I moved out of London a decade ago and stopped commuting when I set up Shipping Strategy in 2018. I was tired of the overcrowding, the pollution, the constant commuter-sniffles.
After a year like no other, TradeWinds asked 40 shipping industry stakeholders what they see for 2021 after a year beset by the coronavirus, and how the pandemic will shape shipping's future.
Covid-19 has brought thousands to the same conclusion. In the two years since I became an unwitting vanguard, communication technology took a big step forward, so that low-cost and free video conferencing (how do they do that?) went from possible to convenient to acceptable. Now I spend as much time in video-chats as I do in data collection, analysis, and writing. Even the most die-hard "people-people" in shipping have come round to the idea that business can be done at a distance and not only over the dinner table.
My favourite benefit is no longer having to spend hours in airports, calling the office from taxis as I shuttle to and from airports, standing in countless queues for endless security checks, staring sleeplessly at impressionist reproductions in naff hotels, or working out other cities’ public transport systems.
A recent study found that most aviation CO2 emissions are caused by those who "enjoy" frequent flights. For many of us, flying stopped being enjoyable several years ago. The two clocks in our kitchen, showing House Time and Daddy Time, are now pleasingly synchronised. Now that we are all climate-woke, we can feel better about ourselves if we take fewer flights. Aviation will take longer than shipping to recover from Covid-19.
Crew rotation has been the challenge for shipping during the public health crisis, but the long-term challenge remains decarbonisation.
In my interviews with shipowners for ship.energy, I hear time and again the refrain, "we will invest in the zero-carbon technology once the regulators will tell us what it is".
As yet it does not exist, and four-fifths of the necessary investment will be in the fuelling infrastructure rather than the ships. If shipping is to decarbonise, it will do so as the global economy decarbonises.
And what will become of the coal and oil cargoes? Will they be replaced by biomass, ammonia, methanol and hydrogen? As yet we don’t know what a post-hydrocarbon global economy looks like, so we cannot clearly define shipping’s role within it.
Thirty years ago, Jeff Bezos was working on Wall Street, the GPS system was only 24 satellites all operated by the US military, and Mark Zuckerberg had not had his bar mitzvah yet. The iPhone did not arrive until 2007. We have no idea what the world will look like in 30 years’ time. Planning shipping trade and technology for that world is almost impossible.
