On Thursday, the ship management division of Stena confirmed that two tanker crewmembers were killed by a large wave off Cape Horn last weekend.
On Saturday, as the Euronav-owned oil tanker Arafura was rounding Cape Horn, en route to Long Beach from Brazil, she ran into rough weather and heavy waves. An alarm went off towards the bow, and the chief officer and the bosun went to attend to it. During the evolution, they were struck by a large wave and killed.
An investigation into the incident is under way, according to Stena subsidiary Northern Marine Management, the ship’s manager.
In order to properly handle the remains of the two crewmembers and give the crew some respite, the Arafura has diverted to Valparaiso. Northern Marine is in talks with local authorities to arrange for crew changes if possible, along with repatriation of the two bodies.
“The safety and wellbeing of all of our colleagues at sea is our number one priority for both owners and managers and a full and thorough investigation into this incident will be carried out to establish the root cause,” Northern Marine said in a statement. “Every sympathy and heartfelt condolences go out to the families from both Northern Marine and the vessel’s owners, Euronav.”
AIS data provided by Pole Star shows that the Arafura passed through the Le Maire Strait at about 0100 on September 10, making about 17 knots. As she headed southwest towards Cape Horn, she gradually slowed to five knots; after rounding the Horn on the morning of the 11th, she briefly slowed to a drifting speed of 1.5 knots, then diverted to a position close to shore. As of Thursday, she was off Puerto Montt, heading north towards Valparaiso.
An IMO-led project to combat ocean plastic waste is now under way in Jamaica, one of the first countries to join the agency’s GloLitter Partnerships program.
The GloLitter project aims to build capacity in nations to enable them to tackle ocean plastic pollution, particularly wastes from fishing and marine operations. Studies have estimated that shoreside communities send 4.8-12.7 million tons of plastic waste into the oceans every year, with negative impacts on marine species, human health and maritime industries.
Some maritime stakeholders also generate ocean plastic, particularly the nets and other gear from fishing operations. The GloLitter Partnerships project aims to help developing countries to reduce marine litter within the maritime and fishing sectors, including ways to reduce the use of plastic on board.
Jamaica is one of the 10 countries selected as lead partners in the $4.5 million program.
“As a Small Island Developing State (SID) with an open economy and heavy dependence on the blue economy for trade, tourism and fishing, Jamaica is well placed to benefit from the project,” said Rear Adm. Peter Brady (ret’d.), the director general of the Maritime Authority of Jamaica. “We will have the responsibility to share our experience and best practice gained from the project with the rest of the Caribbean and other SIDs.”
In Jamaica, the GloLitter program will address the retrieval of lost and discarded fishing gear, and it will help establish port facilities and initiatives for the recycling and reuse of marine plastic litter. With financial support from the government of Norway, the program will also hire a local consultant to assist with institutional and legal reforms for the prevention of marine litter. The project extends through 2024.
(Article originally published in May/June 2021 edition.)
It’s January 2019, and despite it being the middle of the summer in the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica’s freezing winds are blowing 80 mph and producing 50-foot waves.
The world’s first wind- and solar-powered autonomous sailing vessel, the 23-foot Saildrone Explorer, endured the extreme weather while surviving collisions with giant icebergs on its 196-day, 12,000-nautical-mile mission to circumnavigate Antarctica. It deployed a total of four drones on a scientific mission to survey krill abundance, track tagged penguins and seals, and measure the rate of CO2 absorption in the Southern Ocean for the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA.
Over the past decade, autonomous unmanned or uncrewed surface vessels (USV) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) went from a novel concept to a booming maritime industry subsector. From autonomously navigating without direct intervention from humans, uncrewed systems are helping us better understand “Spaceship Earth’s” natural environment through objective, peer-reviewed and verifiable data.
As part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2030, the U.N. Decade of Ocean Science seeks to stimulate exploration and knowledge-generation to reverse the decline of the ocean marine ecosystem. One stated goal is the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) Seabed 2030 Project, which hopes to map the remaining 80 percent of the uncharted ocean floor by 2030.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the so-called “Blue Economy,” including the preservation and regeneration of the marine environment, is worth $1.5 trillion per year and provides more than 31 million full-time jobs. We caught up with three of the foremost USV manufacturers to learn more about the state of the art.
The Little Saildrone That Could
Backed by Google, California-based Saildrone is looking to build an armada of 1,000 solar- and wind-powered USVs, each covering a six-by-six-degree area (one Saildrone per 360 nautical square miles) for in-situ observation of the world’s oceans in near-real-time.
This quiet USV company has racked up an impressive portfolio of over 10,000 days at sea and traversed 500,000 nautical miles while collecting hundreds of millions of data points. They have active partnerships with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory and Schmidt Ocean Institute, to name a few.
Saildrone’s Founder & CEO, Richard Jenkins, developed the wing technology during his 10-year effort to break the land speed record for wind-powered vehicles, which he did in 2009 at a speed of 126.2 mph. Jenkins now operates a fleet of carbon-neutral Saildrones to harness ocean and wind data for what he calls “The Quantified Planet.”
“We’ve more completely mapped the surface of Mars than our own earth’s ocean floor,” he says. “However, with only 20 percent mapped, it will take centuries – and fortunes – to complete using legacy methods.” With crewed survey vessels costing $35,000 to $75,000 per day to operate compared to approximately $2,500 per day for Saildrones, its mission-as-a-service offers year-round, cost-effective data collection at scale for up to 365 days of ocean data, ocean mapping and maritime domain awareness.
Saildrone currently maintains three platforms, the 23-foot Explorer, 34-foot Voyager and the 72-foot Surveyor, each one designed for specific missions, water depths and sensor suites. They also come in your favorite color, so long as it’s international orange.
Saildrone’s Vice President of Ocean Data, Andy Ziegwied, a seasoned applied oceanographer, says that sensor fusion on its various platforms provides seafloor classification and high-resolution feature mapping with near-shore and open-ocean bathymetry (down to 7,000 meters below the surface) with incredible accuracy. These USVs provide solutions for nautical chart validation, meta-ocean data collection (atmospheric measurements, sea surface temperature, air-sea fluxes and carbon absorption) for improved climate models, and ecosystem monitoring of fisheries and salinity.
The new 72-foot Surveyor is being deployed to remote and harsh environments such as Arctic regions and hurricane zones where moored instruments and free-floating platforms get easily ejected or destroyed. There are five Saildrones deploying this Atlantic hurricane season to quantify the variability of surface fluxes (rate of change of heat, carbon and moisture) over annual cycles in the Gulf Stream.
Such missions will help better understand the carbon cycle budget used for forecasting global climate transformation. Along with its massive storms, the Gulf Stream feeds off heat energy while also pumping CO2 into the ocean at relatively high rates.
Asked if any alarming data had been captured over time, Jenkins cited the 1-2 parts per million (ppm) increase in CO2 each year in the Arctic. “When we started measurements in 2016, it was 402 ppm. It’s now 418 ppm, which is a very significant rate of change in temperature and CO2.” He adds that “Data quality relies on lots of testing and verification. Real accuracy is tough to achieve. Sensors need to maintain accuracy, and the data is heavily scrutinized through peer-review.”
Kongsberg
Norway’s Kongsberg has been manufacturing sensors, USVs and AUVs since 1993. Its solutions for oceanographic sensors and marine survey platforms for research and mapping are a staple in the industry.
Atle Gran, Area Sales Manager for Marine Robotics, says Kongsberg’s 26-foot Sounder USV was designed as a multipurpose sonar and hydro-acoustic application for seabed mapping and fish finding/research. Equipped with the K-MATE autonomy controller, Sunstone Navigation System and Maritime Broadband Radio/Iridium VSAT, the shipping container portable USV can rapidly deploy anywhere in the world and survey for 20 days while transmitting near-real-time data. The flat-bottom hull and moonpool configuration allow for custom sensor suites.
Peru’s TASA, the world’s largest producer and exporter of fishmeal and fish oil, is in a partnership to deploy the Sounder USV for persistent monitoring of resources for fish detection, classification and tracking.
Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS)
During its June attempt at becoming the largest autonomous vessel to cross the Atlantic, the Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) had to pause its mission to resolve a “small mechanical issue.” The 49-foot, fully-autonomous, AI and solar-powered research trimaran was three days and 250 nautical miles into its planned 21-day, 3,800-nautical-mile voyage when the exhaust gas coupling from one of the generators failed.
As a result, the intelligent system returned home, parked 100 miles offshore and went into loiter mode while waiting for recovery. The MAS Project is a collaboration between IBM, industry, academia and ProMare, a U.S. nonprofit research organization.
“Luckily, MAS wasn’t lonely, bored, injured or scared,” says Brett Phaneuf, Founding Board Member of ProMare. “If a person were on that vessel and couldn’t fix it, there would have been an emergency.”
He then revealed that the brunt of the work has been structuring the software and validating it. “The boat part was easy, but our biggest concern was a mechanical failure. You can only design out and make so many things redundant” – a keen observation given that the replacement part for the motor is nine months out.
Phaneuf explains how much they underestimated the resistance to autonomous vessels: “The reality is that no one has rules for this. The U.S. and U.K. took different stances. The U.K. Coast Guard had trouble with classification and wanted to register it as a workboat while the U.S. Coast Guard was remarkably forward-leaning, and we ended up registering it as a pleasure craft.”
Other regulatory hurdles involved explaining how unmanned systems do not have an onboard crew to prevent a collision, which IBM’s AI Captain currently performs. Phaneuf’s reply is, “Well, it’s okay for a single-crewed sailboat to sleep at night. Worst case, the intelligent system will send a notification to someone onshore to help remotely navigate via an end-to-end, real-time encrypted Iridium VSAT uplink. The voyage itself was extremely boring because we didn’t get near anything.”
The closest point of approach to another vessel was one nautical mile of a 15-meter sailboat. “No news is good news,” says Phaneuf. “We aim for boring. We’re more convinced that the real danger of collision is within 12 miles of shore, at which point we’ll take an escort vessel.”
The MAS Project will use the time to upgrade systems, as computing power has quadrupled since last year’s install, and perform more sea trails. Once underway again, the public can remotely monitor the ship’s systems and progress through the online portal at www.mas400.com.
Preserving Spaceship Earth
As the industry moves toward the broader adoption of these platforms, exponential amounts of data are being amassed. The above examples demonstrate the immense capabilities autonomous unmanned systems offer to better understand, quantify and manage our natural environment. Hopefully, their integration will help us preserve Spaceship Earth for future generations. – MarEx
Sean Holt is a regular contributor to The Maritime Executive and serves on the Board of Directors of AUVSI (Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle Systems International) – Cascade Chapter.
Construction of the Vineyard Wind project, America’s first full-scale offshore wind farm, is set to begin now that its backers have secured $2.3 billion in financing from nine international and U.S. banks.
Vineyard Wind said with the new funding, the company will start its major commercial-scale offshore wind farm, despite the recent permitting lawsuit filed at the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
The Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, which is a group of commercial fishermen, filed a case challenging the decision by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to approve the project. They contend that offshore wind farms could have adverse impacts on the ocean environment and fishing industry.
Vineyard Wind plans to begin the project onshore this fall in Barnstable, Massachusetts, with the offshore segment of the work starting in 2022. The company expects power from the Vineyard Wind 1 installation to be delivered to the grid in 2023.
Vineyard Wind is a joint venture between Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP). The CEO of Vineyard, Lars Pederson said that “achieving financing is an important milestone because we can finally move from talking about offshore wind to delivering power on a commercial scale in the U.S.” He added that the company has everything in place to begin construction and will soon be creating new jobs.
The Vineyard Wind project was approved in May in a landmark permitting decision that significantly advanced the Biden administration’s offshore wind energy ambitions. The White House hopes to expand America’s offshore wind capacity from the current 42 MW to 30,000 MW by 2030. The administration’s plan aims at fully transitioning the U.S. economy to clean energy by 2050 in an effort to combat climate change.
In approving Vineyard Wind’s final permit application, BOEM said the project creates a roadmap for the future of development of the innovative offshore wind industry.
Vineyard Wind 1 is an 800 MW project located 15 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. It will generate enough electricity for more than 400,000 homes and businesses, and its backers say that it will save rate payers $1.4 billion over the first 20 years of operation and reduce carbon emissions by more than 1.6 million tons per year.
The wind farm project will consist of 84 turbines, which will be installed in an east-west orientation with a minimum spacing of one nautical mile between them. The backers of adjacent wind farm proposals have agreed to maintain the same one-nm layout in order to make vessel navigation simpler throughout the region, and the U.S. Coast Guard has given the arrangement a positive review.
The UK will meet with India in November in an effort to establish a free trade agreement to build new trade relationships following Britain’s departure from the European Union.
Since its departure from the EU in January 2020, the UK is seeking to rebuild trading agreements as its previous EU trade agreements ended at the beginning of this year.
India’s Commerce & Industry Minister, Sri Piyush Goyal, said the interim trade pact would involve early tariff or market access concessions on key high priority products and services.
“India is committed to the early conclusion of an ambitious, comprehensive and mutually beneficial India-UK free trade agreement,” said Goyal after holding discussions with Britain’s Secretary of State Elizabeth Truss.
Data from the UK Department of Trade shows that India is the UK’s 15th largest trading partner with a value at $25.3 billion in 2020, accounting for 1.6 percent of total UK international trade.
In 2019 the foreign direct investment (FDI) by the UK to India was $21 billion, which accounted for one percent of the total UK outward FDI stock. India accounted for $13 billion in investment in the UK.
The countries hope to conclude the FTA by March 2020.
Last week, the UK’s National Crime Agency intercepted a converted New Zealand Navy patrol boat and arrested her six-member crew on suspicion of drug trafficking. After an extensive search, officers pulled two tonnes of cocaine from hiding places on board.
The vessel – the yacht-conversion Kahu, formerly a patrol vessel belonging to the Royal New Zealand Navy – was intercepted by NCA agents Thursday evening at a position about 70 nm off the coast of Plymouth. Kahu was under way on a long voyage from the Caribbean, but she did not reach her planned destination; instead, the team escorted her back to shore for a “deep rummage search.”
Her six crewmembers – including one UK national and five Nicaraguan nationals – have been arrested and are in custody.
“This is a massive haul of cocaine with an estimated street value of around [$220 million],” said NCA deputy director Matt Horne. “There’s no doubt these drugs would have been sold on into communities across the UK . . . fueling more crime and misery. Organized crime groups are motivated by money. The deprivation of these drugs will smash a hole in the [group’s] plans and ability to operate.”
The 1979-built Kahu was converted at New Zealand yard Fitzroy Yachts in 2011, and her former owner – Fitzroy founder Peter White-Robinson – told Canada’s National Post that the vessel would be a good candidate for smuggling because of her range. For a trans-Pacific cruise, White-Robinson added enough tank space to take her 8,000 nm between bunkering ports. He sold the vessel in 2013 along with Fitzroy Yachts, and it has changed hands several times since.
The bust was facilitated by the Australian Federal Police, who gave the NCA information obtained through Australia’s access to the AnOm encrypted communication platform. The AnOm “secure phone” was conceived and created by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation for distribution to suspected criminals, and the FBI and its international partners used a back door in the app to covertly monitor organized crime syndicates for years. In all, the undercover effort snared 27 million messages from 12,000 devices around the world, leading to stunning drug busts and more than 800 arrests.
“Operation Ironside [the AnOm operation] has opened the door to unprecedented collaboration across law enforcement agencies around the globe,” said AFP Assistant Commissioner Lesa Gale. “This result highlights the importance of the AFP’s partnership with the NCA to combat offshore transnational organised crime that impacts both of our countries.”
A remotely commanded tugboat is set to circumnavigate Denmark in a multi-week, 1,000 nautical mile voyage, and its operators hope to prove that the world’s waterways are primed and ready for autonomous shipping.
Boston-based Sea Machines Robotics said the voyage dubbed ‘The Machine Odyssey’ marks a landfall moment for autonomous transportation, allowing the company to demonstrate how operators can integrate autonomous technology into their vessel operations for a host of technology-driven benefits, ranging from enhanced safety and reliability to leaps in productivity and new on-water capabilities.
“Just as other land-based industries shift repetitive, manual drudgery from human to predictable robotic systems, our autonomous technology elevates humans from controller to commander with most of the direct continuous control effort being managed by technology,” said Michael Johnson, Sea Machines CEO.
Johnson added that recasting the human-technology relationship is the basis of a new era of at-sea operations, providing on-water industries with the tools and capability to be much more competitive and operate in better harmony with the natural ocean environment.
The Nellie Bly has been installed with Sea Machines’ SM300 autonomy system. The comprehensive sensor-to-propeller system uses advanced path-planning, obstacle avoidance replanning, vectored nautical chart data and dynamic domain perception designed to control a voyage from start to finish. The vessel will carry two professional mariners and occasional guest passengers, calling on 14 ports along the route to display and demonstrate the technology.
The Nellie Bly odyssey joins a growing number of companies that are undertaking trial expeditions for autonomous systems on commercial vessels. South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries, Samsung Heavy Industries and Norway’s Yara are among the companies that are aggressively pursuing the technology, with plans to launch it on commercial vessels as soon as 2023.
However, autonomous technology – including autonomous vessel technology – is opposed by many dockworkers. The influential U.S. International Longshoremen’s Association has stated that its members will not service automated vessels operating without crews.
Following the launch of the Making Waves: The Future of Shipping’ initiative, IMO produced a new video telling the story of the issues & opportunities the shipping industry faces at a time of environmental crisis.
“The IMO community is highly committed to tackling climate change,” IMO Secretary-General Kitack Lim says, in the interview for Making Waves: The Future of Shipping, a news-style video launched at IMO Headquarters (13 September) as part of London International Shipping Week.
The IMO segment outlines the latest mandatory energy efficiency measures for ships, including the ship carbon intensity indicator rating system.
What is more, in a second video, IMO explains how is supporting alternative fuels and the application of new technologies, highlighting the global projects which aim to ensure no one is left behind in shipping’s transition.
The tansformation of the shipping industry to one that is decarbonized will require collaboration and investment. IMO’s role is to bring together many stakeholders with different goals and ensure that everyone is onboard.
Human Rights at Sea (HRAS) has called upon the IMO to increase its level of transparency and factual detail in the public reporting of cases reflecting human and labour rights abuse of seafarers.
The change being requested is needed to address the perception that protectionist blue-washing is occurring in relation to those entities involved in sub-standard, manipulative, and/or unlawful activities affecting crew and their families.
Following the recent In Focus IMO article ‘Supporting seafarers on the frontline of COVID-19‘, HRAS contacted the IMO to better understand the UN Agency’s position for not detailing those entities involved in the numerous case studies highlighted concerning issues of seafarer abuse during the COVID-19 pandemic.
HRAS highlighted to the IMO its continuous drive for greater public transparency for exposing accurate levels and sources of abuse within the shipping industry from an objective and fact-based approach.
This includes the fair and reasonable spotlighting of flag, port and coastal state authorities, owners, operators, managers, and recruiting agencies acting against the interests and fundamental rights of the seafarer.
On the other side, IMO representative, Natasha Brown, stated: “We have decided not to engage in “name and shame. Instead, we have found that the more successful approach is to engage with the countries at the diplomatic level, forge solutions and then report these as examples for others to follow.This is not about hiding anything; we’re trying to use methods that provide the best chance for solutions.”
Overall, HRAS urges the IMO and its Members to step up and shed its current veil of neutral fact reporting which HRAS asserts encourages abusive practices towards seafarers due to an institutional policy and fear of calling entities and individuals to public account thereby, de facto, reinforcing impunity and lack of effective remedy.
The International Council on Clean Transport’s (ICCT) Marine Program Lead, Bryan Comer, called the IMO to pick a ‘zero date’ – the year by which shipping’s life cycle carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions are zero.
Once the IMO has set a zero date, Mr. Comer notes that the industry needs interim targets. As he explains, the industry must set absolute emissions reduction goals for years between now and the zero date.
Regarding the zero date, Mr. Comer’s analysis shows it should be not later than 2050. That is based on updated carbon budgets from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report.
What policymakers need to understand is that it’s the cumulative emissions between now and the zero year that we’re concerned with, because that’s how the carbon budgets are conceived
However, meeting these interim reductions is critically important, as if shipping exactly follows the zero-by-2050 trajectory, cumulative emissions between now and 2050 would total only 14 Gt, lower than the 17 Gt well below 2 °C budget.
While there’s some nuance, if international shipping is to do its part to achieve the Paris Agreement temperature goals, member states should agree to reduce absolute emissions by 33% or 50% by 2030 and 67% or 100% in 2040 relative to 2008. No matter what, the IMO’s revised GHG strategy should aim for zero emissions by no later than 2050
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