And you should be.
The damning fact about methanol is that it has a very low energy density. Per wikipedia [1], one kilogram of diesel has an energy content of 45.6 MJ (megajoules). One kg of methanol has only 19.7 MJ. So, joule for joule, you need 2.3 tons of methanol for each ton of diesel you replace.
My guess is that these ships will forever remain "methanol capable", but will continue to run on regular diesel fuel. It's probably some scheme to get some green credits, just like the "flex fuel" cars in the US, which can run on ethanol, but most often don't.
I found that a 5000 TEU carrier has a fuel capacity of 2 million gallons [2]. Since Anna Maersk can carry almost 50% more, its fuel capacity should be larger, but probably by less than 50% because of economies of scale. In any case, replacing diesel with methanol would require at least an additional 3 million gallons, which comes to 10000 tons. That's 10% of the gross tonnage of the ship. I suspect that no ship builder or operator will consider this a negligible amount.
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q83601270
[2] https://www.aol.com/many-gallons-fuel-does-container-1427038...
As far as synthetic hydrocarbon production goes, methanol is low-hanging fruit. E.g.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fchem.2018.0044...
> "Starting from pure CO2 and a separate pure source of H2, rather than a mixture of CO, CO2, and H2 as is the case with syngas, simplifies the chemistry, and therefore also changes the reaction and purification processes from conventional methanol producing industrial plants. At the core of the advantages is that the reaction impurities are essentially limited to only water and dissolved CO2 in the crude methanol."
Battery electric may work at some smaller scales such as local ferries but not for moving 100,000 tons across oceans. The energy density just isn't there.
Nuclear would be good but would make the ships a huge piracy/terrorism target. You'd need military escorts for them.
Dunno if this is actually true. There's plenty of stuff going around every day in unguarded ships that have significantly more accessible terror-potential than anything you can put together with a small nuclear reactor.
If recent events in the Panama Canal or Baltimore isn't convincing enough of the disruption a single misplaced cargo ship can cause, it's hard to argue against Tianjin[1] and Beirut[2]. Like those disasters, mind bogglingly destructive as they were, were caused by incompetence and negligence. It's hard to imagine what someone with malicious intent could cook up with nearly 3000 tons of ammonium nitrate.
It would definitely also work for 100 000 tons, but then a sizable percentage of those 100 000 tons will be battery and not freight. Unless the ship should make stops all the time to recharge, which is expensive as well, so no, batteries are not a economical solution for freight ships.
But fuel cells might be a solution
https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2021/march-...
Lot's of possibilities, but I think the biggest hurdle is, that diesel is still very cheap.
A Panamax ship can consume 63,000 gallons a day. To do that with batteries, you'd basically need a whole ship of batteries.
63000*33*.33/(3854*0.9)*84000 = 16,782,563 lbs or ~7,600 metric tons worth of batteries for 1 day's worth of "electric fuel"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40859000-delta-v
Though we only encounter microwave beaming in the sequel, Critical Mass
I found the book a very good read, super realistic. 10/10 for realism/science/research and 8/10 for story. It's very optimistic. Nice to read with the war in Ukraine and progressive climate change not filling with optimism.
If you like other optimistic (mostly) hard sci fi, I recommend the mars trilogy from Kim Stanly Robinson, in case you missed that so far.
How fast do you need to go to hydrofoil when you're carrying 200 cars?
They're working on a battery elecrtric version of my local ferry, and yeah, it's gonna be a lot of charging infra; but in theory the operating costs are much lower, and the charging plans mean they increased grid redundancy for me, so that's nice. This is my current ferry: https://wsdot.com/ferries/vesselwatch/VesselDetail.aspx?vess...
A sci-fi future would have small(ish) and safe fusion reactors propelling massive container ships on hydrofoils going wheeeee.
It has been attempted and found wanting, but it is certainly possible.
You'd probably not want to just replace the engines in current ships, and instead require that they be maintained and crewed by responsible countries.
If you're asking for incentives - if the actual cost of materials does not become directly advantageous, then presumably we'll get plain old fashion regulation forcing the issue.
In any case, actually having these ships out there in operational service gives additional incentives to whoever is working on bio-methanol to like... actually get going.
Edit: Sneaking in an aside. If you were wondering about the naming, and maybe you were ignorant like me. Maersk is majority owned by A.P. Moller Holding. A.P. Moller is one of Maersk's founders.
https://www.maersk.com/support/faqs/low-carbon-fuels-used-by...
[https://smartcitysweden.com/best-practice/399/swedens-larges...]
But yes, the methanol fuel capability is a necessary-but-not-sufficient precondition for low co2 emissions shipping.
Would I be (very approximately) correct in thinking of it like the transition to Electric Vehicles, where it is not sufficient in that we then also need to ensure the electricity is generated in a low CO2 emissions manner? But the transition to EVs is a necessary step, because it enables that transition to be possible?
https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2023/06/13/maersk-secur...
The cleanest process combines hydrogen produced from renewable electricity (typically wind or solar) and CO2 captured from the combustion of biomass.
Carbon fee and dividend would incentivize low carbon fuels by putting a price on carbon. The methanol purchased would not incur a fee. Carbon fee and dividend is employed in Canada and bills have been introduced to the US congress many times since 2009. Shipping companies have an incentive to begin employing low carbon fuels to get ahead of policy changes.
IIUC, you can produce 1 tonne of Methanol for $100-250 from CO2: https://decarbonisationtechnology.com/article/162/conversion... (presumably the cost should be less for waste, since waste is "free").
That would be ~250k BTU per dollar and gasoline is about ~50k BTU per dollar IIUC.
OTOH, natural gas is close to 1M BTU per dollar.
Your worry about the 'gap' is sensible but (probably) not relevant here.
You're asking to do the job of 'produce energy in a sustainable way' and the job of 'use said sustainably produced energy efficiently' in tandem, never raising one without also raising the other on the same day.
Not. Possible. This market is already far too complicated. So, instead, you work on one of the 2 edges and trust that the market will fix the other edge. If not immediately, then at least create a stable incentive.
For example, right now, solar and wind is generally considered 'cheapest', but that glosses over an important detail: When the sun is out and it's windy, power prices are often __negative__ for it. So cheap, it's negative. That's because so much solar and wind is produced, the demand side hasn't caught up. Power MUST be used IMMEDIATELY, you can't just 'let it go round and round on the power cables', they'd just asplode. If there's a sudden unplanned influx of power then that's bad and thus you get money _back_ if you take more power off the grid in that time. And, the flipside: ON a misty day (no wind, no sun), power is very expensive. Because supply is lower than expected. (Prices go negative because not all solar/wind systems are smart gridded up; if they were, they'd just turn themselves off and stop producing. Which merely reduces the price to 0 instead of negative).
Hence, one of the big missing links in this future renewable energy world we're trying to make happen, is an energy _demand_ that can react perfectly to the inherently fluctuating nature of energy _supply_ where the supply is based on solar/wind.
One solution is to add a really stable or flexible source on the supply side. This is partly why richer countries still are building gas-based fossil fuel powerplants: Gas plants are easily 'tunable' - you can pretty much just rotate a volume knob and the power output responds pretty quickly. Coal is harder to 'tune', and nuclear is MUCH harder to tune (twiddle the knob now, it has an effect hours from now). Regardless of the tuning, a fossil fuel powerplant, even one that is usually running at nearly zero flow, is something we'd prefer to avoid.
So, a better solution is to instead have flexible demand that can respond to fluctuating supply. But that's really hard to do!
The solution so far is to let the grid mediate: Folks producing power just shove it on the grid, prices respond to supply, and the hope is that the cheap (or even negative!) arbitrary price drops incentivize the market to come up with ways to use the free power when its there.
This is sort of working but the biggest issue is the grid part. It's actually really pricey to build a grid that can deal with massive spikes, and the exact places where you want to build wind and solar (far away where there's plenty of space) is where there is no grid. Because nobody lives there.
Methanol offers an enticing way out. Instead of building, say, a wind farm in an urban area (complicated), or a wind farm where there's plenty of space (but no grid connection that can deal with it), you build a wind farm out of the way and hook it up to a methanol factory. You just store the methanol (it's easy to store - liquid and not all that poisonous or volatile), you can even pump it, you can ship it.
The amount of research and money flowing into this model of 'make fluctuating renewable energy sources and hook em up to methanol producing things built right next to them' is limited because the demand for it isn't all that high. But it's not all that technically challenging (within reason. My point is, this is WAAY easier than nuclear fusion, for example) - so, create stable demand for it and it's highly likely the market will provide.
Hence, it's oversimplified but in broad strokes fair to call methanol 'low emission' even if methanol supply today isn't great.