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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

That really is an incredible achievement. It's 1/3 of a mile long. Travelling at the speed of sound you'd take 1.4 seconds to go from the bow to the stern. You'd only need 82,000 of these ships to encircle the Earth at the equator. It's 203 times bigger than the largest natural sea creature (a Blue Whale), and more than 3000 times heavier.

Bit of a shame it's dedicated to continuing our use of fossil fuels really.

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The curvature of the earth is measurable between the bow and stern of this ship. If the ship were perfectly flat and you leveled out the front, I'd estimate the back to be at a 1.8cm higher altitude.

"Bit of a shame it's dedicated to continuing our use of fossil fuels really."

Well, I guess the onus is on us to greatly reduce our use of fossil fuels. They're doing their part to more efficiently meet our demand. We can't help but be happy when gas gets cheap then we can buy large vehicles again.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/12/02/automake...

True, but I'd rather another LNG field than another coal mine or crude refinery. As fossil fuels go, natural gas is the least bad option.

Unfortunately, companies don't create more LNG fields and fewer refineries because people on the internet understand that it's a cleaner solution. It's about supply and demand. Our choice in the cars we drive has more of a vote.

Supply and demand, unfortunately. On the bright side, I think even our use of fossil fuels has gotten cleaner and more efficient, and as solar/wind power becomes more efficient, market forces will give them a greater piece of the pie.

Have people who parrot "supply and demand" ever heard of marketing, advertising or sales?

I'd rather this ship with the latest technology is transporting fuels from small drilling rigs than rainforest in Southeast Asia and South America being clear felled to make bio fuels.

Fuel use is morally defensible and fossil fuels are the most efficient fuel for the time being. Until a replacement tech is found and developed then the correct thing to do is find more efficient extraction, transportation and use of fossil fuel. Happily that's the way things are going as the current price drop demonstrates.

And that price drop will increase consumption.

It's unfortunate, but developments in fuel efficiency will inevitably lead to higher use. This is a general principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

From this it could be argued that the "morally correct" thing to do would be to discourage research into more efficient ways of extracting bad fuels, and use those freed resources to study alternative sources of energy. You don't want to keep widening the profitability gap.

"Bad fuel"? All fuels have costs and benefits. Natural gas is probably the best one going. Extraction has minimal environmental impact, it burns clean with very little pollution and can't be spilled into the ocean like oil. It's also versatile, being suitable as a vehicle fuel, a heating / cooking fuel and as a basis for both large scale industrial and electrical production. I'd say that before an alternative large scale energy source is developed, natural gas is the best way forward.

All of that may be true, but it doesn't mitigate the fundamental problem: it's a CO2-releasing fossil fuel. Alternative energy sources don't just magically drop out of the sky through the inexorable march of utopian technology - they get developed through effort. The more expensive and inconvenient a fuel is, the higher the incentive to work on alternatives. Again, why widen the gap by improving extraction efficiency? In the short term, it will increase use by lowering the price, and in the long term it will slow the development of clean fuels. Neither of these is good for the environment.

Incidentally, we already have an alternative large-scale energy source - nuclear. It has problems (mainly red tape and waste-disposal), but the worst-case scenario for nuclear doesn't involve the mass-destruction of ecosystems and coastal towns across the globe.

If we've gotta use the fuels, I'd prefer we use the latest/best tech to get it.

> Bit of a shame it's dedicated to continuing our use of fossil fuels really.

Relative to baseline this probably consumes the least fossil fuels per tonne of any FF-powered transportation mechanism, so relative to baseline this vessel pushes our fuel usage closer to sustainability.

>probably consumes the least fossil fuels per tonne

I don't believe that the commenter to whom you're replying is referring to the use of fossil fuels to transport the ship (which I believe has to be towed.) They seem to be referring to the fact that it is for processing fossil fuels. It's about production, not consumption.

Ah, sorry missed that aspect. Thanks!

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