Selling Ellen

The greening of the UK ferry fleet is starting to happen. The Green Edge looks at some of the skills implications.

Have you ever walked through Sandbanks and taken the chain ferry to Studland? It’s an idyllic spot on the Dorset coast at the mouth of Poole harbour. The current chain ferry, Bramble Bush Bay, has been in service since 1994 and is diesel-powered. Its eventual successor could well run on batteries.

Ellen, an electric ferry, recently set a world record (yet to be fully validated) after sailing 50 nautical miles on a single charge. She operates between the islands of Ærø and Als in Southern Denmark, with zero carbon emissions and 24% lower operating costs compared with diesel ferries. The Green Edge thinks this is a story worth exploring in a little more detail, since a move to e-Ferries in the UK is undoubtedly going to be a major feature of point 6 (Jet Zero and Green Ships) of the Government’s Ten Point Plan.

According to a recent study done by Oxford Economics for Interferry, there are currently 15,400 ferries operating across the world. Around 170 of these are in the UK, including 13 chain ferries like Bramble Bush Bay. Ferries keep islands served, remove lengthy land road trips, and provide around 1.1 million jobs worldwide. In time all of these ferries will have to operate on a net zero basis and so are likely to be powered by electricity, LNG or hydrogen. One recent report¹ inferred that the proportion of hybrid to pure electric vessels in the current global ferry fleet is around 3 to 1.

The first hybrid ferry to operate in England is Victoria of Wight. Entering service in 2018, she operates across the Solent between Portsmouth and Fishbourne on the Isle of Wight. Built at a shipyard in Turkey, she can carry more than 1,100 passengers and 170 vehicles. In Scotland, CalMac Ferries Limited operates three hybrid ferries - all built on the Clyde -  each of them small, at 150 passengers and around 230 vehicles, in comparison with Victoria of Wight . The greening of the UK’s ferry fleet is starting to happen.

For longer haul routes in and out of the UK, larger vessels are being added. Brittany Ferries - a company largely owned by French farmers but with a large footprint in England - is already augmenting its fleet with LNG-powered vessels like the Salamanca and is planning to take delivery of the world’s largest hybrid ship, the Saint Malo, in 2024. The Salamanca and Saint Malo are actually two instances of a class of Ro-Pax (roll on/roll off/passenger) ferries known as E-Flexers. Built in China (of course) Stena RoRo has twelve of the vessels on order and charters some of them to Brittany Ferries and others, while retaining the rest for its own use. So, large LNG and hybrid ferries are likely to become a regular feature around the UK in the not-too-distant future. A further incentive for the UK’s ports to sort out their eco-friendly shore-side plug-in facilities, as we talked about in this Green Edge post.

Image: MDPI

So, back to Ellen. On a normal day, she sails up to seven 22 nautical mile (40 kilometer) round trips between her harbours, and tops up her charge in 20 minutes while reloading after each round trip. Without her, each year there’d be an additional 2,000 tonnes of CO2, 41 tonnes of NOX, 1.3 tonnes of SO2 and 2.5 tonnes of particulates – an increasing concern to population health around ports – pumping into the atmosphere. All good stuff (or at least not bad stuff). But she’s needed a new onshore life support system: transformers; power access to handle 4.4 MW at peak charging; AC/DC converters; and a ramp-based charging arm in her home ‘charging’ harbour of Søby. Not to mention back-up onshore power just in case there’s a shortfall in local grid capacity.

And here’s an important point: e-Ferries require significant onshore investment. For hybrids of the future, this may also include hydrogen, possibly generated on-site using renewable generating capacity. So, combining the new onshore infrastructures with the changing power architecture of the vessels themselves, we see a significant impact on the skills needed and types of work that people will do.

Ellen was built under an EU-backed project called E-Ferry and, as such, has a bunch of project literature attached to her, including a Final Evaluation report included as part of a general information package. The report includes a survey of the workforces involved in building and operating Ellen, but somewhat frustratingly (to us, at least), the project team seems to have fallen into the trap we’ve commented on several times, conflating green jobs with green skills to base their assessment on predictions of jobs created or lost, rather than on skills needed or displaced. As a consequence (perhaps), when they surveyed the project partners for workforce impact, they avoided surveying the ferry operator itself. Body-swerving an awkward moment with the unions, perhaps.

Which is a pity, because there seem to be some useful skill pointers there². The approval process for the vessel had already assessed that she could operate without the need for an onboard engineer and able seaman, although at least part of the reason for this seems to have been that she was built with automooring, which hasn’t been a feature of the previous vessels operating on the route. But that seems to be it as far as the onboard skills assessment goes. Fewer crew on newer ferries? Likely. After all, it’s happened on buses – a driver and a conductor became just a driver, and soon perhaps nobody at all in a driverless bus world.

Onshore though, the picture may be different, although again we’d prefer the Ellen team to have focused on skills rather than on job predictions. While overall job quality was seen to increase, one of the key findings was the potential increase in the need for specialised skillsets. Much of this can be related to automation, but the experience of Ellen also showed specific skills related to handling battery systems, safety procedures, water cooling and ventilation requirements, and fire suppression systems. In general, both onboard and onshore, the shift in energy systems brings with it greater automation, less maintenance, and the circular economy principles of whole battery life.

Adding insights to strategy

Under the guidance of the Maritime 2050 strategy, the UK Shipbuilding Skills Taskforce is shaping skills development for ship building, while the Maritime Skills Commission champions the skills required for jobs in shipping, ports, leisure marine, engineering, science and professional services, and has just released its Skills for Green Jobs position paper. The Ellen project adds valuable insights to their work:

“…the e-ferry is approved to sail without a marine engineer. Instead a service engineer takes care of running maintenance that is less demanding with the simplicity and fewer moving parts of the battery drive train compared to fossil fuel engines”.

Annie Kortsari, Head of Laboratory for Rail Transport Systems and Services, and Research Associate at the Hellenic Institute of Transport, Greece, 2021

Unsurprisingly, Norway is electrifying its ferry fleet of around 180 ferries in a big way. A recent evaluation of Norway’s green maritime shift suggests four success factors:

1. an innovation system characterised by close collaboration and extensive dialogue among stakeholders;

2. an interconnected innovation system and an active entrepreneurial state;

3. an entrepreneurial state and ambitious climate targets set the direction for a decarbonised ferry sector;

4. undermining resistance from vested interests by transforming would-be transition losers into convertibles and making the best out of a crisis.

These success factors indicate a wider set of skills aimed at bringing organisations together, creating joint agenda, and releasing funding to ensure ferry fleets are upgraded more quickly than the normal replacement rate for ferries.

Another piece of the transition is the ability of port and near-port facilities to develop in a financially viable way. An analysis by E4Tech of future Clean Maritime Clusters makes for interesting reading. Considering a range of technologies and criteria, a number of ports scored well, including Aberdeen, London, Humberside, North Cheshire/Merseyside, Teesside, and Orkney. This is not to say other ports could not - or should not - develop green onshore capabilities. But it does suggest that some ports will have a distinct advantage over others as we move towards a fully decarbonised maritime sector.

One thing we do know from a recent conversation we’ve had with someone who understands the skills needs of the maritime sector well: there is a green skills shortage. We would not be surprised to see competition for a crossover of talent from other sectors as the greening of the maritime sector continues apace.

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1. The report investigated 36 electrified ferries and reported that 9 were all electric and 27 were hybrid vessels. This survey drew data from mainly European countries where there is a lot of interest and investment, for example, across Norway (8 electric/hybrid ferries listed), Denmark (6), Germany (5) and Scotland (3).

2. A note at this stage that The Green Edge is in contact with the parties behind Ellen and hopes to get to the bottom of the skills impact, perhaps in a later post.