Sail away

Plodder · Post by **Plodder** » 27 Jun 2005, 21:57

It seems to me that as oil becomes scarcer the way to travel will be using sail power. What better way could there be to travel long distances at quite high speeds? Sailing boats may have to be commandeered so that rather than being the play things of the rich they are used to transport things usefully.

Any thoughts?

isenhand · Post by **isenhand** » 28 Jun 2005, 07:02

What about airships, blimps and gravity planes?

Pete_M · Post by **Pete_M** » 28 Jun 2005, 22:18

I have posted before that I think sail powered boats will have a significant part to play in the future. I think that local freight delivery, small scale fishing and trade with the continent are all possibilities.

Sailing boats operate on a much more human scale both in size and behaviour. Today very large carriers dock in massive centralised container ports with minimum man power and extensive automation. Sail power could scale down and localise this operation employing more people from a community. Its worked before.

The question is, what do we do with all those powered motor cruisers that will be going nowhere? Luxury chicken houses I guess.

Pete M

Sam172 · Post by **Sam172** » 29 Jun 2005, 11:10

Living near 3 container ports here (Felixstowe, Harwich, Ipswich) it'll be interesting to see how this pans out in the future (that is if I don't flee this area

)

Of course, it won't revert to wind power for a long time yet - but I do wonder what'll happen to the area when oil starts becoming more and more expensive. Job losses I suspect at the ports...unless we have spanish merchants sailing over in schooners filled with Incan gold...

Bandidoz · Post by **Bandidoz** » 05 Jul 2005, 01:57

I thought the Japanese were experimenting with sail-assisted tankers 10 or 20 years ago.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mec ... 524881.600

RogerCO · Post by **RogerCO** » 05 Jul 2005, 09:18

Sailing on the sea is good old pre-oil technology.

What the oil age has given us is a network of smooth surface relatively flat and straight land lanes. We call them motorways, but they could be adapted to use by sail-powered land yachts or land-clippers.

Imagine the sight of the M4 under a brisk westerly breeze carring a stream of sail powered vehicles towards London, a few days later there's a Southerly and two-way traffic is possible...

I have an idea that if one of the early demand management strategies is to ban driving on Sundays we could have an Exeter to Bristol sailing race up the M5.

Post by **clv101** » 10 Nov 2006, 13:38

isenhand wrote:What about airships, blimps and gravity planes?

I think airships represent the future of air travel. This on the BBC today:

But one thing might just come to the rescue of the airship concept, the former oil-man believes.

"In a world with very limited fossil fuels or restricted use of fossil fuels you have got to go back to the technology of your great grandfather - no cars, but bicycles. The airships could form part of that."

The Spirit of Dubai boasts that during a week of operations it uses less fuel than a Boeing 767 uses to get from gate to runway.

But the real, glittering possibility for the airship aficionados is that future advances in solar panel technology could render them light enough to plaster over the airship's large surface area and make it an effective means of mass transport.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6135598.stm

oobers · Post by **oobers** » 10 Nov 2006, 14:17

Let's just hope we don't continue down this path:

Arrival of 'SS Santa' at Felixstowe

Watching the clip, from about 2.30 feels a bit like being at a funeral with the arrival of some grotesque giant floating hearse.

Emma Maersk is 397m long and can cary 13,500 containers of consumer goodies. It has a 110,000bhp diesel engine and in my mind, most bizarre - a crew of just 13

Post by **clv101** » 10 Nov 2006, 14:26

I don't really knock container shipping, it really is incredibly fuel efficient (and could be much more so if the reduced the speed by a few knots). The amount of fuel used per $ of merchandise in that ship will be minimal and it would still be viable with $500 oil I expect. The market at the destination will collapse long before global container shipping becomes unviable.

oobers · Post by **oobers** » 10 Nov 2006, 15:13

clv101 wrote: The market at the destination will collapse long before global container shipping becomes unviable.

And when that happens, what will we do with a monster like Emma Maersk? If it is only cheap oil that enables goods to be made, shipped, bought and distributed on in this quantity, won't it become a floating white elephant? Or will it just not sail so often? The thing that bothered me was that it was bringing in full containers and taking them all back empty - not even any plastic packaging to recycle!

Post by **clv101** » 10 Nov 2006, 16:01

oobers wrote:The thing that bothered me was that it was bringing in full containers and taking them all back empty - not even any plastic packaging to recycle!

I did hear at my FoE meeting a few months back that Chinese container ships were filling up for the return leg with plastics collected in the UK for recycling. There wasn't the market for plastics recycling in the UK hence they were given to the Chinese, not for recycling though but for dirty incineration for power generation back in China. I don't know how accurate this story is though!

grinu · Post by **grinu** » 11 Nov 2006, 10:39

There will be huge amounts of above ground resources available for fashioning into other things when large hulks of machinery are no longer viable.

Vortex · Post by **Vortex** » 19 Nov 2006, 21:10

Global trade has existed for centuries.

I doubt that we will go back to camel trains ... so we will do our best to maintain this sort of ship for transport of valuable goods: spices, tractors, fabrics, meat, grain.

Society will have to be in REAL trouble for us to go back 100% to the Middle Ages.

I can imagine however that the loading, unloading & routing of such ships will be micro-managed to optimise fuel usage versus benefit & profit for all parties.

Kentucky Fried Panda · Post by **Kentucky Fried Panda** » 07 Apr 2007, 20:55

Sail will be coming back for many reasons.
To take the whole family on a low carbon holiday.
Have the travel bug but cheap flights are no more? Sailing will be pretty much the only way to do that.

Vortex · Post by **Vortex** » 08 Apr 2007, 10:45

The number of aircraft will fall of course, and maybe their design will change ... but air travel will be around even if Peak Oil hits almost everything else.

People WILL pay a small fortune to visit family in Australia once every 10 years or so ... even if they are cutting back on everything else and living a very drab life.