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Podcast: Engineering Matters
Episode: #117 How Sails Could Save Shipping
Description: The first boats that harnessed the wind to skip over the waves may have been built 8,000 years ago. Several hundred years later, the earliest seaborne trading networks began to form in the Aegean and the Persian Gulf.
Modern cargo shipping relies on ‘bunker fuel’ a thick, black sludge made from the dregs of the refining process. It is also loaded with sulphur, which produces gases and particles hazardous to human and animal health.
But the difficulty of settling on a single renewable fuel, combined with conservative decarbonisation targets, means shipping is making limited progress in the...