It's pretty hard to comprehend, but the sixteen largest container cargo ships floating across our oceans are responsible for more environmental pollution than all of the cars on the planet combined.

The reason for this is that they are, obviously, enormous, with equally enormous engines that absolutely drink fuel in the form of oil. They were never built with the environment in mind, just as ways to ensure that us humans could keep moving stuff around the planet at the lowest possible cost.

Just six years ago, the holy grail of ambition was to consider enabling such ships to run on liquid natural gas, and whilst there's a lot of reasons that might be an improvement, it's hard to understand the lack of ambition. I mean, switching out one fossil fuel for another which requires even more processing... really? Is that the best we can do?

Fortunately, some smart minded folks in Norway had other plans. In May of 2017 Yara and Kongsberg partnered up to build the world's first zero emission and autonomous ship, to be named the Yara Birkeland.

Skip forward to November of 2021, the Yara Birkeland sailed her maiden voyage as the world's first electric and self-propelled container ship, pulling into the Oslo Fjord for the world to admire. This one ship alone will cut 1,000 tonnes of CO2 and replace the equivalent of 40,000 trips by diesel-powered trucks, per year.

Of course - the real impact of this ship should be much, much greater - if the rest of the ship building world decides to accept this as the and proper holy grail of what could be achieved.

Header image: The Yara Birkeland ship in the Oslo Fjord, copyright Yara International ASA.

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