David Wooley and Ed Carr, lead authors of recent papers outlining policy and technology options for reducing emissions in the shipping industry, discuss the fuels (and batteries?) that could power ships of the future, the policies needed to move forward, and California's pivotal role.
Deathly toxic ammonia, and thermodynamically implausible hydrogen schemes play into the hands of the fossil fuel industry. Oil companies are always in favor of impossible alternatives to their business.
It's totally dishonest to not talk about nuclear shipping.
South Korea and China are making progress in building nuclear container ships that will not need to run at slow speeds. Their services will be much more valuable because they're faster.
You don't need experts to operate modern reactors. We invented this thing called computer automation. It didn't exist back in the 1960s because we hadn't invented the transistor yet. And since the nuclear regulatory commission didn't allow any improvements in cost or safety since 1975, you may think that there isn't anything engineers can do. Actually there's an awful lot of stuff we know how to do right away. And the Biden administration has been doing a great job, along with both parties in Congress, the forcing long delayed innovation in nuclear power.
They run themselves. Even the old reactors on submarines and aircraft carriers are pretty hurt darn hard to mess up.
This really needs a part 2 that looks into the role that nuclear has played in decarbonized shipping. The united states alone has thousands of reactor-years of experience operating fully decarbonized ships around the world, with zero accidents. That is an astonishing feat.
Companies in the US, UK, South Korea, Russia, and China are actively developing commercial nuclear ships. There is enough activity to warrant a deep-dive on this specific technology. It's the only proven method to decarbonize shipping that is working today at scale.
I will counter this with the Baltimore Bridge / Ship disaster. Potentially caused because a crewman 'turned something off'
These ships are not staffed by highly trained nuclear experts. They are highly skilled seafarers, but putting reactors on every Libyian/Cyprus/[insert country with minimal regulations] flagged vessel isn't a viable solution.
I highly doubt that's possible. Nuclear simply can't fail, ever. Ships sink, break up, etc. Dotting the oceans with sunken nuclear waste heaps seems less than ideal solution.
My question is reverse - can you absolutely guarantee they won't ever fail? and you can actually clean up any failures if not?
I'm, obviously, not a fan of nuclear anything :) We will also absolutely need nuclear power generation for the next couple decades. Putting them on things that sink seems bad unless there's a very very good justification for them. (like the military advantage)
My Climate Journey did a fascinating pod interview a couple years ago with the founders of FleetZero https://www.mcjcollective.com/my-climate-journey-podcast/fleetzero , a startup working on battery electric ships. As Wooley and Carr said, you can't electrify the huge cargo ships that go point-to-point across the Pacific. But part of FleetZero's thesis is that (as Wooley and Carr said), speed is often not a priority for cargo, so it can make economic sense to replace some of those huge ships with smaller, battery powered ships, making the transpacific route by progressing north up the coast of asia and then up the US west coast, with maybe 4 stops total, to exchange shipping container-sized batteries for fully charged one. Part of the reason the extra travel time can be economical is that (as with BEV cars), when you design a ship to be electric from the ground up, you get one with much simpler, much more elegant design, requiring MUCH less maintenance and a much smaller crew to operate, Highly recommend listening to the MCJ interview.
Amol Phadke at Lawrence Berkeley labs is a great person to talk to also about potential of batteries for shipping. It would need big batteries but....they're cargo ships! Get out of the old school fuel-must-be-a-liquid oil and gas mindset.
Thanks for mentioning this company and MCJ. The "future", as discussed in the pod, wasn't very far ahead. It is not a far stretch to believe that batteries will continue to get better, eliminating the alternatives one-by-one economically. Battery-electric ships are already good enough for inland and coastal routes. And for safety, nothing is going to beat batteries.
I'm hoping we see a very general trend of resources becoming more distributed and decentralized, and local power enabling local production. I wish somebody would represent the working class and take leadership (vs the populist crap currently happening). Anyway.
The number I've heard on the amount of fossil fuel maritime cargo is 40%.
Also, I was interested to see Maersk reportedly has developed a new offshore wind installation vessel.
The guests helpfully pointed out that it is the sulfur which is the mechanism for atmospheric *cooling*. Particulates, such as black and brown carbon have a warming effect, I believe. They warm the atmosphere and reduce the albedo of ice. The stuff suspended in the air falls out in days or weeks, and reportedly represent 3-4 tenths of a degree of warming.
Nuclear energy can be used to make synthetic NetZero hydrocarbon fuels like diesel and kerosene. That means shipping and aviation fuel net zero is easy. But energy must be made cheaper. Easy for engineers to do. Don't expect utility executives to ask for cheaper energy... Can't afford it-it's too cheap!
I saw "scholars at UC Berkeley" and was ready to be disappointed by theoretical discussions about "solutions" that wouldn't be economically viable for the very diverse maritime shipping fleet and the correspondingly diverse ownership pool. Certainly the large, EU, Asian, or US-based liner services employing the largest container ships are at the vanguard here - EU ETS and political forces make this necessary for them. For the many thousand of other maritime shipping assets out there, many just squeaking by, economically, this podcast was a nice overview of what is currently realistic in the real-world of maritime shipping involving thin margins. Thank you.
It would seem to me that hydrogen, the most common element and virtually non-polluting, would be getting a lot more attention as a fuel source than it does.
It's getting $100B in IRA subsidies. I think that is attracting a lot of unintended attention. But it could be a big prize. The issues are 1) electrolyzers have a very large CapEx 2) The electrolysis efficiency is not great and 3) All the LNG issues discussed by the guests of this episode, only more so. Primary energy -> Final energy is just POOR.
Also, combustion with ambient air produces NOx pollution.
It's hard to speculate what that $100B will yield, but I would just spend it on tried and true things that displace current fossil fuel use.
Yeah, it has lots of positives. For shipping I'd wonder about the lack of density and space needed to store that much of it. Could you perhaps store it as ammonia and convert, but that also adds another potential environmental disaster for inevitable spills.
Deathly toxic ammonia, and thermodynamically implausible hydrogen schemes play into the hands of the fossil fuel industry. Oil companies are always in favor of impossible alternatives to their business.
It's totally dishonest to not talk about nuclear shipping.
South Korea and China are making progress in building nuclear container ships that will not need to run at slow speeds. Their services will be much more valuable because they're faster.
You don't need experts to operate modern reactors. We invented this thing called computer automation. It didn't exist back in the 1960s because we hadn't invented the transistor yet. And since the nuclear regulatory commission didn't allow any improvements in cost or safety since 1975, you may think that there isn't anything engineers can do. Actually there's an awful lot of stuff we know how to do right away. And the Biden administration has been doing a great job, along with both parties in Congress, the forcing long delayed innovation in nuclear power.
They run themselves. Even the old reactors on submarines and aircraft carriers are pretty hurt darn hard to mess up.
This really needs a part 2 that looks into the role that nuclear has played in decarbonized shipping. The united states alone has thousands of reactor-years of experience operating fully decarbonized ships around the world, with zero accidents. That is an astonishing feat.
Companies in the US, UK, South Korea, Russia, and China are actively developing commercial nuclear ships. There is enough activity to warrant a deep-dive on this specific technology. It's the only proven method to decarbonize shipping that is working today at scale.
I will counter this with the Baltimore Bridge / Ship disaster. Potentially caused because a crewman 'turned something off'
These ships are not staffed by highly trained nuclear experts. They are highly skilled seafarers, but putting reactors on every Libyian/Cyprus/[insert country with minimal regulations] flagged vessel isn't a viable solution.
Are you suggesting that a reactor wouldn't be hardened against such accidents?
I highly doubt that's possible. Nuclear simply can't fail, ever. Ships sink, break up, etc. Dotting the oceans with sunken nuclear waste heaps seems less than ideal solution.
My question is reverse - can you absolutely guarantee they won't ever fail? and you can actually clean up any failures if not?
Even if the above is adequately answered, apparently we don't yet have a great way to decommission them. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a22690208/us-navy-dismantling-uss-enterprise-nuclear-disposal/ Now, imagine [insert country with minimal regulations] doing it.
I'm, obviously, not a fan of nuclear anything :) We will also absolutely need nuclear power generation for the next couple decades. Putting them on things that sink seems bad unless there's a very very good justification for them. (like the military advantage)
My Climate Journey did a fascinating pod interview a couple years ago with the founders of FleetZero https://www.mcjcollective.com/my-climate-journey-podcast/fleetzero , a startup working on battery electric ships. As Wooley and Carr said, you can't electrify the huge cargo ships that go point-to-point across the Pacific. But part of FleetZero's thesis is that (as Wooley and Carr said), speed is often not a priority for cargo, so it can make economic sense to replace some of those huge ships with smaller, battery powered ships, making the transpacific route by progressing north up the coast of asia and then up the US west coast, with maybe 4 stops total, to exchange shipping container-sized batteries for fully charged one. Part of the reason the extra travel time can be economical is that (as with BEV cars), when you design a ship to be electric from the ground up, you get one with much simpler, much more elegant design, requiring MUCH less maintenance and a much smaller crew to operate, Highly recommend listening to the MCJ interview.
Amol Phadke at Lawrence Berkeley labs is a great person to talk to also about potential of batteries for shipping. It would need big batteries but....they're cargo ships! Get out of the old school fuel-must-be-a-liquid oil and gas mindset.
Thanks for mentioning this company and MCJ. The "future", as discussed in the pod, wasn't very far ahead. It is not a far stretch to believe that batteries will continue to get better, eliminating the alternatives one-by-one economically. Battery-electric ships are already good enough for inland and coastal routes. And for safety, nothing is going to beat batteries.
I'm hoping we see a very general trend of resources becoming more distributed and decentralized, and local power enabling local production. I wish somebody would represent the working class and take leadership (vs the populist crap currently happening). Anyway.
The number I've heard on the amount of fossil fuel maritime cargo is 40%.
Also, I was interested to see Maersk reportedly has developed a new offshore wind installation vessel.
The guests helpfully pointed out that it is the sulfur which is the mechanism for atmospheric *cooling*. Particulates, such as black and brown carbon have a warming effect, I believe. They warm the atmosphere and reduce the albedo of ice. The stuff suspended in the air falls out in days or weeks, and reportedly represent 3-4 tenths of a degree of warming.
Nuclear energy can be used to make synthetic NetZero hydrocarbon fuels like diesel and kerosene. That means shipping and aviation fuel net zero is easy. But energy must be made cheaper. Easy for engineers to do. Don't expect utility executives to ask for cheaper energy... Can't afford it-it's too cheap!
Nice to hear them actually have the guts to come out and say "no" to LNG. Other delay tactic fictional "solutions" designed to make transition nice and slow (or never) for the fossil fuel industry: hydrogen, carbon capture, biofuel, low carbon fuel. Blue hydrogen: combination of two unproven technologies (hydrogen and carbon capture). Here is a nice assessment of the hydrogen hype. Bottom line: just because governments spend a lot of money on these technologies, does not mean they work. Policy makers are not scientists. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/07/08/analysis/government-expecting-hydrogen-market-cratered?nih=f7f9aec108283fc34065ced39c301528&utm_source=National+Observer&utm_campaign=4a0c8b8e96-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_07_06_12_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cacd0f141f-4a0c8b8e96-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Highly recommend pod on batteries for shipping (maybe try Amol Phadke, Lawrence Berkeley Lab).
I saw "scholars at UC Berkeley" and was ready to be disappointed by theoretical discussions about "solutions" that wouldn't be economically viable for the very diverse maritime shipping fleet and the correspondingly diverse ownership pool. Certainly the large, EU, Asian, or US-based liner services employing the largest container ships are at the vanguard here - EU ETS and political forces make this necessary for them. For the many thousand of other maritime shipping assets out there, many just squeaking by, economically, this podcast was a nice overview of what is currently realistic in the real-world of maritime shipping involving thin margins. Thank you.
I re subscribed after reading this. Very interesting!
It would seem to me that hydrogen, the most common element and virtually non-polluting, would be getting a lot more attention as a fuel source than it does.
It's getting $100B in IRA subsidies. I think that is attracting a lot of unintended attention. But it could be a big prize. The issues are 1) electrolyzers have a very large CapEx 2) The electrolysis efficiency is not great and 3) All the LNG issues discussed by the guests of this episode, only more so. Primary energy -> Final energy is just POOR.
Also, combustion with ambient air produces NOx pollution.
It's hard to speculate what that $100B will yield, but I would just spend it on tried and true things that displace current fossil fuel use.
Yeah, it has lots of positives. For shipping I'd wonder about the lack of density and space needed to store that much of it. Could you perhaps store it as ammonia and convert, but that also adds another potential environmental disaster for inevitable spills.
a random youtube channel I follow....just boat after dirty diesel boat rolling coal
https://youtu.be/tcgj7tB4IP0?t=83
Just for the scale of the edge cases we have to solve.