- Spurred largely by pending global regulations, the race is on to develop low- and zero-carbon fuels for ships and scale up their use.
- There are “bridge fuels” that could be used during a transition period or in a limited way for the long term, such as biofuels, and then there are options that are more sustainable at scale, such as green methanol and green ammonia.
- Experts continue to debate the pros and cons of green methanol and green ammonia, which are generally seen as the best options in the medium to long term.
- A net-zero framework for shipping that would drive the adoption of alternative fuels is coming up for a vote in mid-October at a meeting of the International Maritime Organization in London.
archived (Wayback Machine)
The fucking wind. And a few solar panels
Kites are such an obvious answer
According to this very compelling article, we could actually skip transition fuels entirely, and switch over to iron-air electric batteries pretty much immediately. It just seems to be lesser known.
I think it’d be possible to combine iron-air batteries with new sail designs to extend the range even further without any carbon emissions.
Thank you for sharing this! Great to see someone present some real numbers and explain how it would work.
In a hypothetical future, I think using “excess” renewable energy during the day to run electrolyzers to make green hydrogen makes sense. I’m not sure how hydrogen stacks up against methanol or ammonia fuels though.
They don’t really talk about using hydrogen directly, just as past of the process of producing other fuels. I assume it boils down to the fact that hydrogen requires all the infrastructure associated with high pressure storage and transport. Methanol/ammonia can be transported as liquid in much the same way as other liquid hydrocarbon fuels, you can carry it in a bucket if you needed to.
I thought there were modern sails that looked promising.
There’s a bunch of them!
I gathered up all the examples I could find awhile back:
The IRL and proposed examples are about halfway down the page.
