Sustainable Leadership

4Moonshot Makers

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

—Mark Twain

IT WAS ONE of those crisp, bright mornings rare for a November in Norway, and you could see the needles on a fir tree from three miles away. The sun shone in a cloudless sky, making the cobalt waters of the Oslo harbor and the sharp outlines of the surrounding Modernist architecture so vivid they almost hurt my jetlagged eyes. With serendipitous timing, I found myself standing in the middle of an excited crowd of onlookers staring past the main dock toward an unusual looking cargo boat. We were about to witness the arrival of the world's first autonomous all-electric ship, commissioned by fertilizer conglomerate Yara International.

The Yara Birkeland, as the sky-blue 80-meter-long vessel was named (after Yara's founder, Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland), also happened to be the world's first emission-free container ship. It had huge implications for the maritime transport industry, which is responsible for almost 2.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions, producing 1 billion tons of CO₂ annually.¹

You could not have asked for better conditions for a boat launch. As the Yara Birkeland made its way from the port town of Horton some 60 miles to the south, the sea was smooth as glass—a sign, perhaps, that Nature welcomed this disruptive technology-laden boat on her maiden voyage.

So why would Yara International, a fertilizer maker, invest $15 million on an autonomous ship? Why did it make this bold Viking ...