Last Thursday, the world's first self-driving, electric container (电气化的集装箱) ship made its first trip to Oslo, Norway. The ship's owners aim to cut pollution by moving large amounts of products by water on the southern coast of Norway instead of by truck.
The ship, called Yara Birkeland, is owned by Yara, a company that makes fertilizer (化肥). The company wanted to develop a zero-pollution ship that was completely autonomous (self-driving). Yara worked with a ship-building company called Vard and the technology company Kongsberg to develop the ship. The company says that in the future everything will be done completely by machine.
The Yara Birkeland is a container ship, able to carry 120 large containers like those pulled by trucks. But the ship is fully electric and is powered by clean batteries (电池). The company says the ship has roughly（大约，粗略地） as many batteries as 100 electric cars. The electricity（电） that will be used to recharge（给…再次充电） the batteries is produced by water power, so there's no pollution at all.
On November 18, the boat traveled from Horten to Oslo, making its first trip ever. But the Yara Birkeland won't usually be going to Oslo, and it won't be traveling far, either. It will travel a regular route from Yara's factory in Porsgrunn up to the port in Brevik, covering a distance of about 8.7 miles. Yara normally uses trucks to move fertilizer between these locations.
Now, with the Yara Birkeland moving huge amounts of fertilizer by water, the company expects to cut out 40,000 yearly trips by oil-powered trucks. That will prevent about 2,204,620 pounds of carbon from being let out（释放，发出） every year.
In the future, as an autonomous（自动化的） ship, the Yara Birkeland is expected to operate without any human control. Yara plans to spend the next two years training and testing the ship. But, as with（与…一样） many autonomous cars, the ship will continue to have humans watching out even once the ship is driving by itself.
