I have to say that the "fun facts" included here are actually pretty cool. They are exactly the sort of thing one would want to use to explain the whats and whys of the ship to your kid.
So if I understand correctly, methanol is a low emission fuel source because the CO2 is taken from the air or from plants that have captured it from the air? But if there isn’t enough supply of methanol now, won’t the gap just be filled by methanol from natural gas? And what incentive is there to change from natural gas to something more sustainable in the future? I’m skeptical that these methanol ships are an improvement.
Well it's probably better than bunker oil or whatever petroleum fuel was used before.
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.
"Battery electric may work at some smaller scales such as local ferries but not for moving 100,000 tons across oceans"
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.
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.
I'll do try, thanks! Think I've read the one in the middle, long time ago, when there were no online books and a good portion of my sci-fi reads were found in a supermarket in 3 big baskets showing up randomly from time to time. Filled with seemingly random sci-fi books. About 22 years ago in Poland.
Why not put the batteries in cargo containers and load fully charged batteries when you arrive at a dock and unload the depleted ones. Surely there would be a way to connect them together that could even happen automatically once the batteries are in place right?
Back of the napkin math, 63,000 gallons of gasoline per day. 33kWh of energy in each gallon of gasoline. Internal combustion approximately 33% efficient at turning that energy into propulsion while batteries and electric motors are ~90% efficient. A Tesla megapack stores 3,854 kWh and weighs 84,000 lbs.
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"
You do not like fuel cells? Ammonia/methan/pure hydrogen do not have the fuel density like diesel, but it is still very managable. Possibly even better all in all im terms of weight, as you need less fuel.
I may be wrong, but I think large cargo ships usually go fairly long distances between docking, so they would still need a lot of battery- batteries that may be better deployed elsewhere for the time being. What might work, maybe, is to have re-battery-ing ships that could be deployed along the route to meet the cargo ships and replace the batteries while en route. I have no idea if this is feasible... but it sounds like it might be worth exploring if I had an investor/partner with the billions it would take to develop...
Nuclear would be perfect for large scale shipping operations, but it's tightly controlled for the reason you mentioned but also for what if there's a meltdown?
A sci-fi future would have small(ish) and safe fusion reactors propelling massive container ships on hydrofoils going wheeeee.
Local ferries are speed sensitive, and unless ultra light and with hydrofoils, drag from speed will kill the feasibility of battery electric high speed ferrying. If done anyways, you'd need almost MW scale charging infrastructure to make rapid round trips. Ferries often don't even tie to the dock, they just continuously push against the dock while passengers unload and reload, and turn around to resume travel.
> Local ferries are speed sensitive, and unless ultra light and with hydrofoils,
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...
> 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.
You can take CO2 from industrial processes that emit it as a byproduct.
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.
The current methanol source is almost certainly natural gas. There is quite a lot of work in trying to get bio-methanol and other truly low/negative GHG sources online (along with biodiesel, bio-heavy fuels, etc etc).
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.
That sounds more like biodigesters or landfill gas than the "hydrogen from renewable sources plus CO2 from the combustion of plant sources" described in a cousin comment.
It can also be exhaust from biofueled turbine power plants, which apparently are a thing in Northern Europe. Typically fed from timber harvest slash, brush, etc.
> 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?
Well, it's like electric cars. You can charge the battery from solar power or burning coal. But if you shut down the coal plants and go all solar, you don't need to change anything about the existing cars.
The replacement of high-sulfur bunker-oil fuel (literally the bottom of the barrel in terms of petroleum refining) with methanol is an undeniable win on multiple grounds, such as high air pollution in port cities and along shipping lanes. Methanol is simply a much cleaner-burning fuel, regardless of source.
As far as synthetic hydrocarbon production goes, methanol is low-hanging fruit. E.g.
> "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."
Oil industry chemists have decided somehow that methanol from LNG is the next step to delivering their own production materials. Related to this are long-range plans to build the infrastructure of ports, manufacturing and processing facilities to implement it. IMHO they do not intend to ask anyone for permission, they will simply do this with military, and let the politicians deal with fallout.
Not the CO2 - the C. Technically you don't need the Cs at all, you can just burn H2. However, H2 has all sorts of annoyances; running a car on H2 is difficult. Running a boat on it, not really feasible right now.
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, c...
> I’m skeptical that these methanol ships are an improvement.
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 ran some numbers. This ship can carry 7226 TEU containers; it has a gross tonnage of about 100k tons (93.5k to be precise) [1].
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.
I wonder if it would be possible to economically separate and store the CO2 from methanol combustion (on the ship), then deliver it back to a methanol production facility. Alternately, this could enable use of a fossil fuel, with the CO2 delivered to a facility for sequestration, or perhaps even pumped into deep water during an ocean crossing.
The deep ocean is naturally acidic due to the natural carbon pump. Because of this, below a certain depth (typically around 15,000 feet), calcite and aragonite just dissolve (the "carbonate compensation depth") and there is no accumulation in the ooze. The carbon pump involves dead organic matter falling to depth, where it is consumed and oxidized, producing CO2 there.
Comments like this make be curious how many people understand the carbon cycle and it's relationship to global warming. CO2 isn't just a byproduct of combustion like sulfur or the particles in smoke, it's an essential part of the chemical release of energy that drives our society.
Plants take in sunlight (energy) + co2 + h2o, and chemically use the energy to break down the co2 and h2o in to complex hydrocarbons they use build their structure and store energy and release o2.
When you add o2 back to the hydrocarbons through combustion, you undo the process getting energy + co2 + h2o.
Hydrocarbons, from table sugar to crude oil, are really just solar batteries. They store energy captured by the sun, and then release this when combined with oxygen.
But as you can see co2 is a necessary part of the process and you cannot simply undo the process without taking more energy than you got in the first place (since nothing is 100% efficient). This is why "carbon capture" is a fundamentally tricky problem. In order for it to be successful you need more energy than you started with, and clearly cannot get that energy from fossil fuels (even indirectly) or you ultimately make the problem worse.
Taking your comment, it sounds like mechanical / industrial scale carbon capture is only viable if we have large amounts of cheap and renewable energy. That won't happen anytime soon either, any excess is bought up by datacenters, hydrogen production (which is used like a cheap electricity sink), or storage (batteries, water pumped up into a lake, etc).
But yeah, carbon emissions won't be solved until renewable energy production out-competes emitting energy production by a significant margin, and even then it will take a while due to market forces.
Carbon capture from combustion rather than from the air seems more practical, hence the suggestion to do that on the ship. Allam cycle systems have an overall efficiency similar to combined cycle systems (around 60% LHV) and deliver the CO2 of combustion in separated, compressed, liquefied form.
You can capture CO2 while still getting net energy out of the process, as long as you don't turn it back into (the same) hydrocarbons. The tricky part of carbon capture is not the capturing, but storing it in a way that ensures that it won't be released into the atmosphere anytime soon.
Im guessing that container ships don’t need much refueling? If the ship runs into issues I wonder if they have to ground it until they can ship the methanol to it.
Apparently not; large container ships have a range of 10.000 - 20.000 miles on a single tank of fuel. These things are huge, and I can imagine they don't even need to compromise on storage space for fuel tanks (just like planes have fuel in the wings so their cargo capacity is maximised)
based on an understanding of physics, economics and energy policy. This is to get ESG approval not because it makes economic sense, the article itself speaks to why they are doing it. Denmark is extreme about renewables. Also its total excel magic that they get to “green” Dont take my word for it, just follow the claims and see how little of this is anything but ESG strategizing and greenwashing
76 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadhttps://brandcentral.maersk.com/d/AWavsgKLBExv/press-area#/p...
Surprisingly high. Is this typical for container ships? Would it be run slower if carrying non-perishable, low-value cargo?
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.
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-...
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.
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"
Lot's of possibilities, but I think the biggest hurdle is, that diesel is still very cheap.
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.
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...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Tianjin_explosions
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion
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.
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.
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."
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, c...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
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...
> Effects of Ocean Acidification on Marine Phytoplankton
https://cmi.princeton.edu/annual-meetings/annual-reports/yea...
> Regime shifts and ecological catastrophes in a model of plankton-oxygen dynamics under the climate change
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28456463/
Plants take in sunlight (energy) + co2 + h2o, and chemically use the energy to break down the co2 and h2o in to complex hydrocarbons they use build their structure and store energy and release o2.
When you add o2 back to the hydrocarbons through combustion, you undo the process getting energy + co2 + h2o.
Hydrocarbons, from table sugar to crude oil, are really just solar batteries. They store energy captured by the sun, and then release this when combined with oxygen.
But as you can see co2 is a necessary part of the process and you cannot simply undo the process without taking more energy than you got in the first place (since nothing is 100% efficient). This is why "carbon capture" is a fundamentally tricky problem. In order for it to be successful you need more energy than you started with, and clearly cannot get that energy from fossil fuels (even indirectly) or you ultimately make the problem worse.
But yeah, carbon emissions won't be solved until renewable energy production out-competes emitting energy production by a significant margin, and even then it will take a while due to market forces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allam_power_cycle
What they actually do in operation is of course different from what they're able to do.
That's taking some space somewhere, usually between the double hulls on the bottom of the ship.
The moment between reading the words "African" and "elephants" was frought.