After five years where containerships seemed to stabilise in size at a capacity of around 18,000 Twenty Foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) in size, shipping companies are building bigger again. Now the biggest containership has a capacity of nearly 21,500 TEU. What’s the push behind building bigger? Economies of scale – the bigger the ships, the…
There’s a race on to power the transport of the future. Carbon isn’t even in the running. The two front runners are hydrogen and batteries as a method of storing electricity. In this piece we will look at a zero carbon emission hydrogen extraction and storage plant that sits in a shipping container, while reflecting…
We’ve touched on some great uses for shipping containers here at the Gateway Gazette. Here’s one of the most purposeful: a lifeboat station in a shipping container. This isn’t some rusty box dragged onto a beach, but is one where the entire lifeboat station and boat are built in the UK and donated to countries…
In September 2016 there was a statewide power outage across South Australia. Renewable energy haters leapt into the fray, wrongly blaming the wind energy supplying the grid in the storm. Much to the chagrin of the renewable energy haters, the solution to the problem was found in a Tesla battery system and not a new…
New electric powered container carrying barges are being built to carry shipping containers around Europe’s inland waterways. Highways of ages The great rivers of Europe, including the Rhine, Seine and Danube, have been the major cargo highways of the continent for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. Despite the advantages of trucks and trains, they are…
Moving a shipping container around the world today is a lot more efficient than the old ‘break bulk’ method. Though on the ground the movements can be quite simple, there is still a lot of inefficiency in getting a company to handle those movements. After establishing the problem we will look at four companies trying…
Could smart shipping containers be a way of guaranteeing your shipment gets to its destination? Did you know that cargo theft in the US costs shippers something like $30 billion a year? What about the fact that 10,000 shipping containers a year are lost over the side from ships at sea? Several million shipping containers…
The world’s first zero emissions, fully autonomous container ship is to be launched next year in 2018. The plan is for these vessels to be cheaper to run and with zero emissions to save on diesel emissions from 40,000 heavy truck journeys every year. Will it actually be safer than container ships that ply the…
Shipping containers are a classic and proven method of moving all sorts of goods around the world. The numbers involved in the shipping container trade are huge – the European Union estimates that 3.8 billion tonnes of goods are loaded and unloaded every year in shipping containers in that part of the world. Due to…
Iceland has the peculiar honour of having more American tourists visit the country every year than its entire national population. The idea then that the US Maine Brewer’s Guild should send a shipping container with 78 types of beer to a beer festival in Iceland this summer isn’t as silly as you might think… Wait…