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Comment by tppiotrowski | Hacker News Reader

> A self-driving hydrogen-powered submarine is among the winners in a UK government competition to tackle emissions from shipping.

> But what kind of cargo will the submarine be carrying? "That's what we're going to figure out over the next few months," he told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme.

> The creators say it will also collect micro-plastic from the water column and feed the data to researchers.

I think it's an interesting concept but selling it as a fix for emissions for shipping seems like greenwashing to me.

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This submarine was designed to transport green energy grant money straight to designers wallet.

Additionally, unless I'm missing something, we don't actually have the economics at scale to produce "green hydrogen" right now - it's definitely cleaner than oil, but it's still rather environmentally expensive to produce.

It's not evironmentally expensive, but it is currently money expensive due to a combination of implicit subsidies of the fossil fuel industry and small scale of production.

At the moment most hydrogen is produced by reforming natural gas. So in some ways it's less "green" than just burning the natural gas.

It's a complicated area but the key difference is to only use it for things that can't be otherwise electrified, which are mostly chemical input tasks, but cargo shipping on (or under) water is probably one of the sensible uses.

Here's an article with a handy chart:

https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/liebreich-oil...

Unless the sub has a snorkel to the surface or some ability to extract dissolved O2 from seawater, the sub will also need an onboard supply of O2.. presumably compressed O2.. or they use hydrogen peroxide like in torpedoes?

Yes fuel cell powered submarines always carry an onboard oxygen supply, either compressed gas or liquid. It's not practical to extract that much dissolved O2 from seawater.

> But what kind of cargo will the submarine be carrying? "That's what we're going to figure out over the next few months," he told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme.

Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

It not that crazy concept for an actually functional drone delivery system. Ocean based wind farms that generate green hydrogen has been suggested as a possible future method to solve the grid stability issue in a future without fossil fuels (especially in the camp that would rather use fossil fuels than nuclear). If you are already producing the hydrogen in the ocean, having a delivery system of drones that operate on hydrogen and can travel independently to those wind farms to refuel seems like a good match.

This assuming that the cost of building the green hydrogen producing wind farm near the ports, the cost of the drones, the control systems and loading/offloading can be competitive to simply using very large ships that burn cheap fossil fuel.

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