By Ed Ballard

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Any readers considering a life on the high seas can assess their career options at maritime-zone.com. It lists more than 30 openings for the position of wiper. You'd make about $1,500 a month.

"The job is to wipe oil that's leaking out of an engine," says marine engineer turned entrepreneur Steven Henderson. "Working on a ship in the middle of the ocean is brutal."

Unromantic about what life is like for most seafarers, Henderson dreams of making automated battery-powered container ships with no crew at all. For now, his company makes big batteries. Fleetzero recently opened a factory in Houston and just raised $43 million from investors including shipping giant Maersk to expand its manufacturing capacity.

How much of the shipping industry could run on batteries is debated, but the fact there is a debate shows how rapidly batteries have improved. Until the past few years, the kind used in electric cars were viewed as too expensive, heavy and bulky for ships. Now they are powering ferries in Norway's fjords and container ships on China's rivers.

Fleetzero doesn't manufacture the battery cells itself. It buys those from companies in China and elsewhere, and packages them in fridge-size units that are designed to minimize fire risk without using too much space.

The company's early customers will run hybrid ships. They include tanker owner AET, which commissioned batteries for a vessel that will shepherd bigger ships into the Gulf of Mexico, which the U.S. now calls the Gulf of America. The batteries will have about as much capacity as 200 Tesla Model 3s, and a 500-mile range without using the diesel engine. Fleetzero's Houston factory currently has enough capacity to make about 25 such systems a year.

Ships generally burn bunker fuel, the tar-like residue left after refineries extract higher-value products from oil. It's dirty but energy-dense; big ships can go more than 10,000 miles on a tank.

Experts generally say the best green replacement would be another liquid -- perhaps ammonia, which can be emissions-free, even if it's highly explosive. But those options are expensive and won't take off without penalties for pollution. The Trump administration torpedoed a global tax on ship emissions, and ship owners are still commissioning fossil-fueled ships.

Absent tougher regulations, greener options must be cheap. Batteries' improving cost and energy density (capacity relative to weight) means they could eventually power giant vessels, said Santiago Yanez, who works on new technologies at AET.

Counterintuitively, electrifying long routes would be harder for small ships, because they carry less tonnage for their size. The answer could be port stops or even (as an academic recently proposed) ships being propelled by smaller battery vessels. Alternatively, hybrids could become the norm.

"Even if Fleetzero goes away tomorrow, in 20 years every ship being built will have batteries," Henderson said. "It's just economics and physics."

That would mean an industry transformed, with access to power, rather than an oil refinery, influencing where ships dock. Electric ships, with simpler propulsion systems, would need less maintenance -- meaning less work for wipers.

Tell me what you think: Send your feedback and suggestions to ed.ballard@wsj.com. And if somebody forwarded you this email, you can subscribe here.

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This Week's Top Stories

America's biggest grid operator has an AI problem. Data centers' power demand is threatening to max out generation capacity in a 13-state region. Consumers are furious about the rate increases, there's a mounting risk of blackouts during heat waves or deep freezes -- and the fixes are nearly impossible to implement quickly.

Trump's fixation with other countries' oil. In interviews going back to the 1980s, President Trump outlined his interest in the U.S. seizing oil from other countries. Now, his intervention in Venezuela is an effort to realize that vision. It's one part of a presidential agenda that could bind the U.S. economy to fossil fuels for decades.

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About Us

WSJ Climate & Energy offers news, analysis and exclusive data focused on the intersection of business, money and climate. You'll find highlights from across Dow Jones, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and Investor's Business Daily, plus data and analysis from OPIS, Chemical Market Analytics and McCloskey.

Today's email was written by Ed Ballard in London. Contact him at ed.ballard@wsj.com. Contact the team at climate@wsj.com.

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January 15, 2026 09:25 ET (14:25 GMT)

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