Yes, lifting a standard 10,000 TEU container ship onto foils would be quite difficult. ARGO however has been designed from the water up to be a foiling craft and carries much less weight compared to conventional buoyant type ships.

ARGO will dock in standard container terminals. Its draught will be considerably less than conventional containerships. Also, by being far smaller than conventional container ships, it is able to dock in many smaller regional ports.

ARGO, being a hydrofoil vessel, has the ability to simply pass over the top of most wave environments, with the masts effortlessly slicing through the water. As the waves get larger in height in deep water locations, so also does the wavelength, allowing ARGO to contour up and down the reasonably flat waves. In extreme storm environments, ARGO would reduce speed and proceed in hullborne operation.

ARGO is equipped with forward scanning SONAR and RADAR, and a computerized object detection and avoidance system that can detect submerged objects as small as 10cm at a range of 1000m. Additionally, ARGO’s foils have a relatively small frontal area which greatly reduces the probability of debris impact. Lastly, in the event of a collision, ARGO’s foils are made of an impact resistant variant of carbon fiber composite, in addition to being incredibly strong to begin with. The combination of low risk, detection and avoidance and high toughness means that submerged debris is a only a minor and manageable issue for ARGO.

The green hydrogen economy is rapidly growing, and adding more demand to that market will only make it grow faster. We are confident that there will be ample green hydrogen available in the ports where we operate.

The peak of commercial hydrofoil operations was during the 1970s when among others, the US navy had a fleet of 6 foiling torpedo boats (The Pegasus class). Since then, there have been massive leaps forward in materials technology and fluid dynamics modelling, meaning ARGO will be far more efficient that the foiling craft of the 70s.