,300 jobs for Spain over the next eight
years, according to a report released Monday.

A document called "The economic impact of the America’s Cup"
analyzed the benefits of the sailing event between 2007 and 2015 on
host city Valencia and the rest of Spain.

After spending more than €2 billion (US$2.65 billion) on
infrastructure — including the building of the Port America’s Cup,
which is expected to host 1 million visitors over the event’s three
months — the province of Valencia is expected to gain €3.7 billion
(US$4.9 billion) and generate more than 40,770 jobs, mostly within the
service and industry sectors.

With a $1.3 million assist in funding from the nation’s two biggest container ports, Foss Maritime of Seattle just announced it will construct the world’s first hybrid tugboat — a 5,000-hp vessel that displaces a significant portion of dirty diesel engines with giant battery packs that work in tandem to reduce fuel consumption; carbon, nitrogen oxide, and sulphur dioxide emissions; and noise.

As I’ve mentioned before, any forward step like this in the hidebound shipping business ought be considered a bold move. Germany’s Beluga Shipping this fall will unveil the world’s first hybrid container ship with a giant kite hoisted above its bow; and now the world’s fleet of tugboats will start making the slow switch to alternative fuels, too. Credit the new Clean Air Action Plan, implemented by the port of Los Angeles and Long Beach, for getting the idea off the ground.

According to Foss —which has been cranking out tugs since 1889 — its new hybrid rig "will look almost identical to its sister Dolphin-class tug boats … and will be powered by batteries coupled with diesel generators and feature a modified engine room accommodating two 670 horsepower battery packs and two 335 horsepower generators. Although the main engines in the hybrid tug will have lower horsepower than the existing Dolphin engines, overall the tug will have the same total horsepower as its sister tugs."

Most of the benefits of the hybrid will happen, oddly enough, when the vessel isn’t moving. According to Foss, tug boats expend nearly half their fuel when they’re simply idling in harbor. With the new rig, however, "instead of idling the main engines while in standby mode when alongside a customer vessel awaiting orders from the pilot, the hybrid tug will run on battery power with the main engines shut down." 

Moe details from the Foss website here.

If you’ve seen how coverage of America’s Cup racing has evolved on the Web over the last 7 or 8 years, you also know how the latest virtual 3D viewers make the spotty television coverage seem hopelessly lame, uninteresting, and slow. (Of course, if you’re a sailor, you watch both, since ANY sailing coverage, which is hard to find, is better than nothing.) It’s no fault of the producers, really:  fixing a camera on a boat that moves at a relative snail’s pace against a fixed horizon is about as exciting for most non-sailors as watching grass grow.

Good news, then, that New Zealand’s Animation Research Ltd. just landed the gig to provide virtual/3D America’s Cup coverage when the action starts next month in Valencia. ARL handled the impressive 3D coverage in the 2003 contest, and the viewers and interactive features only get better this time around.  Each AC boat will have an ARL "kit" on board that relays boat performance and location data to ARL servers, which serve it up on richly detailed 3D maps with course lines, markers, and laylines are clear to see from any angle.

Photo by cam17.

The global shipping industry has for years been resistant to serious regulation and oversight, but the top two issues of the day–terrorism and the environment–are gradually forcing it to come clean. Last week, Germany’s Institute for Physics and Atmosphere published a new study showing that maritime shipping’s carbon footprint is a lot bigger, and growing faster, than anyone suspected.

Every airline that purchases new planes, for instance, loves to show off their lower emissions data, yet aviation as a whole generates just 2 percent of global CO2 output. The carbon footprint of global shipping, by comparison — through which 90 percent of the world’s goods are carried — is estimated by IPA at 5 percent, and rising fast.

A separate study by BP, which owns 50 tankers itself,  backs up that claim, estimating that shipping emissions would grow by 75 percent over the next 15 to 20 years as global trade expands and more and more giant container ships take up permanent residence on the world’s oceans. As Donald Gregory, director of environment at BP Marine, explained to the Guardian,  "Ships are getting bigger and every shipyard in the world has a full order book. There are about 20,000 new ships on order."

As I’ve written here before: the newer, bigger vessels being commissioned by shippers like Maersk are marvels of both engineering and economics, and have been instrumental in lowering the cost of global trade. (Today it costs more to transport a standard shipping container 100 kilometers by truck than it does to move it by sea from
China to Europe.) But the scrutiny to which aviation has been subjected on greenhouse issues has yet to come down on the shipping giants.

But likely not for long. As I mentioned here a while back, Germany’s Beluga Shipping is designing this new container ship to be outfitted with a giant kite flying off the bow that will kick in added power to the ship’s diesel engines and cut fuel consumption, and thus emissions, by up to 33 percent. (Don’t laugh: It’s an idea that engineers have tossed around since the 1960s.) That’s chump change, I suppose, against the trends of the industry at large, but hey: You gotta start somewhere. And if we start with sails? All the better.

More info on the maritime environmental studies in this well-reported piece from the Guardian.