Every week there is a fire on a cargo ship. Most are not caused by the cargo. But when the cargo catches fire you want to be able to put it out before the whole ships turns into scrap.
It might sound like an odd question, but we have experience with this in Norway, and the results are counterintuitive. Cars in a large airport parking garage caught fire, and it had many EVs in it. Not a single battery pack caught fire. Only the interior of the EVs did. If they were all EVs the fire would likely be less severe, or not have started at all (an ICE car started it)
Battery packs are very well insulated against fires.
Assuming the fire doesn't go completely out of control, I don't see a reason to worry much about battery packs catching fire.
Putting out an EV battery fire basically entails dumping enormous amounts of water on it to keep the temperature under control until it's cool enough that it doesn't auto-ignite as soon as you stop. That can take hours.
I tend to agree that the risk of EV fires is overblown. ICE cars catch on fire all the time and we don't usually hear about it because it's not all that rare or unusual. It just doesn't make the news. EV fires are a novelty so we hear about them. (Not that any amount of vehicle fires is okay.)
I do think though that if you're moving thousands of cars together on a ship, then that's maybe creating a different kind of risk profile.
I look forward to wider adoption of LFP batteries. They aren't immune to fire; I think the electrolyte is still flammable. They just aren't nearly as energetic when they burn, and they're harder to ignite in the first place.
I kind of wonder if it would help to pack batteries with something that requires a huge amount of energy to vaporize, so that the heat from a battery fire just goes into a state transition of some inert substance. (You could boil water off for instance, but maybe there's something more weight-efficient.)
That's a problem fire departments are still trying to adapt to, many resorting to putting out the fire conventionally, then submerging the car in a water-filled container.
But I'm unclear on how that makes the risk profile worse for ships? The initial fire should be easier to contain with EVs than with gasoline cars because EV batteries are much better protected than fuel tanks, and water for cooling affected vehicles for a couple hours is plentiful. It's a ship after all.
Maybe there's a discussion to be had about modifications to fire fighting equipment and staffing because of the different demands, but I don't see how the risk is bigger.
Gasoline-powered vehicles aren't fueled when loaded onto a ship, so they don't really pose much of a fire hazard. However for EVs this is a problem, because it's very difficult to completely drain a lithium battery.
> water for cooling affected vehicles for a couple hours is plentiful. It's a ship after all.
Getting the water to all those vehicles is the hard part. If enough of the EVs catch fire the only realistic way to get that much water to the fire is to get the deck below water level, which tends to be very bad for a ship.
Bilge pumps should be able to keep up with firefighting pumps. But, yes, the firefighting pumps won't be able to handle more than several cars on fire.
Flooding a ship's hold with water is generally regarded as a bad thing.
In any case. Fire risk on ships is a matter for insurers. There are a lot of EVs that are going to be shipped around in the next decades. And the shipping business is big business. I'm sure they'll figure it out. Lots of ships catching fire would get costly. So, the prudent thing would be to do the math and take appropriate counter measures. But I seriously doubt any insurers are losing much sleep over this incident.
There are also ships that carry the fuel for ICE cars around; or at least the raw ingredients for it (oil). Or liquid gas. Highly flamable stuff. Very toxic. Nasty when it gets out. Oil tankers do untold amounts of damage to the environment when they sink and spill their load. Happens fairly regularly. Insurers are all over that kind of thing as well.
If you actually genuinely care about cars spontaneously combusting, there are hundreds of people that die in ICE car fires every year. ICE car fires are so common that it's one of the most common reasons for fire trucks to be called. Hundreds of thousands of times per year in the US apparently. ICE cars are not safe at all; they never have been. They catch fire in all sorts of situations. In your garage, while they are parked, when you crash them, or when you drive on the motorway. It happens to old cars; it happens to new cars. So, where's the big outrage over good old ICE car fires? There is none. Double standards. Or rather there's a lobby interested in talking about one thing but very much not about the other thing.
Which is of course what is going on here. This article is on a web site aimed at ICE car enthusiast that no doubt depends on advertising, sponsoring, etc. by various car manufacturers. Spreading FUD about EVs whenever they can. Just so the fearful masses keep on buying ICE cars.
Once the fire actually involves "serious" electricity...well, then you've got (1) "can't blow out" birthday candles from Hell, (2) "spray water on it and you may die by electrocution" issues, and (3) the fire has Unlocked a whole new way to Level Up fast, which does not depend upon the traditional "fire triangle" (fuel, oxygen, and heat).
*Or maybe you can't. Ask any fire fighter whether things get magically easy if there's no electricity involved.
But you are right that it's maybe harder to set the battery on fire in the first place.
So you ship the EVs without batteries, and then... you ship the batteries?
So most shipments of cars are hazard free and cheap (to insure).
And then you have high risk battery shipments. With lots of expensive measures to minimize risks and fail safe.
(This is already today a thing, as you can ship items without batteries for less money.)
As the article points out, it is probably necessary to change best practises of handling electric vs. combustion engined cars. Making really sure, that no car moves and crashes into others, change in firefighting strategies. Make sure, that the cars only contain a minimum amount of charge and of course continue to improve battery safety itself.
Special ships and specially trained and certified crews to savely handle de facto explosive equipment vs. totally hazzard proof expensive boxes of metal.
It might make sense to do this in big quantities. Probably will considered, after insurance companies raise rates after the first ship sank completely due to one carfire, that spread. Even with low charge they can burn out of itself. But sure, there are many other ways to deal with it.
I see what you are saying, but the way we mitigate the fire and explosion hazards on oil and gas transport ships is not really applicable to roll-on/roll-off ships.
The oil tankers and LNG ships use a technic called innert atmosphere to protect their cargo from fire hazard. The idea is that they fill the ulage spaces with a gas low in oxygen to make sure an explosive mixture can’t form.
It would be very hard to innert the whole cargo space of a RO/RO ship the same way, might damage the cargo, would be hazardous to the operators and wouldn’t actually help with a potential thermal runaway of a battery anyway. I will discuss these points in detail:
How do they generate this innerting gas usually? There are two main options. You either use nitrogen, or you pipe in the exhaust gas of the engines. Nitrogen would probably be cost prohibitive. The RO/RO ships are cavernous. The exhaust gas based sytem would cost less, but would damage the cargo. Nobody would want a car which reeks like an ashtray.
The innerted atmosphere is obviously incompatible with human occupancy, yet the cars are usually driven on and off these carriers by a small army of operators. So you need to have processes to vent the innert atmosphere before the vehicles can be embarked/dissembarked, and you need other processes to ensure the venting worked properly otherwise your shore crew will suffocate. This adds complexity, and risks to the operation. This is not a problem on tankers because there nobody needs to enter the tanks during normal operations.
And then finaly why it might not help after all? The nature of electric vehicle battery thermal runaway is such that it doesn’t require oxygen from the atmosphere. It is an exotermic reaction, but not a “fire” in the fire-triangle sense.
So all in all, the one big trick of the tankers can’t be used with vehicle carrying operations. Thus the analogy is less than useful. Not saying that we can’t carry EVs safely, just that our ability to carry fuels safely does not in any way correlate with our ability to carry EVs safely.
Ironically, what is often claimed as a fundamental problem with batteries, their lower energy density than fuel, should make them less dangerous in the case of a disaster in the case of a fire. But the nature of the fire is differently and needs to be handled accordingly. (Of course, shipped cars probably only contain a minimum amount of fuel, but likewise, electric cars would only be minimally charged)
That means sprinkler systems and well-crewed ships that can quickly respond to a fire in one of the decks.
Unfortunately, the shipping industry is effectively unregulated because workers don't dare complain about anything.
Ships have the bare minimum in equipment, likely in poor condition, operated by people who are paid peanuts, poorly trained, etc.
"Simple mechanical damage" to the battery in an EV is a lot harder than you think. The packs are designed to remain intact in crashes...