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Came here to say the same thing. At the scale of container ships, almost all the disadvantages of hydrogen are gone. Storage, cooling and leakage should all be
by endymi0n 8y ago
Came here to say the same thing. At the scale of container ships, almost all the disadvantages of hydrogen are gone. Storage, cooling and leakage should all be controllable, given large enough tanks.
Interestingly enough, there's some prior art in the German Type 212 submarines, looks like it's production ready: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_212_submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_212_submarine
It's probably only about cost and infrastructure. Does anyone have current details on the price of massive diesel engines vs. massive fuel cells and electric motors?
- curtis 8y agoI can't find anything that says how the Type 212 submarines store hydrogen. After thinking about it though, I think they must be using metal hydride storage. Submarines already have to be ballasted to offset the buoyancy of the crew compartment, and given the low density of liquid hydrogen, they'd need ballast to offset that too. Liquid oxygen is slightly more dense than water, but not enough to offer much compensation. It seems like you could use the metal hydride batteries as your primary ballast that you'd need anyway, and get the hydrogen storage pretty much for free (in the weight and volume sense, anyway).