Illustration by Klaus Kremmerz

Supply-chain shortages put container shipping in the headlines during the pandemic, with images of vessels languishing in line at major ports worldwide. It made visible what Steven Henderson (MBA 2016), CEO and cofounder of Fleetzero, calls “the internal organs of the economy.”

Globally, shipping transports more than 10 billion metric tons of cargo each year. According to Yale Climate Connections, almost all of these ships run on fossil fuels and emit carbon pollution. Maritime shipping causes about 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—even more than airplanes.

But maritime shipping has begun—slowly—to consider alternatives to fossil fuels. The body in charge of decarbonization in maritime shipping, the UN’s International Maritime Organization, has set a goal to cut the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least half by 2050.

Why wait that long? What if ships could be propelled without fossil fuels now? That’s an idea at the heart of Fleetzero. The concept has an elegant simplicity: Build batteries into shipping containers that can be unloaded with cranes like any other cargo and swapped out at charging stations in port.

To power their future fleet, Henderson and cofounder Mike Carter, graduates of the US Merchant Marine Academy, have developed a marine battery system based on a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery. Called the Leviathan, it fits inside a shipping container that can be loaded and unloaded like any other cargo. Depleted batteries can be taken to charging stations in port while charged batteries are loaded on board, allowing the ship to get back underway quickly. “The way the math works with swapping is, you need a critical mass, a certain number of ships, before it pencils out to be cheaper than fossil fuels,” Henderson explains. That’s Fleetzero’s goal.

John McCown (MBA 1980), nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Maritime Strategy and author of Giants of the Sea, says he’s intrigued by the Fleetzero model, which could offer a solution for the shipping industry’s dependence on fossil fuels. “In modern container shipping, the ship is really a relatively small part of costs,” observes McCown. “Everything ship-related might only be 30 percent of the carrier’s total cost. The biggest cost is fuel.”

Both economics and environmental regulations are driving the industry to decarbonize. “We want to decarbonize,” McCown says. “But how do we do that? That ties in directly with what the Fleetzero folks are working on.” He cites Fleetzero’s focus on the all-important issue of finding ways to refuel efficiently. “That’s a no-brainer. If you can just switch batteries out when you’re back in port, then that makes a lot of sense.”

James Morton Turner, an environmental scholar and author of Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future, adds that drawing power from LFP batteries is “a promising technology for large-scale applications, since it relies on more abundant materials and doesn’t require problematic materials (such as cobalt or nickel) common in other lithium-ion battery chemistries. I imagine it has great possibilities.”

Fleetzero has embraced those possibilities—though not from the outset.

“When I first heard about batteries on ships as a concept, it was in a paper describing how they would never work and how ridiculous an idea it was,” recalls Henderson, laughing. “I still thought, it is, of course, ridiculous to think that you could power a ship with batteries. The math in the article was wrong in really, really bad ways. So we started to do the math ourselves. Once we realized that the math supported a battery electric shipping concept, we also realized that the only way to make this a reality was to vertically integrate and build our own batteries and be a shipping company.”

If the idea of battery-powered shipping is viable, then why hasn’t it been tried before? Henderson puts it down to the effects of an industry that operates in silos. “Anybody who knows anything about batteries doesn’t know anything about ships,” he notes. “If you look at the leadership of major shipping companies, I’ve never found an engineer, or a technology person, on the senior leadership team. No one had stepped back and asked, How would you make this work? What would it take?”

Enter Henderson and Carter and the Leviathan.

Henderson says he figured out the logistics of battery-swapping by tinkering with his daughter’s toy boats. Starting this year, Fleetzero has a real boat to play with: The partners’ potential proof of concept—an actual ship—is being retrofitted at a shipyard in Louisiana.

Fleetzero has become a shipping company, albeit a company with only one vessel at the moment. “It’s a 265-foot, anchor-handling tug,” Henderson says. “We’ve got a battery factory in Birmingham, Alabama, that we’ve set up for R&D and production, and we’re assembling the first full-scale battery pack for the ship. It’s getting a new paint job, which will take 75 days, and then we’ll be putting the batteries on board.”

The vessel is a hybrid, both battery- and diesel-operated. Soon, the company plans to purpose-build a vessel that will operate on batteries alone. “We want to decarbonize all shipping,” Henderson says. “We’re convinced that shipping will be electrified in the future.”

When Fleetzero’s vessel sets off on its first voyage, Henderson won’t be at the helm. “I’m going to be at the batteries,” he says.

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