Los Angeles: On the high seas, full speed ahead is being replaced by slow and steady. Eager to cut fuel costs, ocean shipping lines have ordered their sea captains to throttle back the engines for what is quaintly known in the industry as "slow steaming."
In some cases, freighters are taking as many as 15 days to make a Pacific crossing that used to take 11 days. Sailors grumble that it's making long voyages even more tedious.
Some ships are crawling at just 12 to 14 knots, or about 22 to 25 kilometres per hour. Many cargo ships are capable of moving at nearly twice that speed.
"After two weeks, it's just so monotonous," said Daniel Ticer, a 58-year-old boatswain who was hanging out between sailings at the International Seafarers Centre in Long Beach, California.
"They try to add entertainment onboard the ship, more movies, but it's tough," said Ticer, who lives near Fresno, California, when he isn't at sea.
There is no relief in sight, however. Ocean shippers lost an estimated $22 billion (Dh80.7 billion) in 2009, analysts say, largely because of the global economic downturn. Saving on fuel is one way to cut losses.
"Companies are more focused on reducing costs, not speed of delivery, and the trend will continue even after the global economy comes back," said Asaf Ashar, who heads the National Ports and Waterways Institute in Washington.
Major convert
Nearly all of the world's shipping lines are using slow steaming at least part of the time, he said. Copenhagen-based A.P. Moeller-Maersk, the world's biggest ocean cargo line, is a major convert.
Maersk, which has a fleet bigger than the US Navy, swung to a $639 million profit in the first three months of the year, the most recent quarter reported, from a $373 million loss in the same period last year.
The sharp improvement came with the help of a 9 per cent saving in fuel consumption because Maersk's ships slowed down. "We continue our slow steaming and fuel-saving activities," said Nils Smedegaard Andersen, Maersk's group chief executive, who has put "basically all ships on slow steaming."
Such cost-saving ploys, Andersen said in a conference call with investors and analysts, "is what will make us competitive going forward." In terms of reducing fuel use, a cargo ship is like a car, only on a huge scale.
A typical 8,000-container ship travelling at 21 knots will burn 125 metric tonnes of fuel to go 500 nautical miles, said Lee Kindberg, environmental director for Maersk North America.
The same ship will need just 80 metric tonnes of fuel to travel the same distance if the speed drops to 15 knots. For the 6,310-nautical-mile voyage from Hong Kong to Long Beach at current bunker fuel prices, that's a potential savings on fuel of $250,000, according to Maersk.
Of course, slow sailing also increases crew costs. But there are still other cost benefits to slowing down. For one thing, it allows carriers to keep more ships in use, avoiding the expense of mothballing.
International trade
As international trade plummeted in 2008 and 2009, shipping line executives found themselves burdened with far more ships than they needed. Ship-breaking centres dismantled a record 208 vessels in 2009, more than twice the previous record in 2008.
More than 10 per cent of the world's cargo container fleet was idled, turning some of the world's waterways into floating parking lots.
Importers and exporters around the world worry that deliveries will suffer as more carriers ease off the throttle.
Jean Louis Cambon heads the global shipping operation of French tyre maker Michelin, one of the European Union's biggest shippers, and he has been a vocal critic of the practice.
