When I was a proper technical journalist many years ago, I used to boil with eager anticipation at the prospect of attending maritime exhibitions.
The ship models, the huge chunks of machinery dragged in on low loaders, the improbable claims of the equipment makers, the meetings with superintendents, naval architects, engineers – even the occasional shipowner wielding a cheque book – it was all wonderful. It was the technology that mattered, whether it was some gigantic hydraulic ramp that would admit four lanes of traffic into the bowels of a RoRo ship or an ingenious nut that prevented your propeller falling off. It was all grist to the mill, fuelling our manual typewriters with thousands of words.
Though the years have passed, technology has always been far more fascinating to me than boring money. So when I read an article complaining that the shipping industry was ignoring what science and technology had on offer, it sort of riled me.
Why, inquired this seer, were shipowners not more adventurous? Why were they not embracing with more enthusiasm all the amazing advances that other industrial sectors were taking aboard? I have to confess I was speed reading at this stage, but I seemed to notice unmanned ships, robotics and exciting new shipbuilding materials flashing before my eyes, just waiting for some bold mercantile adventurer to buy. And what about all these exciting "concept" ships with which friendly marine designers and classification societies are delighting us – superstructures sprouting sails and rotors, ducts, pods and asymmetric keels below the waterline, their upperworks shimmering with clean, green, solar panels?
Any other industry, we were invited to believe, would have grasped all these opportunities with both hands and there would be composite clad bulk carriers with enormous LNG tanks on the poop criss-crossing the seas along with solar-powered robotic submarines everywhere the sea was deep enough to float them.
I am enthusiastically awaiting the trials of the first tanker built of graphene; a Suezmax that will have the lightweight of a Rhine barge and will be manned by an electronic power pack and driven by nuclear fusion. But I would suggest that it would probably not appear in the next few years.
"There you are," complain those who love to bash our industry, "this just demonstrates your innate conservatism. Here are the seeds of real technological revolution and you think you are being terribly forward thinking when you place an order for a paltry 'eco-ship'."
I don't subscribe to these accusations of "conservatism" at all and I don't find it even slightly strange that shipowners these days might be slightly cautious. If you are building any other transport vehicle, its designers and manufacturers spend a king's ransom building prototypes that they test to destruction and then try out on the market long before the car, train, truck or aircraft ever goes into production. By contrast, the shipowner is expected to take an entirely novel type of ship (or engine, or range of equipment) at face value, believe all the designers and manufacturers tell them and part with hard-earned cash for this totally untried item of capital goods.
The truly amazing thing is that so many shipowners are willing to do just this, knowing full well that sometimes it will come off and the ship will be a success – but the rest of the time they will simply be left with a lemon.
If I look back at shipping during my own working life, some shipowner was sufficiently brave to be the purchaser of the very first VLCC, the first OBO, the first LNGC, the first RoRo vessel, the first fast ferry, the first containership, the first pure car carrier, heavy lifter… just compiling this list is beginning to bore me. There were no "prototypes" of any of these designs and the buyer had to put up with some drawings, a viewing of a wax model bouncing about in a test tank (or in more recent years imagination masquerading as computer-assisted design) before reality emerged in a building dock following several stage payments.
There have been vastly expensive mistakes when ships did not come up to expectations, such as a whole series of LNG carriers that completely failed as the insulation didn't insulate and the fleet ended up carrying coal. Think of the many designs that appeared when fuel was cheap, radiating speed and power, but useless when the fuel price quadrupled. Ships that vibrated themselves to pieces or could not keep their course in shallow water (a bit of a handicap for a ferry).
There is quite a list of these failures, but it has never stopped bold shipowners coming upfor more.
It is also a fact that shipowners might be reluctant to take on something entirely new because of the additional cost premium with the shipbuilder loading all his development costs onto the price of that first revolutionary ship. It's the same with equipment – why are they not rushing to buy ballast water systems?
Sneery scientists and makers of wonderful widgets shouldn't suggest that shipowners are stuck in the mud. If the goods work, somebody will probably buy them.
