Electric ship batteries promise compact, cooler power

Which is why we won't be burning ammonia and shouldn't even try.

We already have an entire, scaled up industry of producing artificial fuel in a non-petrochemical route: It's where the ethanol in your gas tank comes from.

Farming will be easier to electrify than shipping, or it might not even need to be, and then we will have ample supply (at least here in the US) of energy dense fuels produced through non-petrochemical needs

Growing corn to turn into ethanol to burn isn't like, a carbon negative process right now, but it's also viable today to provide energy dense fuels in a sustainable way to feed our needs like long term storage, compactness, emergencies, and things like planes which won't work with batteries very well.

We already supply enough artificial hydrocarbon fuel through that process to make up 10% of all gasoline burned. As american cars electrify, the corn farmers are going to lose their shit about this subsidy being reduced, so we should just turn it around and have them commit to a larger artificial fuel industry. Our corn growing is already basically a fully socialized industry, let's just lean into it more. Put less corn syrup into random foods like burger buns and put more of it into vats to get energy dense fuel.

It's (technically, barely) an energy positive process, is extremely scalable, is fairly old "tech" such that it won't be owned by one company or country, and the hardest part will be replacing the petrochemical fertilizer.

Oh, ethanol is a more energy dense fuel too.

Any carbon-based fuel ultimately depends on a lot of capture infrastructure to be carbon-neutral. In the short term, it's hard to see a path to viability. Ammonia is easy to synthesize, ingredients are literally water and air, liquefies at achievable pressure, and can be directly consumed in a fuel cell or combustion engine. It's corrosive, but only to certain materials (late transition metals and aluminum), and toxic, but only in high concentrations (the body naturally contains a few ppm of ammonia at all times). It's biodegradable, so you don't worry as much about spills. It's flammable, but not extremely so like hydrogen.

> I wonder why ammonia became the solution that went ahead to prototype and now appears the top candidate for near future low carbon alternative?

NH3 has no carbon in it. It has the advantage of not producing CO2. This is a good advantage for public communication.

> You still have to deal with a lot of specialized infrastructure and engine design.

Is that really such a downside? Ports are full of specialized infrastructure anyway, and the costs of engine design can be amortized over many engines to be quite minimal overall. Once you've done the design work an ammonia engine isn't more expensive than a hydrogen or diesel engine. And the upsides of ammonia are substantial: fairly easy to handle, quite energy dense and most importantly it is already produced worldwide in huge amounts.

> I wonder why ammonia became the solution that went ahead to prototype and now appears the top candidate for near future low carbon alternative?

You should probably check who would control a larger part of the ammonia supply. I can see few other reasons for putting large quantities of something so unforgiving as ammonia on ships.

Hydrazine may not be as immediately lethal by inhalation but it's considered a probable human carcinogen by the EPA. It has more explosion/fire risk. It's also more expensive to synthesize starting from clean electricity (nuclear or renewables).

Hydrazine is really toxic, even compared to ammonia, and basically rocket fuel. Nah dog.

> Methane works perfectly well for shipping. It's cheap, abundant, and we already have all the infrastructure for it. > > And to fully decarbonize it, we'll just shift to biogas or power-to-gas.

There is nowhere close to enough biogas for ocean going vessel. Methane has got into the focus due to methane slip. And fossil methane only allow a limited CO2 reduction vs Marine Diesel oil. It won't be enough to reach 2030 IMO target on CO2 reduction.

I wonder if there are any nerve agents that can also function as fuels we could use.

Just add sulphur to ammonia.

Unlike superpower navies, shipping lines can't afford to train and pay nuclear engineers plus the necessary armed security personnel.

Yeah, people are probably better off not knowing how insanely cheap shipping lines are. Shipping is one of those parts of the economy and trade that is simultaneously advanced and very old fashioned (in the rickety sense) at the same time.

> A single container can contain up to 8mwh of capacity.

That's about 10 months of power for my home and car (gas heating). A 40' container on my drive or buried in the garden would power the house through the winter. It's crazy when you think how solvable season-shifting domestic power use is once you exclude the $1.5m price tag.

TFA specifically said volume is the last thing a ship operator wants to sacrifice. Volume used for batteries is volume that cannot be used for cargo.

you could fill the double hull compartment with electrolyte and fit nickel plates inside, voila, a nickel iron battery with no extra space taken up.

only problem i see is all the cells would be in parallel due to the single hull, so the voltage would be very low.

for sailing yachts that makes sense. They would use wind for most movement. While in harbor though they want the finer control that being under power allows - they don't need high speed/high power then though. They also don't spend a lot of time in this situation.

I think sailing uses mainly some other kind of energy source.

It makes so much sense. The one's I've seen can be engaged in recovery mode while running your sails, so you can spin the prop and generate electricity. They only get a few hours run time fully charged, but that's plenty for port maneuvers or trip to pick up your crab pots.

Assuming 100$/kWh and those 2G$ (giga/billion), a full charge would be 20 GWh.

Realistically: probably exposed wire like on regular high voltage pylons. Hooked to a not-too-far (the wires will be on the larger end, but you likely don't want the other end to be anywhere it could get in the way of cargo operations, and given the voltages involved, you can probably get half way across the city before it really begins to matter) grid battery bank that normally takes care of day-to-day scale grid balancing/energy arbitrage.

Then you just run a (group of) wires to the ship and apply basically the same principles as those DC fast charge stations for cars, except that you feed the high power DC link of the charging cable from the shore-side battery through much more efficient and importantly cheaper DC/DC regulators instead of involving transformers and AC.

You obviously have remote-controlled switches and circuit breakers to keep those cables grounded while the workers hook them up. You'd probably have several DC links that have their own DC/DC regulators and can be split between ships. Mostly also because there's a limit to how high-current any individual cable/connector is made in practice and because you want to use the current rating on your DC/DC converters and the thick-but-off-the-shelf cables between the battery park and the pier.

Note that these are huge: the largest grid battery plant in operation (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_energy_storage_system ) is only 4GWh, so 1/5th of such a ship.

> However, feeding the coolant through some sort of heat exchange with the sea water is very likely something they do.

Aren't ship engines usually cooled with sea water already (through a heat exchanger, not directly)? So it's not really something new

Also saltwater is conductive so if you submerged your batteries in it, you'd have an immediate short circuit. It's definitely through a heat exchanger.

A bigger ferry than that has been fully electric in Norway for five years between Horten and Moss. Probably a shorter route than the Washington State one though.

https://www.dailyscandinavian.com/worlds-largest-electric-fe...

https://indre24.no/2021/03/01/verdens-storste-elektriske-fer...

As a crazy thought: On predictable routes in shallow enough water, implement an underwater power source similar in function (if not physically similar) to overhead electric bus/trolley power lines? The boats would move along their routes with a cable running down to to a connector that slides along the power source.

I'm imagining channels in a busy waterway or a regular ferry route. Of course it needs economy of scale, but at that point everyone saves on batteries, etc. Unless there are submarines, I don't know what would pass under the boat and cut the connection.

Maybe watercraft usage or routes aren't predictable enough? Maybe the sliding connector is too expensive underwater, especially in sea water.