Dubbed ‘the Tesla of the seas’ this fully-electrified, fully-autonomous cargo ship is already making waves.How does it work?nWhere will it sail?


And why is it already helping save lives inland?

Join us today for a sneak peek inside the world’s first zero-emission cargo ship. At first sight, Norwegian container ship the Yara Birkeland looks like a potential game-changer in the battle against carbon emissions. Oceangoing freight presently emits about a billion tonnes of CO2 a year, more than all but the five biggest nation states. If at least some of that traffic could be electrified, the theory goes, the world might breathe a little easier.nYara Birkeland was developed as a joint venture between Norwegian fertiliser giant Yara International and Kongsberg Gruppen, an engineering firm specialising in civilian and military guidance systems.


 Vard Braila shipyard in Romania


The hull was launched from Vard Braila shipyard in Romania in February 2020, and shipped up to Norway’s Vard Brevik shipyard to be fitted out with her futuristic innards. She’s not quite the first autonomous ship, to be clear – a Finnish car ferry launched in 2018 claims that accolade. But Yara Birkeland is a zero-emission commercial vessel. And the juice to fire up her gigantic 7MWH battery – supplied by Swiss technology firm Leclanché – will come piped in from the Norwegian grid, which derives most of its energy from clean hydroelectric plants. The ship’s on board battery, by the way, holds 1,000 times the capacity of a domestic electric vehicle.

So what will she actually be carrying?


A little over 100 containers.


Which isn’t much in the scheme of things – the biggest ships presently haul 24,000, at around 20 knots in speed, twice as fast as Yara Birkeland.nBut as a proof of concept, Yara Birkeland isn’t a bad start. Yara International commissioned the vessel to run between three ports in southern Norwayn– Herøya, Brevik and Larvik – shipping raw materials and finished fertilizers that are presently transported over land. Moving this same freight by road, the company says, currently necessitates 40,000 fully laden truck journeys a year. The Yara Birkeland will eliminate all those emissions and tiresome refuelling stops at a stroke, in turn making local roads quieter and safer for Norwegian citizens Her maximum voyage length, for now, between Herøya and Larvik is only about 30 nautical miles. She’ll run on two rotatable Azipull pods each producing 900 kW of power, and a pair of electric tunnel thrusters each producing 700kw.


The Yara Birkeland:

The Yara Birkeland is able to sense what’s around, on Norway’s hectic waterways, through a complex suite of radar, Lidar, nautical AIS - that’s ‘automatic identification system’ – regular cameras and infrared cameras that work at night. The vessel will never stray further than 12 nautical miles from the coast. Three separate operational hubs will be on hand, if needed, to cope with any crises, and offer periodic surveillance. Maritime experts tend to agree that autonomous oceangoing vessels are perfectly feasible with existing technology, but the issues that could arise if a fault occurred far out to sea could be prohibitively expensive, not to mention unacceptably dangerous. For now, at least. Yara International’s aspiration was to launch the ship last year, until the pandemic delayed things by a few months. The ultimate dream is to make not only the sailing, but loading and unloading at each end autonomous. For now that’s still on the drawing board, and handled by human-operated cranes. The regulatory and oversight framework required for such tricky maneuvering, in all weathers, is evolving as we speak.


Will all container vessels be autonomous and electric soon?

It’s hard to say. If the Yara Birkeland is a success, when it finally ditches its human safety crew hopefully this winter, it’s certain other companies with similarly limited, near-shore use cases will look into the technology. Navigating busy, larger international ports, with their own complex legal and regulatory ecosystems, will be an altogether greater challenge than pootling about the pretty fjords of Scandinavia. But for now, the Yara Birkeland is on-track to slash Yara International’s operating costs by up to 90%. That’s despite the ship costing around $25million, three times as much as a normal container ship of comparable size. Improvements in battery technology will inevitably make the bigger shipping companies sit up and take notice.

But L few good years of accident-free:


 autonomous shipping will be needed before this technology is more trusted. And as for the emission-free aspect, well, sailing ships have been doing that for centuries right?. What do you think? Does electrification on such a modest scale count for much? Let us know in the comments.