Union Maritime takes delivery of "wing sail" Aframax tanker
UK shipping company Union Maritime (UML) took delivery of its newest Aframax product tanker on Monday, June 16.
The delivery of Brands Hatch to UML came just five days after the ship's formal naming ceremony at the facilities of China State Shipbuilding Corporation subsidiary Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding.
The newbuild has an LOA of 249.95 metres, a beam of 44 metres, and a total cargo capacity of approximately 800,000 barrels of various types of crude oil products.
The ship is also fitted with three 37-metre "wing sails," which can be retracted when needed — for example, when passing underneath a bridge. The wing sails were designed by Bar Technologies and supplied by the China Merchants Group's subsidiary CM Energy Tech.
Editor's note: Over the last four decades or so, Baird Maritime has seen many similar proposals fail dramatically, with technology characterised by complexity, expense and almost total lack of result.
Funding for such projects inevitably involves direct subsidies, or subsidies-in-effect to the companies pushing them on governments or other gullible investors (not to mention very generous remuneration for the executives involved). Such businesses or business units tend not to stick around very long at all.
