Saving Whales from Shipping

As the CEO of Excipio Energy I want to see responsible commercial development of the oceans. As someone who became a marine engineer in no small part because of a love of the oceans and all its creatures (thank you Jacques Cousteau) I make one of our company objectives to ensure that the overall impact of our projects improves the health of the oceans.

As part of the conversations about the concerns surrounding the construction of offshore wind farms the issue of possible harm to whales inevitably comes up.

I should lead by saying I am in no way concerned that wind farms will adversely affect the whale population. Everyone and every company I know in the industry plans on investing in the systems and procedures needed to ensure the wind industry and whales can coexist, and that the overall impact of the wind farms on the marine ecosystem will be positive.

During the discussions around whale protection the issue of vessel speed was raised in the context of reducing whale impacts. I will admit I was surprised that this was still a global problem in 2019; as recently underscored by the ferry impact with a whale in Japan. Whales are very large and tracking devices have been fitted to them for research for years; which brings me to the point of this article.

I can think of no reason why whales cannot be fitted with ship trackers. I would start with the 400+ North Atlantic Right whales. Unless I am mistaken it would not take much to modify an existing ship tracker to combine it with the tech already used to attached monitors to whales. The resulting benefits would be numerous.

Every whale so equipped would (when on the surface) show up on the ship tracking displays already in use. They could be displayed using a flashing red signal or other attention getting device, even hooked into an alarm system so ships would be aware of their presence. This Whale Positioning System (WPS) could, once proven, even allow ships to travel safely at more than 10 knots in know whale waters. It would also reduce the need for whale watchers on vessels. Such an electronic system would identify whales in the area even in bad weather and should be more reliable than humans with binoculars or drones. It would also give those who study whales are wealth of new data. If it becomes a wide spread program it will also save the shipping industry money and even prevent injuries to people as just happened in Japan.

Excipio Energy does not have the resources or expertise to pursue a new whale protection R&D program at this time (we are small and in the middle of raising SEED funding), but would like to put a challenge out to those who do have the time and resources. If you work in either whale protection, offshore development, or vessel tracking hardware/software feel free to contact me and I will connect the interested parties; or just use the comment section below to connect and discuss. Even if you are not interested in participating if you think its a good idea share the article. With some effort and a modest level of investment there is no reason whale-ship collisions cant be eliminated in the near future.