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The world's first commercial ship powered in part by a giant kite is recording fuel savings of between 10 and 15 per cent midway into its maiden voyage across the Atlantic, the shipping company told Reuters on Friday.

The 10,000-tonne MS Beluga SkySails left Germany on Jan. 22 for Venezuela, but its computer-guided kite system was fully deployed only after it reached the trade winds near the Azores, said Verena Frank, Beluga Shipping's SkySails project manager.

The 10-to-15-per-cent reduction in bunker oil consumption, which amounts to about $1,000 to $1,500 a day savings, is in line with projections made by the shipping company and SkySails.

The SkySail system, which is also designed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, had never before been used on a ship as large.

"Everything has worked out as we had planned," Mr. Frank told Reuters. "There's still a lot of testing, adjusting and experimenting taking place. The aim is to have the kite operational for about 50 per cent of the entire first journey."

Once the bugs have been ironed out and the crew's expertise with the €500,000 ($745,000 Canadian) high-tech system improves, fuel savings are projected to be up to 20 per cent.

Mr. Frank said the kite system had never before been tried under such difficult conditions as are found in the mid-Atlantic. They were working on improving the co-ordination of the system.

"We're adjusting, programming, testing, fine-tuning, and working on the stability," Captain Lutz Heldt wrote in a cable to the Beluga home office in Bremen on Friday. Capt. Heldt had picked a traditional windjammer route south of the Azores.

The ship is due to arrive in Venezuela on Feb. 5.

The 160-square metre kite, which flies up to 300 metres above the surface to catch more powerful winds, tows the 132-metre long ship forward and assists the engines.

It is a throwback to an earlier maritime age that harnessed the winds, but which fell out of favour more than a century ago when sailing lost the battle for merchant shipping to modern steam power because it was seen then as primitive and unpredictable.

Skeptics in the modern shipping industry say sail power would never be enough to drive the biggest class of oil tankers – 25 to 50 times larger than the Beluga SkySails.

The world's 50,000 merchant ships, which carry 90 per cent of traded goods from oil, gas, coal, and grains to electronic goods, emit 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year – about 5 per cent of the world's total.