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Is this substantially different than the greenwashing of "flex-fuel" cars that can burn ethanol, but hardly anyone uses it because of economics and scale proble

• stcredzero 11y ago
  There are other feedstocks for ethanol besides corn.
• ams6110 11y ago
  METHanol. Not ethanol. It's not made from corn.
  • dsfyu404ed 11y ago
    The ship won't need to stop for sleep if you run it on METHanonl(TM). Its teeth will rot out pretty quick though.
• dsfyu404ed 11y ago
  They're just designing some flexibility into it. It's pretty much an everyone wins situation. The cheapest fuel may vary country to country for a variety of reasons. Building an engine that can burn whatever (most diesels, with a little extra engineering work can burn whatever) is just killing a lot of birds with one stone. You can tell your customer that the ship will run on whatever so so that they can always gas up with whatever is cheapest and when they want to sell the ship down the road it'll likely be able to run on whatever is in vogue without expensive modifications. You can turn around and tell the media that it can be run on whatever is cleanest if that's what the owner desires. Since industrial engines aren't competing for peak power/torque numbers losing a little bit by not optimizing for a particular fuel isn't a meaningful downside