Yara birkeland, the first autonomous and emission-free containership | Hacker News Reader

Yara birkeland, the first autonomous and emission-free containership

gcaptain.com

143 pointstomohawk74 comments

The article mentions 'green ammonia' as a potential fuel source for shipping, and I would imagine that Yara is poised to be a large producer of the fuel. Using ammonia as a fuel source is something I've never heard of, so reading about it is fascinating: https://cen.acs.org/business/petrochemicals/ammonia-fuel-fut...

It's actually a really interesting fuel (well, energy storage medium) with quite high compatibility with our current way of life. The best part is that you can synthesise it without carbon - which means the feedstocks are only really water, air and electricity.

The downsides are toxicity (but this is probably manageable) and poor round trip efficiency. If we ever end up with excess energy (eg solar power in summer) then synthesising ammonia could be a good means of long term energy storage with very little capital investment required.

I gotta imagine that the low efficiency can be managed by using batteries whenever possible.

There’s already a hybrid ferry in Norway that uses batteries for the first and last part of the trip to avoid emissions near land. Would be perfect if it used ammonia for the middle part of the trip.

There are lots more than that. See https://energiogklima.no/elektriske-bilferger-i-norge/

42 fully or partially electric ferries now, 15 more by the end of the year.

Currently synthesising ammonia requires hydrogen and that comes from fossil fuels (the main process of extracting that hydrogen is steam reforming of natural gas and, I think, the main carbon emitter from the current ammonia process). Green ammonia would be made with green hydrogen which is made from water with electrolysis with renewable energy. These ideas make it more obvious that any viable solutions to climate change will require a massive increase in energy production. Solar and wind require massive scale and nuclear seems to currently be very hard to set up and unjustifiable if unit costs of electricity go down.

> Solar and wind require massive scale

In what way? None of land area requirements, panel production, battery production nor turbine production seem particularly difficult in the modern economy in relation to the scale of the problem.

You need a lot of “stuff” (land, raw materials, labour, etc) for your energy. I’m not sure how true this really is in comparison to e.g. fossil fuel or nuclear power, but I get the sense that a lot of space and resources are required for a very large power output whereas the energy density in land is much lower for solar and wind (though construction is likely cheaper).

David MacKay had a great graph showing the power per land density of various energy sources and in the U.K. assuming that we could switch things like heating and transportation to electricity without loss of efficiency, we would need to roughly coat the country in solar or wind to match current energy consumption. Though the numbers may have changed since, they probably haven’t changed by the 2 orders of magnitude or so that would likely be required for the prospect of just solar/wind to be palatable.

To completely power the US with solar power would take several hundred square miles. In a country with three and a half million of them. We dedicate a lot more land just in parking lots.

David MacKay's book is great, but it was written in 2009. Just re-reading the part about solar panels from the perspective of 2021 is quite eye-opening. He makes assumptions like 10% efficient panels (panels today are probably 18-22% efficient) and says that the required solar power would be "100 times all the photovoltaics in the whole world". The amount of energy he's talking about - around 1200 TWh - is now only 1.4 times all the photovoltaics in the world. In fact, last year the UK alone generated 11.77 TWh - which is about what the entire world generated in 2009 when the book was written.

His book also doesn't really take into account efficiency savings. For example, his "Cars" section calculates 40kWh/day/person - or 0.8 kWh/km (1.25 km/kWh). An average electric car today might get 3 miles/kWh (4.8km/kWh) - as there's no highly inefficient internal combustion engine involved.

Likewise his heating section doesn't take into account energy saving measures and it doesn't account for heating from heat pumps.

It's also exceedingly unlikely that we'd use solar power in the UK to create fuels for aircraft or ships.

So while David does make a good point (I think the book, overall, is excellent and I recommend it frequently), it also overstates significantly the energy required from renewables in the UK.

Thanks for all the information. I think my assumption was that the book would be wrong for efficiency reasons but that it would not be multiple orders of magnitude wrong and that that kind of difference would be required. I suppose in addition to efficiency improvements I may have been overestimating the required solar panel density and underestimating how palatable they are to people.

It turns out a better energy storage system than hydrogen, actually. Think it has better energy density, easier to liquefy, and if you’re making hydrogen it seems to be a relatively easy step to add nitrogen (easily available everywhere as well).

And you can burn ammonia in engines that are closer in design to their gasoline counterparts, as opposed to completely new hydrogen fuel cells. And the density is high enough for it to be a serious contender for aircraft fuel.

So yeah, ammonia, assuming it’s made from green hydrogen (renewable energy) as opposed to blue hydrogen (from natural gas or oil with hand wavy carbon capture), has a lot of interesting prospects.

You can burn hydrogen in ICE engines as well. In the 2000's both BMW and Mazda did limited series developments of cars that can be switched between burning gasoline and hydrogen - the BMW 750 with the M73 V12, and the Mazda RX-8 with the dual rotor Renesis Wankel engine.

Currently batteries (and possibly fuel cells) seem to be winning out for cars, but burning hydrogen in large piston engines seems to be a promising option for ships.

I've heard Yanmar is currently developing a large slow two-stroke marine engine burning hydrogen, probably in the 5 MW range.

I wonder what they would do about nitrogen oxides from ammonia combustion. The article doesn't mention this.

This problem solves itself as ammonia catalyzes nitrogen oxides back to nitrogen. It is widely used (named AdBlue) in diesel engines exhaust.

I had never heard of it either. Thank you! But I found lots links about it and it looks like some people are building container ships that run on it, Daewoo in South Korea being one of them. Very, very cool.

https://container-news.com/ammonia-powered-mega-boxship-five...

https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/how-ammonia-could-de...

Finding out about things like this gives me hope and confirms my belief that human ingenuity will allow us to deal with climate change and other huge problems that humankind will have to deal with.

That is a big ship! It looks like it's only going to do a short run between ports in Norway, but that seems like a serious commitment to a renewable future. Kudos to the team.

>That is a big ship!

It is, and it's very cool to see a ship of this size being built as electric and autonomous. but just for a sense of scale the Ever Given that got stuck in the Suez has a capacity of 20124 TEU. This ship has a capacity of 120 TEU. Granted that is one of the biggest ships in existence, but this one is a couple orders of magnitude smaller.

Perfectly suited to a small regional route in Norway.

Among container ships this is very small. I would hesitate to call it a real container ship because it doesn’t carry even 1000 TEU, which would itself be very small even for smaller ports. This ship only does a 7 nautical mile run (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Yara_Birkeland) because battery technology is simply not practical for long distances.

That's a shame, lets hope progress is made to allow for longer voyages.

It's not going to be, sorry. Having batteries small and light enough for practical large container ships, or transatlantic aircraft, would literally mean reducing the battery in a Tesla down to the size of two gallons of milk. And that is way beyond even the most optimistic estimates of battery technology development.

If you look at the cool improvement graphs shown by battery manufacturers, it's always kWh per dollar that is improving. In terms of energy per weight, the best we have commercially is NCA batteries at 220 Wh/kg. The best we have on the prototype stage in laboratories is around 400 Wh/kg, but those last less than a hundred cycles.

The theoretical maximum is that of a lithium-air battery, where people have demonstrated 1600 Wh/kg in the lab, but they are not rechargeable. Even if we could somehow make those rechargable, a standard Panamax container ship would require 50 000 tonnes of batteries. But it has a capacity of 52 000 tonnes.

So with the most extreme revolution in battery technology, we could just barely make a battery powered container ship that carried 96% batteries and 4% actual cargo.

The article says "7 nm for Herøya – Brevik and 30 nm Herøya – Larvik."

I think it is around the size of a medium-to-large-ish ferry, unfortunately, not really competitive with big-time cargo shipping. (I say I think because ferries are generally measured in "people" rather than "TEU" so it is hard to make a direct comparison, but the sizes are about right). Ships are just big by their nature. But it is a step in the right direction, hopefully this will be a testbed for some tech that can be used in bigger boats.

Not world’s first emission-free cargo ship.

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

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

Also the German Otto Hahn and Japanese Mutsu.

All three of the Western-alliance ships had significant technical as well as cost problems. The Hahn and Mutsu were refitted with conventional propulstion, the Savannah retired and now a museum ship in Baltimore, MD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Civi...

TFA does make the dual claim for the Birkeland of being both autonomous and emissions-free. Though one might make a similar argument of barge traffic drawn by electrically-powered "mules".

Or possibly even their non-electrified original inspirations.

Arguably every ship that ever sailed prior to the invention of engines was "emission-free" by most standards.

The hijackers off the horn of Africa are going to have to start hiring programmers.

The next version of the movie Captain Phillips is going to be some crossover with the original cast of Hackers?

Hijackers...Hackers... Hackjackers? Hihackers?

Look at me, I am sudo now

I'm surprised to see the service speed listed at 6 knots. Seems quite low for a container ship, no? From my limited anecdotal evidence of having cargo ships pass my sailboat, they're usually doing easily 10-15 knots. I wonder if that's related to battery efficiency being better at lower power consumption? In any case, for a short route mostly in shielded waters, as presented in the article, this doesn't seem like a hige downside.

I also have to comment on the "emission-free" moniker. Was the construction of this ship emission-free? Definitely not. Is the maintenance of the ship going to be emission-free? Probably not. I'm not saying we shouldn't be trying to reduce our emissions, but seems like nowadays there's often an almost indistinguishable line between actually trying to produce a sustainable product, and just doing greenwashing to get more government grants and investors onboard.

Slower speeds are much more efficient. In displacement vessels the energy required is proportional to the square root of the speed.

Is this independent of the hull shape and hydrodynamics? Or how does that influence the energy reuirements?

It all contributes, and depending on the sea state and heel angles also.

I've often wondered if you could build a serious ocean-going autonomous ship around this size, powered by sails.

It would be slow, no doubt, but the variable cost to transport containers would be incredibly low. No energy used, no crew to pay. All you need after that is to have a small fleet of them, and a dock that can do autonomous loading and unloading.

The Oceanbird sailing car carrier concept design would appear viable from an engineering standpoint. However I doubt it would be economically viable under current conditions. Publishing the design is probably mostly a PR stunt, and perhaps a hedge against a future carbon emissions tax.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nishandegnarain/2020/12/01/a-ne...

Large ocean going ships will never be fully autonomous. Humans are needed to conduct maintenance and repair, which is generally too complex to automate. But automation will reduce the crew needed for standing watch in the engine room and bridge.

Maybe it's worth reminding that a ship in the middle of the ocean is often much farther away from any other human beings than the astronauts on the ISS, and that sending a rescue mission from ashore to fix a leaking pipe would take a long time and a great amount of fuel. Therefore it makes sense to have at least a few people onboard for basic servicing.

Also maybe worth remembering that once close to the departing or destination harbour, any large cargo ship met with the harbour pilot team who goes onboard and take responsibility for manoeuvering the ship, so no ship would be unmanned the full course of its journey anyway ; only the easier, longer part.

Yes you could build an autonomous ship in theory, although it should probably be modestly crewed in some areas to avoid piracy. The more immediate likely direction is for wind assisted propulsion rather than totally wind powered ships. There are already ships assisted by sails, rotors, and kites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind-assisted_propulsion).

I think uncrewed ships would be easier for avoiding piracy? I assume to take control they would need some kind of authentication so the ship would steam ahead...It would reduce it to vandalism but there's no financial incentive there

I was jokingly predicting that they’ll turn individual shipping containers into autonomous vehicles at some point. Why not?!

At some ports already after they are offloaded they are transported around the yard on programmed platforms. The platforms deliver them to waiting trucks. It’s not “autonomous” but I think it’s functionally close. And probably better to have vehicles transporting them than budilding this into every shipping unit, I assume.

Interestingly, if it's sail powered it looks like people would actually pay to travel on it (although maybe not to travel from where you'd also want to ship cargo?). So maybe workforce would not be that expensive on those ships.

For instance: - the sailcargo project (https://www.sailcargo.inc/) main ship has as many guest travellers than sailors (assuming "guests" means paying customers) - the ecoclipper500 project (https://ecoclipper.org/prototype/) also has room for "guests" - many of the traditional large sailboats are packed with paying guests and unpaid trainees as well

It's already a reality -- See https://www.saildrone.com/technology/vehicles. A few companies building serious fleets for ocean data collection.

Awesome. Now just have it carry a few containers and we're really on our way!

In regards to the batteries, I haven't found information on what type of batteries the ship uses. However, new Sodium-ion batteries could be a good option for the ship's requirements.

Sodium-ion is heavier than lithium counterparts but should be cheaper (uses sodium instead of lithium, cobalt, etc) and potentially offer greater charge, lifecycle, and safety performance.

CATL Sodium-ion news article: https://www.catl.com/en/news/665.html

No one has mentioned it, perhaps it is too obvious but a key difference is that with cars you can use regenerative breaking to convert kinetic energy back to electrical energy.

I don't think ships stop and start nearly as much as cars, I guess a propeller could be used as a regenerative break, I don't think it would add much to the efficiency though.

How long would it take to charge the batteries?

That is a very good question. I tried to find you an answer but the only bits about the charging that I could find is that it is fully automatic and that they expect it to happen during the unloading or loading, but not how long that would take.

Video of robotic plug:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc2CBGVa_kw

Worlds largest electric ferry connecting to a automatic robotic charger station

Here it says "5 minutes" for charging (15 minutes trip):

https://press.siemens.com/global/en/feature/pioneer-position...

"At nearly 98 meters long and 16 meters wide, the Elektra can transport up to 90 cars per trip. The ferry purchased by FinFerries will now be traveling this route every 15 minutes. The batteries will be charged in roughly five minutes while cars move off and onto the ferry. The two lithium-ion batteries each have a capacity of 530 kWh. "

So this one having 7 times larger batteries charged via the same connection would charge in a bit over 30 minutes on a trip like that, and on the route that it is planned for probably more like several hours, which seems reasonable given that they also need to load and unload.

If you have one charge point at the loading dock and another charge point at the unloading dock (and charge the ship during the average loading / unloading times).. theoretically you can estimate the max range between the two docks where you never have to worry about charging.

Well, you'll never have to worry about charging anyway, but ships that don't move are losing money so ideally charging would not add to the turn-around time. I think it is the money that the owners would be worrying about.

7 MWh is a pretty beefy battery, I am going on the assumption that its size was carefully chosen to give it sufficient capacity during the operating life of the vessel to serve its route. Filling that up from an industrial drop at 20KV with 100A is doable in under four hours.

I wonder how much money is saved in fuel and maintenance.

It may well be that the decision to go uncrewed was given in by either higher purchase price or higher operating costs so they had to do one more thing to make the ship competitive. But making an electric ship uncrewed is feasible, doing that with a diesel would be a little bit more tricky, boats that size are - unsurprisingly, I guess - mechanically quite complex.

In this case they 'crew' the boat from the shore, which will probably work well as long as conditions are good, but I'd hate to be in the driving seat of one of those and to see the comms link go down.

At least it won't be difficult to keep them cool, with all that seawater at the ready.

Most new ferries in Norway seems to use batteries these days and last time I was on the west cost back in September I made sure to look at it.

It seems they attach a charger while they lower the ramp fir unloading and disconnect it just before leaving.

The unload / load process seemed as fast as before to me but I haven't used ferries a lot since before covid.

I also guess they might do slightly longer maintenance charging cycles at night since there are fewer departures then.

I don't get why they don't have roll-on roll-off batteries. It's a ferry after all. Plenty off time to charge then.

The cost savings from slow charging would need to be really big to offset the cost of having 2x as many batteries and operating the logistics of battery shuffling.

2x as many batteries would last 2x as long. Maybe longer when charged more slowly.

I read about maybe the first electric ferry, that the grid could not supply the power demand when speed charging the ferry. A new power line with greater capacity was then build.

Grid operations are generally better off with lower peak demands.

What happens to the battery when its useful life is over?

The recycling industry is growing up: https://northvolt.com/

biiiig business in battery recycling atm. I imagine that a boat load of battery will be quite attractive based purely on economy of scale benefits.

Battery recycling in china: guy on backyard strips most valuable parts with hammer and throws 90% of battery into dumpster.

It is very lucrative indeed.

Lithium batteries can be 100% recycled. As mentioned by another user:

https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/technology-br...

>> "Northvolt aims to produce cells with 50% recycled material by 2030..."

>> "...it has produced its first lithium-ion battery cell using 100% recycled nickel, manganese and cobalt..."

>> “The recycling process can recover up to 95% of the metals in a battery..."

I can't parse this on a quick skim, probably due to lack of understanding this tech. Looks like operations begin in 2022, so we will see if they are able to be profitable and stay afloat. Hope so, would be great to be able to recycle these batteries. If not, I suspect there will be problems.

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