Large ocean vessels like cargo and cruise ships are some of the biggest greenhouse gas producers on the planet, so I really hope this is a good way forward.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
385 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
59402 readers
2516 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
At the very least they should have all long-since been converted to diesel instead of bunker fuel, which emits more carbon and a shit ton of sulfur, one of the worst greenhouse gasses. But these people give less than a fuck. Countries need to be willing to stop trade with vessels like this before even the simplest technical solutions will be adopted.
Sulfur polution actually has cooling effect, so it is kind of opposite of greenhouse gases. It sucks in different ways, though.
If in the upper atmosphere yes, but I doubt any of the sulfer from these gets anywhere near that height, and actually just falls back down to pollute down here.
It's actually been theorized that ships using cleaner fuel (read: less sulfur output) contributed to the peak temperatures of the atlantik ocean
Thankfully we already have non-sulfur cloud seeding technology so now that we know the oceanic clouds made it cooler we can make more clouds without sulfur, netting us the heat shield without the pollution.
No, the link seems to be real. Very recent studies based on satellite data have detected a reduction in cloud reflectivity caused by the reduction in sulfur emissions. This will accelerate global warming; by exactly how much is currently not known.
But bunker fuel is cheap!
According to this graph from 2016 those emissions were about 1.7% of the whole pie. Reducing emissions is definitely a step in the right direction, but in this case it’s not going to be a very big step.
Just to give you some perspective, road transport is responsible for about 11.9%, so tackling that should be a significantly higher priority IMO. We could take that step by developing electric lorries, trucks and vans and other electric cars, but they would also need to be recharged using nuclear or renewables.
Energy use in buildings covers about 17.5% so that should probably be even more urgent. Burning oil to heat up your house in the winter should be replaced with more ecological options. As usual, running your air conditioning in the summer also contributes to the problem if the electricity comes from coal, oil or gas.
People tend to forget that 24.2% comes from industry, so optimizing that part should be among the top 10 of our priorities IMO. In many cases, you could switch from carbon based fuels into other sources, but that may require building more nuclear, wind, solar and grid energy storage.
Steel production is also pretty big (7.2%), and as far as I know, there’s no easy way to replace coke. However, it is possible to capture the CO2 right at the source, but currently there are no economic incentives to build an entire carbon processing factory right next to your steel mill. Carbon tax might a good way to make the steel industry look for ways to reduce emissions. If keeping the old factory running costs hundreds of millions a year in taxes, while building that carbon plant costs about the same, many companies might consider it… or they might just outsource everything to China instead.
Picking and choosing which one to fix "first" is a problem, IMO.
We are capable of tackling every area simultaneously. Let's get more EVs out there, let's try hydrogen-powered airplanes, more nuclear, and sails on ships.
Let's do everything we can.
There is a replacement fore coke. Check out NZ steel plant moving to renewables.
And get this. NZ tax players get to pay for that privilege. What a win for a private company
I found an article about it, and it mentioned using arc furnaces. That’s the obvious move, because it simply involves replacing coke with electricity to melt the iron.
However, a steel mill also needs some carbon as it’s a key ingredient of steel. That’s the tricky part. If your process has no carbon at all, you’re not going to be producing steel either. My guess is, they replaced all the things they could and left what they had to. Most likely, there’s still one part of the mill that uses coke or some other carbon source.
Can you get carbon from a different source ? Would it need to be coke ?
I can't remember the details but yeah they were electrifying the process. Seemed a great idea. Just bad that tax layers are basically bailing out a company. They get a free ride and we get slightly better air quality
Yeah, the politics of it can get nasty. I guess they did that to keep the jobs or something.
Anyway, if you put a little bit of carbon into molten iron, you get steel. Traditionally that has been done by burning coke, and we’ve been using that for ages because it’s cheap and relatively clean in the pyrometallurgical sense. If you burned wood, oil or something else, you certainly could get the carbon that way too, but your steel would be contaminated by the rest of the periodic table, and that’s not great if you’re trying to build a bridge out of steel like that. Various carbon sources such as wood can be purified into coke, so there are options. It’s just that they haven’t been economically viable while normal coke has been available.
And that’s when we get back into politics. If it makes economic sense for companies to keep on polluting, they certainly will. The government gets to decide which business practices are rewarded and which are punished.
Nobody wants Chinese steel.
It's kind of funny because this is true, but if God came down and changed all logistics to trains and aircraft tomorrow our emissions would rise enormously. Shipping is extremely efficient, we just do a fuckton of it.
As is, we do it by ship, so hopefully wind-powered shipping and electric cargo ships will be the way of the future for them.
load more comments
(5 replies)
It seems to make economical sense to be utilising winds whenever they're blowing. I'm no expert but reduced engine maintenance and fuel consumption at those times are the two I can think of. So long as the wind infrastructure isn't expensive to maintain and use, this would be the preferred option sailing forward.
I dont think this ship could ever go sail-only. But it can use them as assistance to the engines. It'd need a lot more sails, taller sails, and probably some hull modifications to get anywhere near the same speed on sail only. But it can use the sails to go faster for a given throttle setting.
Wow, they invented sailing!
Neat - these things usually show up in the news as a render and then you never hear about it again. Being actually built full-scale is pretty cool.
Sails obviously work, the two questions with an automated metal sail for cargo ships are cost and reliability. Making moving parts that don't break down in high wind and salt water isn't easy.
It just comes down to whether or not the fuel saved is worth more than the sail maintenance. Hopefully it is.
Plus there's that whole destroying the planet thing. Not sure if that's included as a cost.
Bunker fuel on cargo ships is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. The damage they do is immense.
We should just tax bunker fuel up to a point where it's a bit cheaper to run sails..... Only if we had a planet wide universal accord on it
Yeah such an easy solution. So who gets to keep the tax money? Who pays the tax - the ones shipping the goods, or the ones buying the goods?
Did you just wake up from eternal slumber? Everytime you buy something that arrived by lorry, be it even a tomato, everyone pays for the taxes directly and indirectly.
whoever gets paid to transport stuff around will need to buy fuel for their bussines so they can successfully deliver the goods they've been hired to deliver. So the company that owns the ships will get a full tank from the port, this time it will only be way more expenses due to taxes, and that maybe will push the the owners into investing into greener technology to transport goods that isn't as polluting.
Who keeps the taxes? The country whose port the shop was residing while fueling up.
We all know what taxes are. We all know you're an armchair thinker who believes that every problem has one simple solution, which apparently only you could think of for some reason. Anyway continue to enjoy the bliss ignorance is.
Don't be rude.
The shareholders don't care about the planet tomorrow when not caring today is profitable. That's how the system works - by design.
I swear to God that beeb reporter HAD to be taking the piss when he wrote that. It's so fucking oniony the way he wrote it. "Special wind-powered sails" as opposed to the ether I guess. He goes out of his way to ignore sailing ships or compare it to them. We see you Tom.
Tbf, they're not normal sails in the traditional sense. They're made entirely out of metal and are shaped much differently than what old school sailboats had. But yeah, I agree it does sound kinda funny.
And I guess these sails don't require a huge crew constantly adjusting ropes and canvas. If it performs well that's a huge innovation in sailing.
Oh yeah, he just deliberately ignores the comparison. It's completely absent.
Let's go all in. I want the old style pirate ships again
Ships, powered by the wind? What a time to be alive!
It's pretty wild to think that as recently as 1939 commercially-viable sailing vessels were still hauling cargo around the world. Even weirder to think that one of these vessels ended up appearing in The Godfather Part II and is now a floating restaurant in Philadelphia.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Enabling a vessel to be blown along by the wind, rather than rely solely on its engine, could hopefully eventually reduce a cargo ship's lifetime emissions by 30%.
It was developed by UK firm BAR Technologies, which was spun out of Sir Ben Ainslie's 2017 America's Cup team, a competition sometimes called the 'Formula One of the seas'.
"This is one of the most slow-moving projects we've done, but without doubt with the biggest impact for the planet," its head John Cooper - who used to work for Formula One team McLaren - told the BBC.
Experts say wind power is a promising area to explore, as the shipping industry tries to reduce the estimated 837 million tonnes of CO2 it produces each year.
"Wind power can make a big difference," says Dr Simon Bullock, shipping researcher at the Tyndall Centre, at the University of Manchester.
He said new cleaner fuels will take time to emerge "so we have to throw everything at operational measures on existing ships - like retrofitting vessels with sails, kites and rotors".
The original article contains 860 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Cool, now do the same with an airplane so we can save global warming
Oh the humanity!
We've come full circle in a way, let's hope this technology succeeds.