Automated, Electric Barges on US Waterways
By Christopher Tidmore
Elon Musk and other tech luminaries constantly tout the future of electric propelled, self-driving trucking. Musk’s Tesla recently unveiled its autonomous Semi, and the Swedish transportation company Einride introduced their electric truck, the T-Pod, with a range of 124 miles and a 20kWh capacity.
However, an Eighteen-Wheeler’s potential to create a revolution in autonomous, carbon-free commercial shipping pales before news out of the Netherlands that self-guiding, electric barges may soon take to the waterways. Each of these ships will be capable of carrying 24 shipping cargo containers weighing up to 425 tonnes, contrasting with the one or two carried by freight trucks on roads. If their near-duplicates could be constructed in American shipyards, the financial disadvantage that the Jones Act has levied on US Flagged vessels on the inland water-system would suddenly disappear.
The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 requires a compliment of US citizens to crew American vessels, along with other regulations that US Flagged vessels be built domestically, and heavy (and expensive) licensure requirements for the bridge staff. In other words, US Merchant Marine vessels have always faced the requirement of paying far more than their foreign competitors. Such a fiscal disadvantage has proven bad enough on the high seas, but it has severely handicapped US domestic water-based transport. Despite the far greater carrying capacity of barges versus freight trains or trucks, higher staffing requirements and operations costs usually tipped the balance for land-transport shipping methods.
As a consequence, trains and trucks rendered a higher carbon footprint and environmental impact than a water-based alternative might have made felt in the last few decades. In recent years, river and canal shipping has enjoyed something of a renaissance despite the Jones Act. Recent experiments on “container-on-barge” transport have begun to show that water transport can financially compete, (http://thefmz.com/infrastructure-bill-push-container-barge/), but the possible addition of electric barges that drive themselves might make all the difference in the financial battle.
Technically, the Coast Guard rules would still require a licensed captain aboard, even if the barge is self-driving, yet a barge that could dispense with most of the rest of the crew--as well as the constant replacement of diesel for the engines--would easily undercut eighteen-wheeler or freight rail shipping.
The fully electric container barges dubbed the “Tesla of the Canals” will hit the waters this summer in Europe. The Dutch boat builder Port-Liner is poised to launch a fleet of these autonomous battery-powered barges in the Netherlands, shipping goods between Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam . At 52-meters long and 6.7- meters wide the craft are small enough to navigate both access canals as well as major waterways. Each ship can operate for fifteen hours on a single battery charge thanks to its six meter long batteries charged using carbon-free energy,
Moreover, the massive ships will operate completely autonomously without crew on board, according to Port Line spokespeople. (Though, the company admits as the first of the ships are rolled out this summer, the crew will stay with the boats to oversee their maiden voyages.) The first five launch in August with a second round of ships is planned to be released later in the year. Port-Liner hopes to be able to get to a production rate of 500 boats built each year. The next round of boats will also be bigger in size, about to carry more than the equivalent of twenty-four lorries. Eventually, the company promises that each barge will save 18,000 tonnes per year of carbon dioxide emissions compared to similar land-based transport methods.
Perhaps the best news is that the technology can be adapted to retrofit existing barges. In other words, older diesel vessels can also become green--and cheaper to run. Here the potential for the American domestic market screams. An entire industry could be born by retrofitting many of our basic transport vessels, and due to low bridges in the Netherlands, the barges are smaller than their tonnage potential allows. Far more than twenty-four container loads could be run on US boats on the Mississippi or the intranavigational canal system in North America.
Since much domestic transport does tend to rely on tugs pushing barges, rather than the self-propelled version more common in Europe, there is a limit to the impact of redesigning existing US vessels. Nevertheless, just as self-driving electric cars take to the roads, so might autonomous barges—if the currently hoped for improvements in port infrastructure come to pass.