Ships can’t hide from satellites. And with COVID sowing chaos along ocean trade lanes, having “eyes in the sky” is more valuable than ever.
Spire Global, founded in Silicon Valley in 2012, is a top provider of this technology. FreightWaves interviewed Spire Maritime General Manager Simon Van den Dries during the SpaceWaves virtual forum on Thursday.
According to Van den Dries, who is based in Luxembourg, Spire currently has 102 3.5-kilogram microsatellites in orbit. The microsatellites are manufactured in Glasgow, Scotland, and orbit at an altitude of 310 miles (500 kilometers).
Through the Automatic Identification System (AIS), each ship sends out a signal with information on its location, identification, destination, speed and draft (how deep it’s sitting in the water). Van den Dries explained that AIS was originally monitored terrestrially, which limited coverage to around 160 miles offshore. The advent of satellite coverage starting in 2015 “meant that suddenly you could see ships anywhere on the globe.”
“We can identify 250,000 vessels and we know where every vessel is within approximately 15-20 minutes,” he said. “That allows customers to make better trade decisions, better insurance decisions and to optimize vessel performance.”
Just the starting point
“But AIS is just the start,” explained Van den Dries. “It all starts with location, but to get insights, you need a lot of historical data” — which Spire has.
“You can have a lot of human intelligence and a lot of machine intelligence. We’re certainly facilitating the latter.”
The bulk shipping segment offers multiple examples of how AIS data alone falls short.
Smaller dry bulk ships and tankers can carry many different types of cargo. The AIS data shows you if the ship is laden or empty, but that by itself doesn’t tell you much if you don’t know the cargo onboard. Meanwhile, AIS data on ship destinations can be problematic, particularly for tankers, which frequently change destinations in mid-voyage.
When asked about such complications, Van den Dries said that if you have years of historical data, you can create algorithms to predict the cargo. And human intelligence — “people on the ground at the ports” — can complement the algorithms.
Container shipping conundrum
The AIS data challenges for bulk-cargo shipping are easy compared to container shipping.
If a liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier is near maximum draft, you can tell how much LNG is being shipped (because an LNG carrier carries a standard load). If a container ship is near maximum draft, you don’t know how much cargo is inside the boxes.
Most of the mass on a container ship consists of the mass of the vessel itself, the container equipment, the fuel and the ballast water (with the mass of the fuel and ballast water changing over the course of a voyage). Only a relatively small portion of the overall mass is the cargo inside the containers.
Container ships are also constantly bringing boxes on and taking boxes off at each port, while container slot utilization varies by voyage. Consequently, knowing the AIS draft data doesn’t tell you much about the cargo load.
This creates a greater reliance on algorithms. But the problem here is that COVID has completely changed container-shipping patterns. Algorithms are based on past trading behavior. How can algorithms based on pre-COVID behavior predict post-COVID behavior?
“Algorithms won’t be of much value in these exceptional times,” Van den Dries acknowledged when asked about AIS container-shipping applications.
“Container shipping is not something we’re directly working on, but we can see several of our customers working on this,” he continued.
To address challenges, he said that “people with local specialization are very important.” In addition, it’s good to have a specialized segment focus. “I know some people who are working on, for example, retail goods. They’re just following containers that are going into retail stores. So, I think you need to specialize on particular segments and on particular geographies [with containers]. That’s where you need to start.”
What’s next?
Asked what’s to come over the next half-decade, he affirmed, “There’s still more room to grow and to get better data faster. We would like to catch [the location of] every ship every five minutes.
“Another thing that’s coming is that there’s talk of ‘AIS 2.0,’ which will be about a two-way system, not only the ship sending out info.” He also sees future developments in terms of marrying Spire’s AIS data with its maritime weather data.
And in general, he said, “it’s going to be all about aggregating data.” In other words, it’s not just about knowing ship locations and speed and destinations and what cargo ships carry and the weather they face. It’s about putting it all together. Click for more FreightWaves/American Shipper articles by Greg Miller
MORE ON COVERAGE OF FREIGHTWAVES VIRTUAL EVENTS: Ag exporters grapple with COVID, trade war, political unknowns: see story here. COVID to have lasting effects on supply chain: see story here.