Making waves

LNG Canada CEO Jason Klein wanted to make a splash. It was spring 2023, and in just a few months, a who’s who from the liquefied natural gas industry would be in Vancouver for the International Gas Union’s first global LNG conference since COVID-19. Ocean-going carriers weren’t due to start hauling the liquid-gas output from Klein’s Shell-led, $40-billion joint venture, under construction 650 kilometres north in Kitimat, on the traditional territory of the Haisla Nation, for two more years. But he had an idea.

A few years earlier, with LNG Canada’s support, the project’s marine services provider, HaiSea Marine—a joint venture between the Haisla Nation and Vancouver’s Seaspan ULC, a marine conglomerate that operates tugs, barges, commercial ferries and a shipyard—had ordered three battery-electric harbour tugboats. It was a bold move. At the time, no one had yet built a fully electric working tug. But LNG Canada wanted the lowest-emission fleet possible to service the 170 carriers expected annually in Phase 1 of the project. As well, the Haisla Nation, HaiSea’s majority owner, wanted the cleanest and quietest tugs available to protect the integrity of the Douglas Channel, a 140-kilometre corridor of dense coastal rainforest and waters rich with orca, humpbacks and other marine life leading to the terminal.

What ultimately made it possible was having the right designer on hand: Vancouver naval architect and marine engineering firm Robert Allan Ltd.

Though hardly a household name, the 97-year-old, 100-employee company is “probably the foremost tug designer in the world,” says John Snyder, New York–based managing editor at Riviera Maritime Media. Pick any major global port, and you’re likely to find Robert Allan tugs; more than 1,000 are currently at work around the world. Seaspan and Robert Allan had a long history of collaboration, so they started talking.

At first, an electric-diesel hybrid seemed like the solution. But by the time Robert Allan signed a contract with HaiSea in 2019, they’d settled on a state-of-the-art vessel that would be able to do its regular harbour tug duties, getting large ships in and out of their berths, on electric propulsion alone. Packed with more than 5.2 megawatt hours (MWh) of batteries—the equivalent of about 65 Teslas—it promised near-instant power, none of the dirty exhaust or carbon emissions you’d get from a regular tug, and very little noise.

Klein knew that the first of those new tugs, the HaiSea Wamis, was nearing completion at Sanmar Shipyards in Türkiye. So he asked his counterpart at Sanmar for a favour: Could the builders speed up their work, get the boat to Vancouver and park it at the dock outside the Convention Centre in time for the conference?

The answer was yes, barely.

“The shipyard pulled out all the stops,” says Michael Fitzpatrick, CEO at Robert Allan, recounting the story in his office tower boardroom, an eight-minute walk from where the Wamis docked. “The conference started on a Monday, and it arrived on, like, the Saturday before—just in time. They made a big splash about it. And it is a big splash. It was the first full battery-electric boat we’d done.”

Getting the Wamis out of the shipyard wasn’t the only hurdle. After leaving the dock on the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul, the 28-metre tug had to sail under its own power (it has two backup diesel generator sets) through the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, up the Pacific coast to Burrard Inlet and finally under the Lions Gate Bridge into Vancouver harbour. It took roughly 50 days—50 days of people at Robert Allan, HaiSea and LNG Canada anxiously tracking its progress on the MarineTraffic website. “There were a lot of eyeballs watching it every day,” says Fitzpatrick.

Today, anyone with an interest in tugboats or overall marine decarbonization has their eyeballs on the budding, low-emission maritime hub taking shape in Robert Allan’s own backyard. The Wamis, along with its two electric sister tugs, the HaiSea Wee’git and HaiSea Brave, plus a pair of Robert Allan–designed dual-fuel LNG-diesel long-range escort tugs, the HaiSea Kermode and HaiSea Warrior, are now in the Douglas Channel. Their crews, which include a sizable percentage of Haisla Nation members, are making final preparations for the start of carrier operations this summer.

Meanwhile, back in Vancouver, SAAM Towage, one of the Western hemisphere’s largest tugboat operators, headquartered in Chile, is running two smaller Robert Allan electric tugs. Delivered in 2024, they’re used to assist bulk carriers taking coal from Neptune Terminals, co-owned by Elk Valley Resources, on the north shore, and to service ships loaded with grain and crude oil. Added to that, the tugs’ battery maker, Corvus Energy, the world’s largest supplier of marine batteries, is local. Although it is headquartered in Norway, Corvus was founded in Richmond and still does its R&D, product development and some manufacturing there.

The story of how HaiSea and SAAM, working with Robert Allan and Corvus, chose zero-emission tugs, found partners to help justify the upfront costs (SAAM’s boats were about 70% more than a same-size diesel tug, which vary widely in price) and tackled the charging logistics holds lessons for operators the world over. Equally revealing are the roles these boats play in their operations, and the nature of their design and performance—which seems to surprise and delight everyone. “They are amazing to experience when you know how a conventional vessel works,” says Sander Bikkers, president of SAAM Towage Canada.

Bikkers is sitting at a small table next to the galley aboard one of SAAM’s new tugs, moored at the company dock on the southeastern edge of Vancouver’s harbour. Large terminal buildings, cranes and stacks of green, red and blue shipping containers line the shore to the west; along the road behind, rail lines are jammed with tanker cars. He’s just shown me the tug’s battery room, where wall-to-wall rows of white metal packs are stacked 15 deep behind an airlock entrance; the spacious bridge with floor-to-ceiling-windows on all sides; and the three-megawatt power supply and charging cables on the dock. But it’s the boat’s sound and feel when it leaves port or digs in against the massive hull of a giant carrier that defines the contrast for Bikkers.

“At the startup [in a diesel tugboat], there’s lots of noise in the engine room. You have to protect your ears. It will take some time to go to full speed. The whole vessel starts to vibrate. And then it comes up and goes. These tugboats,” he says, gesturing around him, “the first time I was on it, I was so amazed about the silence in the engine room…And then when you’re in the wheelhouse, you have to look at your gauges because you don’t hear anything to judge speed. You don’t feel it, you don’t hear it.”

Robert Allan’s aim, of course, is to see that experience replicated. Locally, there are about 40 berthing tugs working in the Port of Vancouver, handling both domestic carriers and the roughly 3,000 deep-sea cargo ships that arrive annually. But bigger opportunities abound. To that end, it’s stoking demand for its electric tugs by leveraging its time-tested strategy of partnering with leading international shipyards.

By the end of 2024, two more of its Sanmar-made ElectRA tugs were deployed in Europe—at the Sanmar Shipyard and the Port of Oslo—and seven more were on order for use in far-flung locales. Robert Allan has also signed agreements with two other shipyards in Türkiye that give them the exclusive rights to sell and build two other new electric lines, the VoltRA series (to Med Marine) and the eRA series (Uzmar Shipyard). On top of that, it says it expected to finalize orders for at least seven more electric tugs, to be built at different shipyards outside of Türkiye, early in 2025.

“Last year, when all five electric tugs were in Vancouver, they represented 50% of the global market,” says Fitzpatrick. “By this fall, there will be about 25, and 14 will be Robert Allan. It’s not like, ‘Boom, they’re taking over.’ But it’s growing.”

The marine industry has come a long way from its messy origins, but it’s still a dirty business. According to a 2024 Pacific Environment report, 50,000 large cargo ships emit roughly a billion tonnes of greenhouse gases a year—up to 3% of global CO2 emissions—along with “huge amounts of toxic particulate matter, acid gases and metals.” The global ship-handling and coastal tugboat fleet, which numbers around 20,000, adds to that stew, as do all the other working vessels involved in intercoastal shipping. While carbon emissions are the long-term focus, air pollution has an immediate impact on port communities. One study cited by Pacific Environment found that more than 200,000 premature deaths were attributable to global shipping-sourced emissions each year.

The five HaiSea and SAAM electric tugs eliminate about 7,500 tonnes of emissions annually—the equivalent of 1,500 combustion-engine cars. While not insignificant, electrifying even a large number of tugboats isn’t going to make a dent in overall shipping emissions. For ocean-going container ships, bulk carriers and tankers, other measures are needed.

In April, the International Maritime Organization’s Marine Environment Protection Committee will meet in London. Its goal is to finalize binding fuel-standard and GHG-pricing policies to keep the sector on track to meet the IMO’s target of net zero emissions around 2050. For large transoceanic vessels, electrification won’t be part of the solution until the amount of energy that batteries can store increases exponentially. Instead, the focus is on increasing efficiency, coupled with a move to replace carbon-intensive bunker and diesel fuel with lower-carbon alternatives—chiefly methanol, ammonia, hydrogen, biofuels or renewable diesel.

In Europe, the introduction of the FuelEU Maritime Regulation offers a preview of what the IMO plan might look like. Starting this year, all ships over 5,000 gross tonnage—anything bigger than a small cargo ship—calling at European ports are required to reduce the GHG intensity of their energy use, compared to a 2020 baseline, on a graduated scale (2% in 2025, 6% in 2030, up to 80% in 2050). Non-compliant ships must pay fees or buy offsets.

“It’s not certain the IMO will go ahead with the [fee] at this point,” says David Wooley, director of the Environmental Center at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and lead author of the Pacific Environment report. “But there is a lot of momentum there, and it’s supported by the industry itself, the Maersks and some of the other big operators of bulkers and tankers and container vessels.”

Despite the IMO’s focus on larger vessels, Wooley stresses the potential impact of electrification for harbour craft, including tugs and ferries, as well as vessels used for intercoastal and inland shipping. For operators of these boats, he says, switching from fossil fuels to electricity will cut carbon emissions, and “it’s got a huge immediate benefit in terms of air quality in port, coastal and river-based cities.”

Many jurisdictions are already mandating stiffer action to improve air quality by reducing diesel soot and nitrogen oxides (NOx) from harbour craft, in conjunction with meeting climate goals. Canadian rules require ships in port areas to burn low-sulphur fuel, for example. The FuelEU regulations also require container and passenger ships to plug into shoreside electrical power rather than running their engines while docked. Vancouver first introduced this measure for cruise ships back in 2009.

In January, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the California Air Resources Board’s waiver request to update its Commercial Harbor Craft Regulation. The changes accelerate the rate at which ferries, tugs and other workboats must further reduce emissions and/or switch to zero-emission propulsion. According to Wooley, this change, the FuelEU program, along with similar measures being adopted in China and India, will “create a big surge in demand for shipyards that produce those kinds of vessels.”

Understanding the range of vessels that are candidates for electrification—and working to expand it—is the prime directive at Corvus Energy. Its Richmond operations are a mix of cubicles and a modest, high-ceiling warehouse space with a semi-automated production line and assembly area, and an R&D lab behind closed doors. I’m met by Maryam Ebrahimian, senior sales manager for North America, and Mariella Deltcheva, senior vice-president of manufacturing and a Corvus board member.

“Anything you see out in the sea can be electrified now, as long as they go back to dock for charging once a day,” Ebrahimian explains. “Ferries are the biggest segment for us, followed by workboats, including tugs, offshore supply vessels, wind-farm supply vessels, aquaculture fishing boats, yachts.”

Both say the tug market is one of Corvus’s fastest-growing segments globally. “I think it is the future,” says Deltcheva. “All you have to do is go to a big port and see all those tugboats. The business case has to make sense for individual operators, but it’s there for the taking.”

Corvus is extending the reach of its products and the size of the potential market in two main ways: scouting for suitable new cells so it can reduce the size and weight of its battery modules while increasing their energy density, and adding flexibility to the way vessels can install them so they’re able to get more energy storage into the same size boat. Its newest offering, the Dolphin line, for example, packs about three times the energy in the same space as its longstanding Orca batteries (the ones used in the HaiSea and SAAM tugs). The new modules also don’t need to be stacked on a rack when they’re installed, which saves on weight and space. Says Deltcheva: “Everybody loves Dolphin because it can fit into nooks and crannies, is very configurable and more powerful than the equivalent in our older Orca for the same volumetric density.”

Corvus was founded in 2009. A year earlier, Robert Allan designed its first electric-diesel hybrid tugboat. About the same time, it created its first in-house tool to model emission reductions, capital costs and ongoing total cost of ownership for different powering configurations.

These developments coincided with a major organizational milestone. In 2008, a group of 10 senior employees bought the company from Robert Allan, grandson of the founder. That original ownership group has now grown to 32. At the time of the buyout, Fitzpatrick was one of the firm’s senior naval architects. Originally from Toronto, he ran a windsurfing store before moving to Australia to attend university. He got a naval architecture degree and worked with an Australian ship design firm, then returned to Canada to work at Robert Allan.

Fitzpatrick became CEO in 2015. By then, the focus on decarbonization had started to build. But the most dramatic shift came around COVID, in step with a growing corporate focus on net zero. Before 2020, he says, there was modest interest in how to reduce emissions. “But coming out of COVID, it was a complete change.”

For Robert Allan, Fitzpatrick says, this translates into a big opportunity. Boats ordered today will still be in operation in 2040 or 2050. That means they either need to support net zero strategies now or be retrofittable so they do so in the future. “Our share of the diesel harbour tug market is maybe 30% internationally,” he says. “Our share for lower-emission, complicated vessels is more than 50%. We’re moving into an area where our expertise is more valuable than it was before.”

Commissions for new designs drawing on that expertise are also the lifeblood of Robert Allan’s business. “We’re basically consulting engineers,” says Fitzpatrick. “We’re generating intellectual property in that we get to design something, and then sell it again and again and again. The royalties we collect represent a significant percentage of our revenue and almost all of our profit.”

In 2019, roughly one out of 10 vessels that the firm designed were reduced-emission solutions. Now, it’s about seven in 10. “They’re not all zero-emission,” Fitzgerald stresses. “With electric tugs, you need clean electricity for it to make any sense. You also need operations and shoreside infrastructure that can support that.” Around the world, he estimates that pure battery-electric tugs could take 10% of the market, with hybrids taking another 20%. “The majority of the market needs other options.” The alternatives include diesel tugs fitted with exhaust after-treatment to meet the IMO’s newest standard for NOx emissions, as well as tugs and other working boats designed to run on LNG (which eliminates NOx and reduces CO2) or green methanol, which is the “least bad viable solution” from a CO2 perspective, Fitzpatrick says.

Later this year, in fact, the world’s first methanol-fuelled escort tugs, designed by Robert Allan and built at Sanmar, will go into operation in the Port of Vancouver. The two tugs, bought by Kotug Canada, will escort oil tankers between the Trans Mountain terminal and the open Pacific. Since that facility was expanded last year, oil tanker traffic through the harbour has tripled, to an average of 17 vessels per month, up from five or six.

Even if you’ve got clean electricity and the right operational profile, the decision to buy battery-electric tugs still faces another major barrier: upfront capital. Bikkers’s experience at SAAM Towage is a case study in how operators can use partnerships and creative financing to overcome this hurdle.

The story starts with a fleet-plan review Bikkers launched in 2020. While SAAM has more than 20 tugs in its B.C. fleet, its harbour tugs in Vancouver mostly work close to the company dock. The harbour’s tides produce a strong current, which means the majority of ship movement and tugboat activity takes place in a few narrow windows each day, when the tide is slack. “We found out, on average, most of our tugs only work nine hours a day maximum,” says Bikkers. “The other 15 hours, they’re either being serviced by our maintenance department, or they can be charged. It makes perfect sense to buy an electric tug.”

Given the price tag, however, the electric option didn’t make sense without some guarantee they could bring in added business to offset the higher cost. Bikkers’s solution: find large companies that would sign long-term contracts with SAAM in order to reduce their overall CO2 emissions by replacing the diesel tugs servicing their vessels with electric. That’s when German bulk carrier Oldendorff, an existing diesel tug client, introduced SAAM to one of its clients, the mining giant Teck. At that time, Teck was the co-owner of Neptune Terminals, where it loaded steelmaking coal mined in the interior of B.C. (That business was acquired by Glencore and renamed Elk Valley Resources in 2024.)

“We thought it was a great initiative,” says Michael O’Shaughnessy, now Elk Valley’s vice-president of marketing and logistics. “We have some control over our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. But once you get into Scope 3, we count on our partners’ expertise to lead that. We would never have thought of an electric tugboat.” In late 2022, the companies announced an agreement that would see SAAM acquire and deploy two electric tugboats to service the Neptune terminal on an exclusive long-term contract. That and $8.6 million in funding from the province through its CleanBC program were enough to seal the deal.

While getting the HaiSea Wamis to Vancouver in time for the 2023 LNG conference was a highlight for everyone involved, it was also a prelude to an even bigger moment for Jordan Pechie, president of Seaspan Marine Transportation, and Crystal Smith, chief councillor of the Haisla Nation: the day the Wamis sailed “home” to Kitimat last summer.

Named for the Haisla explorer who, according to Haisla oral history, sought sanctuary with his family in Kitamaat Village, marking the beginning of the Haisla Nation, the Wamis sailed up the Douglas Channel and into Kitamaat guided by a crew of eight Haisla members. “It was of massive significance to have that particular tug come into our waters and come home first,” says Smith.

The LNG Canada project, as well as Cedar LNG, a second processing venture, majority-owned by the Haisla Nation, now under construction in the same channel, are regarded by the Haisla and neighbouring Gitxaala and Gitga’at First Nations as fundamental to a new era of economic reconciliation and generational career opportunities. As such, the Wamis and the rest of the HaiSea tug fleet and the opportunities they provide are a tangible and highly symbolic extension of that promise.

Pechie, a former marine captain, was hired by Seaspan six years ago to be senior project manager on the HaiSea Marine project. He saw the project through its early design stages, working closely with Robert Allan; hired the team that oversaw the boats’ construction in Sanmar; and even designed and commissioned the floating operations and maintenance facility, called the Zewén (Haisla for coho), now onsite and in use by the team running HaiSea. Appropriately, then, he was also aboard the Wamis, alongside Smith, when it sailed into the village.

“Seeing the tears in all the mariners’ eyes as they got this incredible opportunity to come back home and work, and being welcomed by the village on the dock, with hereditary chiefs and everyone singing…it’s something you can’t explain until you feel it,” says Pechie, who is Métis. “This doesn’t happen normally. We’ve partnered with an entire nation.”

The fact that the HaiSea tugs also represent a new frontier in the marine world isn’t lost on Smith. “We could not be more proud to be part of that first with Seaspan. And seeing where Indigenous participation can play a meaningful part in changing an outlook on a whole industry, it was absolutely amazing.”

Fitzpatrick and the team at Robert Allan might not have known it when they started, but it’s clear now they couldn’t ask for a better calling card. “People’s reaction…it’s still ongoing,” says Smith. “We have other joint ventures that come visit Kitamaat. And they all ask: ‘Where are the tugs?’”

The article was originally published in the March 2025 issue of Report on Business Magazine. Photography: Opening image courtesy ROB Magazine (Alison Boulier); HaiSea Wamis images (2) courtesy of HaiSea and Seaspan; Robert Fitzpatrick courtesy ROB Magazine (Alison Boulier); all other photos my own.