Serge Picard knew next to nothing about sailboats, beyond having mucked around in one at a summer camp in Quebec many moons ago, prior to commencing an internet search that eventually led to Guillaume Le Grand, a Breton who was raised around sailboats in northwest France.
At the tender age of 26, Le Grand had a wacky idea for him and a couple of buddies to buy an old ketch in the Caribbean, load it with coffee beans and sail across the Atlantic to London, where they would be met by a media throng having shown the world that an old technology — that is, sailboats pushed along by nothing more than the wind — had a 21st-century application as a zero-emissions means of transporting freight.
“It was a great idea, but, you know, I never did it because my two mates let me down,” Le Grand said.
But Picard and Café William Spartivento Inc., his Sherbrooke, Que.-based organic, fair trade coffee company that sells its beans at Costco outlets across Canada, have not failed the now 42-year-old Le Grand and founder of TransOceanic Wind Transport (TOWT).
On a recent October night in Québec City, the Anemos, the world’s largest, purpose-built cargo sailboat, quietly slipped into the docks after a 20-day journey north from Santa Marta, Colombia, with one million kilograms of coffee beans in its hold. The delivery was the first in a five-year, 21-shipment agreement between the two companies.
“I remember my first call with Guillaume, and saying to him, ‘Hey, we need transport, and a lot of it,’” Picard said. “Guillaume said to me, ‘Hey, we need clients, and so we kind of took it from there.’”
The Anemos has since left Canadian waters with several tonnes of Quebec maple syrup aboard, and by mid-October, the 81-metre vessel — which features the largest jib sail ever stitched together and hums along at about 18-20 km/h on average — was two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic and bound for the docks and TOWT headquarters in Le Havre, Normandy. TOWT has a second boat, the Artemis, sailing the high seas circa India, as well as six additional sailboats on order.
Don’t bother asking Le Grand how much these boats are going to cost to build because he will not say. But he did say the company’s financial backers include the Mulliez family, who are among the wealthiest in France, not to mention on Earth, with an estimated fortune that makes the Westons of Canada seem like paupers.
TOWT, by business plan, and Picard, by initially searching the terms “cargo” and “sailboat” on the web, now find themselves at the heart of arguably the greatest comeback story in the history of transporting goods from place to place in what is a US$14-plus-trillion industry that cargo sailboats and wind propulsion technology startups are looking to get a piece of.
Imagine horses and buggies, biplanes and the pony express suddenly reappearing on the scene, albeit updated with the most sophisticated bells, whistles and technologies built into their design, and powered by an inexhaustible, predictable — thanks to modern satellite weather mapping software — emissions-free energy source.
Suddenly, the trusty old trade winds aren’t simply inspiration for stories about pirates and rum runners, but a potential goldmine of guilt-free profit for companies that can figure out how to best harness wind propulsion at a time when maritime transport giants are sailing toward an international regulatory environment that will tax cargo boats running on fossil fuels, perhaps as soon as 2025, according to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the ocean transport regulator.
“Over the past five years, wind propulsion has evolved from ‘This is a nice idea, but what are you going to do with it?’ to a point where the technology is now scaling up at an interesting pace,” Christiaan De Beukelaer said from the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden, although his regular gig is at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
His background is in cultural studies, but somewhere along the professorial journey, he got tired of writing papers with dense-sounding titles, such as The social and built infrastructure of cultural policy: between selective popular memory and future plans, and became interested in wind propulsion as a climate change solution.
That interest landed him aboard a wind-powered cargo vessel for five months during COVID-19. Slammed together with a bunch of strangers at sea, some of whom became friends, and others who weren’t exactly awesome and have not kept in touch since, De Beukelaer learned a lot about interdependence.
In the end, he said, if humanity is to prevent the world from going to hell in a global warming hand basket, people will need to figure out how to work together, like they do on a boat, and cuckoo-sounding ideas such as embracing the wind as a means of getting around in 2024 and beyond, just like in the good, old, seafaring days, need to be taken seriously.
The big sticking point, De Beukelaer said, has been getting the big maritime transport players to buy into wind as an answer.
That’s where the IMO, a United Nations agency with international regulatory scope and some actual teeth to set standards and enforce them with financial penalties, comes in.
The IMO is scheduled to meet next April in London to determine what the shipping emissions standards will be and the levies for failing to abide by them. Hit the industry with a big enough financial hammer, and De Beukelaer is confident that the outcome will be rapid change and an increased appetite for sails of all sorts.
“We need to make sure that the signal that gets sent by the IMO is one that only rewards long-term solutions, and wind propulsion can be a big part of that,” he said.
Picard’s embrace of sailboats puts his coffee company ahead of the curve. He knows how to sail now, but, at heart, he is admittedly more of a numbers guy, not to mention a former Wall Street commodities trader.
He invested in a Quebec coffee company decades ago and soon saw something much more concrete and fulfilling than building spreadsheets and making trades for a living. Over time, he bought out some of the other investors, and along with two other owners, both of whom have backgrounds in finance, he has lately emerged as an organic, fair trade coffee impresario and a big fan of sailboats after sinking millions into greening the company’s roasting processes and its supply chain, which includes a small fleet of electric delivery trucks.
“We are trying to be good corporate citizens,” he said.
Picard lives in Princeton, N.J., although, true to his Quebec roots, he adds a smidge of maple syrup to his morning coffee. In a nod to the indignities of age, he stops drinking coffee by early afternoon or risks the consequences of a sleepless night. But what doesn’t keep him awake is fretting over the financial calculus related to shipping cargo by sailboat.
Conventional cargo ships are faster in the water than the Anemos, averaging between 20 km/h and 40 km/h, but they tend to be slower to unload once in port. A major port, say, Vancouver, can get snarled by container ships waiting to be unloaded, and the bigger the ship — and big ships can carry 60 million kilograms worth of stuff — the fewer ports there are equipped to handle them.
Overall, Canada in 2022 exported $151-billion worth of goods to overseas markets, while Canadian ports handled 339 million tonnes of cargo.
The Anemos, with its smaller load and comparatively nimble frame, can duck into less trafficked places after dark, such as Quebec City, and be fully unloaded by lunch the next day.
Its cargo, meanwhile, is not at risk of spoiling, meaning speed was never of the essence, but the Colombian beans still got to Canada faster than the four-to-six-week delivery time Café William had become accustomed to with conventional cargo boats.
The Anemos, of course, has engines in accordance with maritime safety regulations, and the boat’s captain used them in the Gulf of St. Lawrence for a spell, but wind propulsion still accounted for more than 80 per cent of the boat’s journey to Quebec.
As for the almighty buck, transporting the coffee beans by sailboat cost about $120,000 more than by a solely engine-driven vessel, but the trip lends itself to being baked into the company’s product marketing. After all, what eco-minded soul wouldn’t want to buy fair trade, organic coffee from Colombia delivered by sailboat? The real keen beans can even look up the TOWT voyage number on the coffee’s packaging and retrace the ship’s journey online.
“The shipping world today is optimized, massive, gigantic, and it is opaque, and it moves 90 per cent of the goods around us,” Le Grand said. “But no one cares to think about it; no one thinks about how a tonne of cargo bunker fuel costs $100, that a Filipino deckhand gets paid $700 a month, 11 months of the year, and that this is how your glasses, furniture and everything around you get to you from China.”
In sum, a sailboat is a kinder, gentler way, the cargo sailboat entrepreneur said, but he is not the only entrepreneur who believes wind propulsion has a significant role to play in weaning the maritime supply chain off its reliance on fossil fuels.
His boats have been built as big as he can build them, so he is going to need some help. Whether landlocked or somewhere with an ocean view, what largely goes unseen is that the world’s merchant fleet consists of 100,000 vessels moving 12.2 billion tonnes of you name it (cars, grain, t-shirts, hockey sticks, mutton and so on) around the globe each year.
In terms of its annual greenhouse gas emissions, the fleet is equivalent to a floating Germany, and 98.8 per cent of it is still moving by using fossil fuels. Three per cent of global emissions come from shipping, and the volume of emissions has increased 20 per cent over the past decade.
Being pitted against the three-percenters, with two sailboats, six more on order, and room for a million kilograms of coffee on each, isn’t nothing, but it won’t put a dent in the industry’s emissions problems, so it is a good thing that TOWT isn’t the only one on the case.
Take BA Technologies Ltd. (doing business as BAR Technologies), a company that has its roots in Formula One auto racing and America’s Cup yacht racing. It’s a short hop across the English Channel from Le Havre, France, to Portsmouth, England, where Lauren Eatwell, an engineer who grew up racing sailboats on the Irish Sea and dreamed of being an Olympian, heads up the company’s WindWings project.
High-performance yacht racing essentially boils down to this: the boat with the better design will win the cup, no matter how wily the captain is. The sailboats competing in Spain in the latest edition of the America’s Cup final bear more resemblance to a Star Wars X-wing fighter than the old dinghy tied to the dock at the cottage.
“The idea behind our company was to take all that innovation that went into designing for the America’s Cup and apply it to the commercial environment to see how it can help transform the maritime industry,” Eatwell said.
WindWings are one of the results. The wings can be retrofitted to a cargo ship’s deck or, better yet, built into a new ship’s design. A wing looks like a giant, 750-square-metre billboard, with wind propulsion, not advertising, as its purpose. The wings are retractable and fold down to allow for cargo to be unloaded, and they generate an average fuel savings of 1.5 tonnes per day per wing when deployed.
“People have been proposing ideas like these for decades,” Eatwell said. “We spent a lot of energy at the beginning convincing people that we could make a difference to their fuel savings, that this was a good idea, and that you’d get the financial payback because, of course, everyone is into their financial payback period.”
Eatwell and her colleagues are into other things as well. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, they took a break from the hustle and bustle to watch Britain snap its America’s Cup losing streak against New Zealand in the waters off Barcelona.
“I can confirm that today was a much cheerier day,” she said, though the Kiwis ultimately won the cup.
The company has had lots to smile about lately. Union Maritime Ltd., an oil tanker company, is incorporating the WindWings into the design of 16 new boats, but that’s just the beginning, Eatwell said. Companies are already investing in alternative fuels, such as ammonia, hydrogen and even nuclear, and every one of those expensive fuels is made more efficient, a.k.a. cheaper, by adding some form of wind propulsion technology to the mix.
“I’d like to see 50 per cent of vessels fitted with some kind of wind technology within 10 years,” she said. “If we are going to get anywhere near the IMO targets of zero emissions by 2050, then we are already running out of time, and wind is the only technology that is readily available today and capable of making a big difference.”
Back in Quebec City, Le Grand admitted he had a greenhouse-gas-spewing flight to catch since his duties as a chief executive called for him to be in meetings in France ASAP and not on a state-of-the-art cargo sailboat that takes 12 days to cross the ocean.
Nonetheless, the vision he had of wind as an answer to the world’s emissions woes in his mid-20s finally seems to be blowing in the right direction as he enters his 40s.
Le Grand believes products such as organic Colombian coffee, champagne, Quebec maple syrup, Caribbean rum and other delights that have a specific identity but aren’t luxury goods are ideal to ship by sailboat given the marketing win, coupled with the environmental good vibes associated with embracing the salt-scented simplicity of an ocean breeze.
But then again, he is not fussy.
“We are logisticians,” he said. “We will ship anything, whatever the client wants, we’re going to get it there by sailboat.”
Source: Financial Post
