I have been discussing this with a friend and decided to open up the discussion a bit more to see if anybody has any ideas of this.
Cargo vessels are the life blood of the modern world. My understanding
is that they are a significant fact in green house gas well well. Looks like it si about 2.5% of green house emissions. What I am trying to come up with are possible solutions. Of course simply making ships more fuel efficient and stop burning black oil is a part of it.
I had a couple of thoughts thought. I know that a lot of electric car batteries are getting close to the end of service. They are still suppose to be 70 or 80% efficient though and there is talk about use for grid storage. Maybe they can also be used for maritime. I did some looking up of information and looks like a largish bulk carrier has about 23,000 HP and and my car has 194 horsepower. Rounding down to 20,000 horsepower and accepting maybe half a knot less of speed. At the same time, rounding my car up to 200 horsepower for ease of math. That means that we are talking about 100 times the horsepower of my car. Modern electric cars have about a 300 mile range. To go 300 miles should require about 100 batteries. Double that number for safety and increase to 4500 miles. That means 3000 batteries. It looks like Tesla batteries are about half a ton each. That means only 1500 tons of batteries, not completely insane. I would want a diesel as a backup but one could have the operation of the diesel engine monitored to make sure it is not run except for emergencies.
I thought about another option. Maybe something that is an outgrowth of modern AIP technologies in submarines. They can gothousands of miles with their fuel cells. Surface ships will have far less concerns about the volume of the system than a submarine would.
Thoughts?
