6 ms·

Battery-Powered Ships Next Up in Battle to Tackle Emissions

52 points by howard941 7y ago

jandrese 7y ago
It only operates in Tokyo bay to answer the first question that everybody is going to have. Transatlantic and transpacific container shipping is still going to be among the last sectors of the economy to be electrified. It's probably more practical to build modern sailing ships than to try to electrify bulk overseas cargo shipping. Or maybe a hybrid approach where the sails are also lightweight efficient hardy cheap solar cells that turn electric motors to add a few knots to the speed during the day. But even then you need massive energy storage to make sure you have power to maneuver in a storm.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  It's probably more practical to build modern sailing ships than to try to electrify bulk overseas cargo shipping Back in the heyday of the battleship, replacing the engine was one of the things it wasn't worth doing. It's so hard to do, you might as well just build a new ship. I have no idea if this is still true, or not. Construction techniques have come a long way. Today, there are cruise liners that have all of their propellers in multiple swiveling pods containing electric motors. (They generally have generators run by diesel or steam turbine.)
  - adammunich 7y ago
    It is absolutely still true, most ship engines are not removable without breaking the hull above the engine. If you're going to do that, it's often easier to start fresh.
    - stcredzero 7y ago
      It is absolutely still true, most ship engines are not removable without breaking the hull above the engine. Seems to me, especially with electric engine pods, ships can be designed to allow the replacement of the engine/generator.
      - vkou 7y ago
        They can be, but the ones that are currently afloat haven't been. Shipping companies have had decades of success fighting against legally-mandated retrofits - double-hulled tankers, trivial safety features for passenger ferries... I don't think your idea of replaceable engines is going to get any traction.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Totally depends on the industry niche. As always the low margin guys will repair/modify and the high margin guys will buy new hardware.
  - fooblitzky 7y ago
    The lifetime of a modern ship is only 25-30 years. I think when the parent comment mentioned electrifying bulk cargo shipping,they were referring to building new electric ships, not converting existing ones.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Re-engining a jetliner often means designing a whole new airplane, too.
  - Shivetya 7y ago
    Oh I don't know, Japan did it a few times with the Fuso and her sisters. Even the Italians did it with a line of battleships. The debate back in the 30s was if diesel could take the place of steam turbines but they ended up weight prohibitive and some maintenance would be similar to the work required to just swap engine types
  - i_am_proteus 7y ago
    The depends on what you mean by "engine." Big diesels are relatively new in the maritime world. On a steam ship, which had a much less monolithic power plant, replacing an engine or a boiler was feasible. Replacing reduction gears usually was not.
- woodandsteel 7y ago
  Yes, the problem with shipping is that batteries just don't hold enough energy for such a long trip. It might be that hydrogen fuel cells charged by renewable energy will be the long-term solution.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Yea, ships are one of the few areas where hydrogen is actually a very good fit. But, no need for fuel cells as straight up IC engines have similar efficiency at these scales.
    - cjbenedikt 7y ago
      Spot on
- nradov 7y ago
  The long term solution will be to run most large ships on synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuel manufactured on shore using renewable power. Sails and onboard solar power can help a little but the gains will be marginal.
  - russdill 7y ago
    That or fusion.
    - throwaway5d097 7y ago
      Or fission...
      - snerbles 7y ago
        See also the NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered merchant ship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
      - nradov 7y ago
        Fission isn't practical for merchant vessels. Several large ships sink every year due to severe weather, structural failure, cargo shifting, etc. And there's no way to protect those ships against terrorist attacks. Use fission plants ashore to create synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuel for ships. Fusion (if it ever works) will be too large and complex to use in merchant vessels.
        Accujack 7y ago
        Fission hasn't been practical in the past using old reactor technology. Climate change makes a big difference in the equation, though. Marine nuclear power is one of the best understood, safest areas of nuclear use that exists, even using the old technologies. The idea of using "modern sailing vessels" for shipping in the amounts that are presently moved from continent to continent is just plain nuts. Unless most of the world is willing to go back a hundred years in technology, we're going to need to use motor vessels going forward. About the only way to eliminate all carbon emissions from large ships is to make them reactor powered. Batteries will work for short trips, but if you combine the need for long range and high power in shipping of large cargoes, the only way to power ocean going vessels in any practical sense are internal combustion engines running on fossil fuels or steam generating reactors powering turbines. That's why the navies of the world run on one or the other.
- Florin_Andrei 7y ago
  > Transatlantic and transpacific container shipping is still going to be among the last sectors of the economy to be electrified. It probably boils down to energy density, plain and simple.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    For ships? Weight of batteries shouldn't be a big issue with ships. They could be used as ballast, for example.
    - sanxiyn 7y ago
      Weight of batteries is a big issue with ships. Vaclav Smil calculated diesel is 20x dense, turning 5000t diesel fuel for Asia-Europe trip to 100000t battery which is not economical. https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/marine/electric-container-ships-are-stuck-on-the-horizon https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/marine/electric-con...
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        I wonder if a hybrid can reduce that problem, i.e. a hybrid battery/sail, or even a hybrid battery/windmill system. A windmill would help both push the ship and generate power to the batteries.
gdcohen 7y ago
Sounds like someone is going to have to build a network of depth chargers :-)
imglorp 7y ago
Lots of ships run on bunker fuel, a cheap refining fraction nobody else can use. Those 3 story diesel engines are a different breed wherein "one massive container ship equals 50 million cars" https://newatlas.com/shipping-pollution/11526/ https://newatlas.com/shipping-pollution/11526/
- SECProto 7y ago
  In terms of global warming potential, they are nowhere close to that. The "50 million cars" statistic is specific to the SOx output of the ships (sulfur oxides). These cause local impacts (breathing issues, view haze, damage to plants etc) and wide impacts (acid rain) [1]. Because of the strong local impacts, fuel grades for cars, trucks, etc had strong reductions to sulfur content, but ships did not (though often they are required to use more expensive, more refined fuel in port or 20km of shore or what have you). All this to say, these ships do create super high emissions of Sulfur Oxides, but their CO2/equivalents emissions are quite low (the lowest per kg*km of any means of transport! [2] ). Worth addressing, but not nearly the equivalent of 50 million cars in the "emissions" that the common dialogue refers to. [1] https://www.epa.gov/so2-pollution/sulfur-dioxide-basics https://www.epa.gov/so2-pollution/sulfur-dioxide-basics [2] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/01/sustainable-shipping-is-making-waves https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/01...
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    With bunker oil some fraction of a percent of generated power comes from burning the sulfur. Tells you much what you need to know about that. And yes it's very interesting to look at transport modes by hp per ton. You find that ships, trains, and trucks requirements are modest compared to passenger cars.
curtis 7y ago
I wonder if it's practical to stick a couple of Space Shuttle external fuel tank-sized liquid hydrogen tanks on a typical container ship and then run it on hydrogen. One of the problems with liquid hydrogen (not the only one) is that it's impossible to keep it from slowly off gassing. However, if the tank is large enough it would off gas slower than your engines would be consuming the hydrogen.
craz8 7y ago
I recently saw this Fully Charged video about a short, but very frequent, ferry crossing that is now fully electric, with automated charging at both ends of the trip The scale here is enormous, and just for a 4km journey https://youtu.be/rE_M1n-ClOA https://youtu.be/rE_M1n-ClOA
- mncharity 7y ago
  And the new Norwegian ferry Color Hybrid was recently delivered. Not quite twice as large (2k pax, 0.5k cars). Similarly-sized 5-ish MWh batteries, plug-in or diesel-electric. Electric operation around ports, to minimize pollution, and hybrid or diesel elsewhere.
flurdy 7y ago
The world's largest hybrid ferry [1] has just been launched to run between Sandefjord (Norway, on the West coast of the outer Oslofjord) to Strömstad (Sweden, on the Eastern side of the Oslofjord) [2] [1] https://www.ship-technology.com/projects/color-hybrid-ferry/ https://www.ship-technology.com/projects/color-hybrid-ferry/ [2] https://www.colorline.com/sandefjord-stroemstad https://www.colorline.com/sandefjord-stroemstad
- flurdy 7y ago
  Slightly further North the much shorter Horten to Moss route across the Oslofjord will be fully electric in 2021 [1]. Though with much smaller ferries. [1] https://www.ferryshippingnews.com/enova-contributes-nok-31-million-to-the-electrification-project-of-horten-moss/ https://www.ferryshippingnews.com/enova-contributes-nok-31-m...
m0zg 7y ago
These should come in handy in retrofits: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/365-megawatt-superconducting-motor.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/365-megawatt-supercond....
cjbenedikt 7y ago
https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/marine/electric-container-ships-are-stuck-on-the-horizon.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/transportatio...

52 points by howard941 7y ago

It only operates in Tokyo bay to answer the first question that everybody is going to have. Transatlantic and transpacific container shipping is still going to be among the last sectors of the economy to be electrified. It's probably more practical to build modern sailing ships than to try to electrify bulk overseas cargo shipping. Or maybe a hybrid approach where the sails are also lightweight efficient hardy cheap solar cells that turn electric motors to add a few knots to the speed during the day. But even then you need massive energy storage to make sure you have power to maneuver in a storm.

stcredzero 7y ago
It's probably more practical to build modern sailing ships than to try to electrify bulk overseas cargo shipping Back in the heyday of the battleship, replacing the engine was one of the things it wasn't worth doing. It's so hard to do, you might as well just build a new ship. I have no idea if this is still true, or not. Construction techniques have come a long way. Today, there are cruise liners that have all of their propellers in multiple swiveling pods containing electric motors. (They generally have generators run by diesel or steam turbine.)
- adammunich 7y ago
  It is absolutely still true, most ship engines are not removable without breaking the hull above the engine. If you're going to do that, it's often easier to start fresh.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    It is absolutely still true, most ship engines are not removable without breaking the hull above the engine. Seems to me, especially with electric engine pods, ships can be designed to allow the replacement of the engine/generator.
    - vkou 7y ago
      They can be, but the ones that are currently afloat haven't been. Shipping companies have had decades of success fighting against legally-mandated retrofits - double-hulled tankers, trivial safety features for passenger ferries... I don't think your idea of replaceable engines is going to get any traction.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Totally depends on the industry niche. As always the low margin guys will repair/modify and the high margin guys will buy new hardware.
- fooblitzky 7y ago
  The lifetime of a modern ship is only 25-30 years. I think when the parent comment mentioned electrifying bulk cargo shipping,they were referring to building new electric ships, not converting existing ones.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Re-engining a jetliner often means designing a whole new airplane, too.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  Oh I don't know, Japan did it a few times with the Fuso and her sisters. Even the Italians did it with a line of battleships. The debate back in the 30s was if diesel could take the place of steam turbines but they ended up weight prohibitive and some maintenance would be similar to the work required to just swap engine types
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  The depends on what you mean by "engine." Big diesels are relatively new in the maritime world. On a steam ship, which had a much less monolithic power plant, replacing an engine or a boiler was feasible. Replacing reduction gears usually was not.
woodandsteel 7y ago
Yes, the problem with shipping is that batteries just don't hold enough energy for such a long trip. It might be that hydrogen fuel cells charged by renewable energy will be the long-term solution.
- Retric 7y ago
  Yea, ships are one of the few areas where hydrogen is actually a very good fit. But, no need for fuel cells as straight up IC engines have similar efficiency at these scales.
  - cjbenedikt 7y ago
    Spot on
nradov 7y ago
The long term solution will be to run most large ships on synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuel manufactured on shore using renewable power. Sails and onboard solar power can help a little but the gains will be marginal.
- russdill 7y ago
  That or fusion.
  - throwaway5d097 7y ago
    Or fission...
    - snerbles 7y ago
      See also the NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered merchant ship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
    - nradov 7y ago
      Fission isn't practical for merchant vessels. Several large ships sink every year due to severe weather, structural failure, cargo shifting, etc. And there's no way to protect those ships against terrorist attacks. Use fission plants ashore to create synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuel for ships. Fusion (if it ever works) will be too large and complex to use in merchant vessels.
      - Accujack 7y ago
        Fission hasn't been practical in the past using old reactor technology. Climate change makes a big difference in the equation, though. Marine nuclear power is one of the best understood, safest areas of nuclear use that exists, even using the old technologies. The idea of using "modern sailing vessels" for shipping in the amounts that are presently moved from continent to continent is just plain nuts. Unless most of the world is willing to go back a hundred years in technology, we're going to need to use motor vessels going forward. About the only way to eliminate all carbon emissions from large ships is to make them reactor powered. Batteries will work for short trips, but if you combine the need for long range and high power in shipping of large cargoes, the only way to power ocean going vessels in any practical sense are internal combustion engines running on fossil fuels or steam generating reactors powering turbines. That's why the navies of the world run on one or the other.
Florin_Andrei 7y ago
> Transatlantic and transpacific container shipping is still going to be among the last sectors of the economy to be electrified. It probably boils down to energy density, plain and simple.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  For ships? Weight of batteries shouldn't be a big issue with ships. They could be used as ballast, for example.
  - sanxiyn 7y ago
    Weight of batteries is a big issue with ships. Vaclav Smil calculated diesel is 20x dense, turning 5000t diesel fuel for Asia-Europe trip to 100000t battery which is not economical. https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/marine/electric-container-ships-are-stuck-on-the-horizon https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/marine/electric-con...
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      I wonder if a hybrid can reduce that problem, i.e. a hybrid battery/sail, or even a hybrid battery/windmill system. A windmill would help both push the ship and generate power to the batteries.

gdcohen 7y ago

Sounds like someone is going to have to build a network of depth chargers :-)

imglorp 7y ago

Lots of ships run on bunker fuel, a cheap refining fraction nobody else can use. Those 3 story diesel engines are a different breed wherein "one massive container ship equals 50 million cars" https://newatlas.com/shipping-pollution/11526/ https://newatlas.com/shipping-pollution/11526/

SECProto 7y ago
In terms of global warming potential, they are nowhere close to that. The "50 million cars" statistic is specific to the SOx output of the ships (sulfur oxides). These cause local impacts (breathing issues, view haze, damage to plants etc) and wide impacts (acid rain) [1]. Because of the strong local impacts, fuel grades for cars, trucks, etc had strong reductions to sulfur content, but ships did not (though often they are required to use more expensive, more refined fuel in port or 20km of shore or what have you). All this to say, these ships do create super high emissions of Sulfur Oxides, but their CO2/equivalents emissions are quite low (the lowest per kg*km of any means of transport! [2] ). Worth addressing, but not nearly the equivalent of 50 million cars in the "emissions" that the common dialogue refers to. [1] https://www.epa.gov/so2-pollution/sulfur-dioxide-basics https://www.epa.gov/so2-pollution/sulfur-dioxide-basics [2] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/01/sustainable-shipping-is-making-waves https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/01...
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  With bunker oil some fraction of a percent of generated power comes from burning the sulfur. Tells you much what you need to know about that. And yes it's very interesting to look at transport modes by hp per ton. You find that ships, trains, and trucks requirements are modest compared to passenger cars.

curtis 7y ago

I wonder if it's practical to stick a couple of Space Shuttle external fuel tank-sized liquid hydrogen tanks on a typical container ship and then run it on hydrogen. One of the problems with liquid hydrogen (not the only one) is that it's impossible to keep it from slowly off gassing. However, if the tank is large enough it would off gas slower than your engines would be consuming the hydrogen.

craz8 7y ago

I recently saw this Fully Charged video about a short, but very frequent, ferry crossing that is now fully electric, with automated charging at both ends of the trip The scale here is enormous, and just for a 4km journey https://youtu.be/rE_M1n-ClOA https://youtu.be/rE_M1n-ClOA

mncharity 7y ago
And the new Norwegian ferry Color Hybrid was recently delivered. Not quite twice as large (2k pax, 0.5k cars). Similarly-sized 5-ish MWh batteries, plug-in or diesel-electric. Electric operation around ports, to minimize pollution, and hybrid or diesel elsewhere.

flurdy 7y ago

The world's largest hybrid ferry [1] has just been launched to run between Sandefjord (Norway, on the West coast of the outer Oslofjord) to Strömstad (Sweden, on the Eastern side of the Oslofjord) [2] [1] https://www.ship-technology.com/projects/color-hybrid-ferry/ https://www.ship-technology.com/projects/color-hybrid-ferry/ [2] https://www.colorline.com/sandefjord-stroemstad https://www.colorline.com/sandefjord-stroemstad

flurdy 7y ago
Slightly further North the much shorter Horten to Moss route across the Oslofjord will be fully electric in 2021 [1]. Though with much smaller ferries. [1] https://www.ferryshippingnews.com/enova-contributes-nok-31-million-to-the-electrification-project-of-horten-moss/ https://www.ferryshippingnews.com/enova-contributes-nok-31-m...

m0zg 7y ago

These should come in handy in retrofits: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/365-megawatt-superconducting-motor.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/365-megawatt-supercond....

cjbenedikt 7y ago

https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/marine/electric-container-ships-are-stuck-on-the-horizon.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/transportatio...