Europe Takes First Steps in Electrifying World’s Shipping Fleets | Hacker News Reader

Europe Takes First Steps in Electrifying World’s Shipping Fleets

e360.yale.edu

104 pointsISL24 comments

2 out of the 5 ferries running between Helsinborg and Elsinore are now battery powered. The ferries leave every 15 minutes nearly 24/7, and arrive after 20 minutes: it's the largest amount of ferry departures on a single rout in Europe.

The route supposedly was mentioned as far back as the 11th century and the bridge across the Øresunds strait has yet to kill it.

The ferries are 8 thousand tons (the article says just 8 tons) and take 1200+ passengers and 200+ cars with them. They contain 640 6.5 kWh batteries which recharge in just 5-9 minutes (the ferry is only very shortly in the port before leaving for the other country).

As you go on board you get the usual tax free shop but amusingly you can buy tax-free alcohol only while the ferry is the Danish waters. Halfway through the journey, a bell sounds -- and you are now allowed to buy tobacco, as you've entered Swedish waters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HH_Ferry_route

640*6.5 kWh in less than ten minutes must require impressive cables. That's something like 25 MW flowing into those batteries.

They do top up charging on each side to prevent the need for such much power.

http://corvusenergy.com/all-electric-car-ferry/

> ... but the task of greening the high seas fleet is far more daunting.

I think large ocean-going vessels is one place where hydrogen might make sense. The biggest problem with hydrogen is storage, but when you start talking about really large fuel tanks storing liquid hydrogen becomes a lot more practical. All of the hydrogen powered automobiles I've heard of rely either on high-pressure gas storage (requiring heavy tanks) or metal hydride storage (requiring heavy metal hydrides) which pretty much make them inferior to modern battery-electric vehicles.

Storing cryogenic liquid hydrogen doesn't have the same weight penalty, but has a huge volume penalty, plus it has the additional problem of keeping the hydrogen really cold until you're ready to use it. However, on a cargo ship, the large volume of the tank probably isn't a big restriction, and keeping the hydrogen cold enough is going to be a much smaller problem. That's because heat-loss is going to be proportional to the surface area of the tank, rather than the volume.

Hydrogen still suffers from energy loss at production. Hydrogen production by electrolysis is nowhere near 100% efficient, nor is turning the hydrogen back into motive power, either with internal combustion engines or with fuel cells.

On the flip side, I think as long as wind power makes up a substantial portion of electrical generation capacity, there will be times when the cost of electricity actually goes negative. If you can do most of the hydrogen production at times when electricity is really cheap, and you are planning to store it for relatively long periods of time anyway, then most or maybe even all of this overhead can be offset.

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

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?

I 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).

I wonder about just converting the hydrogen to methane for storage and transport. There seems to be a bit of serious research into it.

Being able to reuse existing infrastructure is a pretty big win.

Ammonia is a much better candidate, since it doesn't contain any carbon, so using it can't cause any CO2 emissions. But as others have said, the efficiencies are horrible, so its better if we just figure out H2 transport and storage.

Edit: for large ships, my personal bet is on liquid H2 storage and then combustion in gas turbines. You get a lot of synergies between cryogenic fuel and a gas turbine. Tupolev even built and flew a liquid H2 fueled narrow-body jet in the 80s.

If you get the carbon from the air it doesn't cause any carbon emissions either.

Or an existing stream that is currently being emitted into the air.

To your first point: correct. But the concentration in air is so bloody low for any chemical process (air is <0.5% CO2) that you'll have to put in huge amounts of energy. It's not going to be economically feasible.

To your second point: capturing CO2 and then re-emitting it is completely off the table. It will be (or already is, depending on your interpretation of Directive 2008/98/EC) banned in Europe, likely with an exception for greenhouses (where they need to use CO2 for growing plants, and currently get it from burning natural gas).

Every conversion step loses a lot of energy I'd assume. Producing hydrogen instead of electricity to charge batteries is already wasteful.

Kind of diappointing that the word "nuclear" didn't show up in this article. Exceedingly low-carbon nuclear-powered ships are a very mature technology (Navy), and the shipyard construction environment offers very interesting solutions to the biggest problem with nuclear (cost). For instance, you can serialize production of very large structures. It's Henry Ford to the rescue again but where economies of mass production meet economies of scale.

A few merchant ships with nuclear propulsion have sailed before, like the NS Savannah [1].

If we're going to have a serious conversation about low-carbon long-haul shipping it really should involve consideration of the vast and high-density energy resource in the nucleus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah

First you need to develop a economic naval reactor type that works with minimal manning that keeps the crew within Minimum Safe Manning Certificate. Replacing Pilipino engineering watches with expensive certified nuclear engineers is not cheap.

Secondly you need to make them tamper proof. They must withstand terrorism, theft, hijacking and collisions and the core must be easily separated in the case it's needed.

Thirdly you need to deploy security force that can retake ships within limited time-frame everywhere they operate.

Overall global shipping is has very low CO2 footprint per tonne. Changing to LNG, building thinner and larger ships etc. to reduce CO2 footprint is cheaper.

There are something on the order of 100 shipping hull-losses per decade.

That many cores piling up, within the narrow range of most shipping lanes, strikes me as problematic at best.

The world shipping fleet is vast, on the order of 50k vessels. Marine nuclear experience is a total of 400 vessels, 170 or so active, most submarines.

Several commercial nuclear powered ships were built, the Savannah by the US, and single ships by both Germany, the Otto Hahn, and Japan, Mutsu. All proved uneconomical, the Mutsu had major technical issues, and were either scrapped or converted to conventional fossil propulsion.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c52ll/shippin...

http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/rmt2014_en.pdf

http://www.outsideonline.com/1922111/monsterwellen

From what I remember, these container ships are increasingly automated, with fewer and fewer people needed on board. Would not a nuclear container ship reverse this trends? Would the economic effect of going nuclear be larger than the increased spend on salaries?

Important because shipping produces 2% of global CO2 emissions and is the lowest hanging fruit given how few sources there are.

Also important: marine dispels stink. Sitting on the beach downstream from one is not fun.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_ship...

I second the observation about stinking. It became much more pleasant to cross Norwegian fjords with electrical ferries. Now one can enjoy the scenery while staying outside. With disel ferries staying on the upper deck in front with strong wind one still feels the smell and on the back side, with wind blocked by the ship, the smell can be rather terrible.

We could try adding some sails to save energy: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/09/sailing-ship-re.html

I'm curious, I saw this talked about a lot approximately 5 years ago. I'd have expected this to be relatively standard by now, but it appears not. Does anyone know why this happened?

The notion recurs ever few years. I've seen it periodically over the past 50.

A windjammer fleeet operated profitably thrrough the 1940s on long-haul routes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Erikson

The fossil oil is an issue, but massive use of batteries is another one. Besides liquid carburants have proven themselves. I just don't find proper explanation why there is no massive investment in carbon cycle carburants such as seaweed agriculture.

Will they make electric oil tankers?

hahahahaha

Please don't do this here.

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