"The Triple-E’s capacity is 18,000 TEU. (Most containers today are 40 feet long, so the number carried will be closer to 9,000.) Laid end to end, a single Triple-E’s shipping containers would stretch for 68 miles. “In the late 1990s we were like, ‘Oh my God, a 6,000-TEU ship,’ ” says Peter Shaerf, a managing director at AMA Capital Partners, an investment bank specializing in the maritime industry. “Then you go to 13,000 and now 18,000. I don’t know where it stops.” Practically speaking, a Triple-E, in one trip, could take more than 182 million iPads or 111 million pairs of shoes from Shanghai to Rotterdam. Such a trip would take 25 days and burn 530,000 gallons of fuel. That comes to 0.003 gallons per iPad."
"The Triple-E was able to meet the efficiency requirements without any revolutionary propulsion or metallurgical technologies. Rather, Maersk used a set of clever tweaks to adapt existing ship features to its size. On the most basic level, the ship was designed to maximize container space. The bridge tower, with the crew accommodations inside, was moved forward, so that containers could be stacked higher without obscuring the pilot’s view of the sea ahead. The engine was moved aft to shorten the propeller shaft, allowing more containers to fit in the hold. “It’s quite a simple little trick,” says Troels Posborg, the Maersk naval architect who drew up the preliminary design for the vessel."
"Much of the efficiency will come simply from going slower. Just as in a car, decreasing a ship’s speed, up to a point, is more fuel-efficient. The effect is more pronounced at sea because boats are pushing through water as well as air. As naval architect Charles Cushing explains, “that means if you go, say, from 20 knots to 23 or 24 knots, it will double the fuel requirement, and if you go up to 25 or 26 knots, it’s going up four or five times.” The Triple-E is designed to cruise at 16 knots. Building a ship for slow steaming meant the engines could be less powerful and the hull wider, allowing for more containers. According to Posborg, the company considered 500 different hull forms."
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