Australia’s Pacific security strategy has a diesel problem – wind-assisted cargo ships can help solve it

Somewhere between the atolls of the Marshall Islands there is a cargo ship called the SV Juren Ae, moving freight on less than half the fuel of the vessel she replaced. 

She has sails. She exists because the Republic of the Marshall Islands, in partnership with Germany, worked out that the most dangerous thing about their supply lines was not the weather. It was the diesel. 

In July, at State House in Suva, Anthony Albanese and Sitiveni Rabuka signed the Ocean of Peace Alliance, Fiji’s first mutual defence treaty, and Australia’s fourth. Alongside it came the Vuvale Union, and more than a billion Australian dollars of promised investment over a decade. It was the most consequential thing an Australian Prime Minister has done in the Pacific in a generation. 

But Australia’s expanding Pacific security architecture has a diesel problem. 

The domestic shipping fleets that hold island states together run almost entirely on imported fuel. In the Pacific, the ocean is the highway. When a cyclone season turns bad, or a war spikes the price of oil, it is the ships carrying the food, the fuel and the people that stop. 

On 12 June in Majuro, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Naoero, Tuvalu and Vanuatu signed the Charter of the Pacific Blue Shipping Partnership, with the Marshall Islands Transport Minister its inaugural Chair. It seeks around $US500 million in blended finance over 10 years, including a $US300 million application to the Green Climate Fund for a demonstration fleet of 10-12 new wind-assisted cargo vessels, maritime maintenance facilities and crew training. 

The photographs look AI generated, but these ships and their impact are real. 107 large commercial ships now have wind-assisted propulsion, and the International Windship Association expects this number to double each year moving forward. It works as a retrofit and new-build solution. The Juren Ae provides proof that this technology works and can scale across the Pacific. 

This is the thing Australia says it wants and rarely gets: regionally designed, regionally owned, ministerially mandated, costed, and not invented in Canberra. This week, on the margins of the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Koror, its members will convene a donor forum to fund it. 

Australia should arrive with a number. $A100 million over five years, as a foundation contribution, would anchor it. That figure matches what this government has committed to a single clean energy precinct at the Port of Newcastle.

The same sum would underwrite an entire Pacific region’s maritime transition. Set beside a mutual defence treaty it is the cheapest security we will ever buy, because a fleet running on wind and local electricity cannot be strangled by a fuel price or a closed shipping lane. 

And we would not be buying it only for the Pacific. Australia’s own shipping runs on imported liquid fuel, and the recently released Federal Maritime Emissions Reduction National Action Plan (MERNAP) recognises that scaled domestic production of the low-carbon replacement is decades away. That is an argument for a portfolio of bets rather than a single one.

Wind is one of the only solutions that is commercially proven, retrofittable, scalable and available now. It will help us to afford expensive clean fuels later on by requiring less of them. The cheapest place to learn about it is alongside the countries already embracing it. 

Catherine King released the MERNAP with the observation that the recent conflict in the Middle East has shown how critical maritime resilience has become. She is right. She simply drew the perimeter around Australian waters. The Charter signed in July pulls it three thousand kilometres further out. 

She and Pat Conroy have the opportunity this week to close the gap. 

Andrew Dickson is director of maritime at the Energy Futures Foundation