Giant Retailers Pledge To Leave Fossil-fueled Ships Behind (theverge.com) 96
Major retailers, including Amazon and Ikea, are beginning to clean up their shipping pollution. From a report: A group of companies pledged yesterday that by 2040, they'll only contract ships using zero-carbon fuels to move their goods. Both Ikea and Amazon were among the 15 companies responsible for the most maritime import pollution in 2019, according to one recent analysis. Joining Amazon and Ikea in the commitment are Unilever, Michelin, and clothing retailer Inditex, which owns Zara and other brands. German retailer Tchibo, Patagonia, sports gear company Brooks Running, and FrogBikes are part of the deal, too. The aim is to leave behind heavy fuel oil in favor of alternatives that don't release planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions. But there will still be plenty of hurdles ahead to rein in shipping pollution. "This will be a catalyzing force and a game-changer for the industry to really push for the decarbonization of the sector," says Kendra Ulrich, shipping campaigns director at the environmental nonprofit Stand.earth, which was one of the authors of the 2019 import pollution report.
are they going to cut the forests down for this? (Score:4)
plant based fuels are nice but not at the expense of cutting down forests to grow the plants to make the fuel. like the USA and corn
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I'm guessing it won't quite be 100% ready....
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It's not the same as a windmill on a sailboat but even that could potentially harvest a certain amount. If the wind is perpendicular to the direction of the boat, it likely can generate significant power this way. As this force is more relative to ballast than motion, though we can say it adds a certain amount of friction. If the wind uses vertical capTure the direction doesn't matter really but again the most gain is likely with perpendicular motion towards the wind.
Depending on the setup you don't need 10
Re:are they going to cut the forests down for this (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen as it exists today cannot be considered a green fuel.
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I'm thinking sailing downwind faster than the wind!
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Plant based fuels don't scale to this level. The most likely fuel for long distance looks to be ammonia, although methanol has a chance too, both produced industrially. Nuclear and wind are outsiders.
Short and medium distance will likely be batteries.
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More to the point, neither plant-based fuels nor methanol are zero carbon. Quite the opposite - burning them releases all their carbon back into the air.
Hydrogen is only zero-carbon if it's made with a zero-carbon process. It generally isn't.
Wind on a ship smells like a perpetual motion machine. You'd have to spend energy to counter the force the wind applies to the mill. Maybe some imbalances to be exploited but I'm suspicious of the idea all the same.
Nuclear if ports are willing to host Panamanian flagged
Re:are they going to cut the forests down for this (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, I think what you are objecting to are windmills on a ship. This is a silly thing to object to, because it has been successfully demonstrated in service as supplemental propulsion by one of the largest cargo shipping companies in the world. https://www.norsepower.com/pos... [norsepower.com]
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Windmills on ships sounds similar to projects for floating solar plants. One such project in the UK uses an existing reservoir to float the solar panels. This has the great advantage that it does not occupy any land, which is a common objection to land-based wind and solar.
As far as I know, one of the disadvantages of a conventional sailing ship is that it is dependent on the current direction of the wind, so that restricted what routes were viable. Ocean-going vessels exploited trade winds [noaa.gov]. I presume a ves
Re: are they going to cut the forests down for thi (Score:2)
Your comparison is ludicrous.
Yes, Clippers went fast. They also didn't carry 250,000 tons of cargo.
Even in their heyday, they weren't the primary cargo ships, they were used for the most valuable, time sensitive cargos,i.e. the airfreight of their day...they were vastly more expensive to sail, per ton of cargo, than their peers.
Nobody - not one - has deployed a service functional cargo ship in the modern era powered by wind. And that fuel is free vs $25k/day bunker cost for a container ship...And yet even
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Wind on a ship sounds like a sailboat, a design which has several millennia of successful implementations that can be duplicated or improved upon.
Ship mass scales by the volume while area available for sails scales by the square. So sails are only feasible for smaller ships unless much longer travel times are acceptable.
How many sails does it take to produce 50,000 horsepower?
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Wind on a ship smells like a perpetual motion machine. You'd have to spend energy to counter the force the wind applies to the mill. Maybe some imbalances to be exploited but I'm suspicious of the idea all the same.
Yeah...all those perpetual motion...sailboats.
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Hydrogen is only zero-carbon if it's made with a zero-carbon process. It generally isn't.
This will not always be the case. People are constantly working on ways to make hydrolysis more efficient.
Wind on a ship smells like a perpetual motion machine. You'd have to spend energy to counter the force the wind applies to the mill. Maybe some imbalances to be exploited but I'm suspicious of the idea all the same.
Except if you use sails. They are being used on freighters today. Just not so many. Here are some examples. [thetius.com]
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Not sure why it wasn't obvious I meant wind for electrical generation. The wind driving the generators will push the ship in a way that has to be offset by the electrically powered screw. This feedback loop consumes the energy that was generated in the first place.
Direct-drive wind, aka sailing ships, have unrelated issues which make them unsuitable for modern cargo vessels.
Re: are they going to cut the forests down for thi (Score:2)
Most ammonia comes from natural gas.
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https://cen.acs.org/environmen... [acs.org]
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When folks tried nuclear shipping earlier it wasn't economic. Is there a chance it could be now, for the very largest ships, using new reactor designs?
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When folks tried nuclear shipping earlier it wasn't economic. Is there a chance it could be now, for the very largest ships, using new reactor designs?
In a perfect world, very much so. But the nuclear industry is hamstrung but over-regulation and "nuke fear" which makes it unlikely. Given the ~$2b capital cost for the largest of tanker ships, the price tag for a ~50MW fission plant isn't unreasonable. Unfortunately, sufficiently compact and powerful plants would likely require enriched uranium (think nuclear sub, aircraft carrier, etc.) which is a hard no for private use. Especially since many cargo ships are registered under counties that aren't nucle
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The overregulation and nuke fear that you cite is an awful thing. How many people have died from nuclear accidents, total? Far, far, far fewer than die from air pollution from coal, or from car accidents, or a zillion other things. And, if you discount Chernobyl, which only blew up because an aggressively designed reactor with a dangerously positive void coefficient was pushed into a xenon pit and then yanked out by force *and* the infamous use of graphite-tipped control rods...
The oldest operating power re
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Ya know, there are literal tons of yard waste produced each year in this country alone which could be converted into fuel, aside from corn. If it's not being composted, why not use it for fuel?
Then again, there are literal tons of bodies dying each year which could similarly be used, but then, religion.
A Message from 2040 (Score:1)
Major retailers, including Amazon and Ikea, were unable to comment on meeting their zero-carbon shipping goals. Even through the use of shell companies and "independent contractors" sources indicate that corporate goals were largely unmet.
In other news, LA will see a low of 33 C again today with highs in the upper 40s.
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40C is an Australian summer day.
33C is an Australian spring day.
This is a forum for international discussions.
Unless you want to claim that non-US people are somehow second class.
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It's pretty easy to do once you learn the units, which are just as meaningful as Fahrenheit. I'm sure that you know that 0 degrees Celcius is the temperature water freezes and 100 degrees Celcius is the temperature that water boils (at standard air pressure), right? So 33 degrees is a third of the way from freezing to boiling. Halfway from freezing to boiling is 50 degrees, which is close to the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth in Death Valley (I think the record is 54 degrees Celcius with a dispu
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That's the thing, with degrees F, I don't have to give it any thought or any effort....we think in degrees F for daily actives from birth to death here...never in C.
Without thinking I know how hot 99F is....and how cold 22F is.
I have to stop, and think or get a calculator out, etc....
In the US, in regular life, we do not do ANYTHING in metric. Sure in a lab we'll do degrees C
That's a good troll. (Score:2)
Well done. If you were serious I'd say willful ignorance is it's own punishment.
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In the US, in regular life, we do not do ANYTHING in metric.
I live in the US, so I don't think you can speak for everyone in the US. True, I wasn't born here but it really isn't hard to have an idea about both systems. You use an example of how you "know how hot 99F is....and how cold 22F is.". But do you really know how hot they are? For example, if we put you in a climate controlled room and set the temperature and other conditions, could you tell whether it was 99F or 22F, or could you just give a ballpark figure? Because if you can't do it in reverse like that,
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If you weren't born here, then you were exposed to the metric system before coming here.
We're not here....and yes, it is a pain in the ass to have to stop and think about it.
Err, in normal every day life, I never use a 24 hours clo
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If you weren't born here, then you were exposed to the metric system before coming here.
We're not here....and yes, it is a pain in the ass to have to stop and think about it.
Yes, but why am I comfortable using both Fahrenheit and Celcius if your apparent theory that early imprinting forces you to use one or the other holds water? I can also use inches, feet, yards and miles (and furlongs for that matter) and acres and also use millimeters, centimeters, meters and kilometers as well as hectares. I will admit that the concept of mils really bothers me, but I can work with them. I know offhand inches in a foot, feet in a yard, inches in a yard, feet in a mile, yards in a mile, squ
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I am going to tell you, those numbers are not far from where they were when I lived in the SanGrabriel Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles, in the 70's. Oh, and very few of the people I knew had air conditioning.
Unless nukes on cargo ships, this is BS (Score:3)
Bunker oil is not going to go away. Cost per mile vs cargo moved, this is so far the least polluting fossil fuel right now.
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Bunker oil is not going to go away. Cost per mile vs cargo moved, this is so far the least polluting fossil fuel right now.
It's a horribly polluting fossil fuel, it's just being used in an application that's highly efficient. Cargo ships and large ships in general can have a tiny cross section relative to their mass, which works out to a tiny amount of friction relative to the mass being moved, and there are various tricks to lower the friction even more like pumping bubbles under the hull, etc. That efficiency has nothing to do with the fuel type though. That high efficiency is also on truly massive volume, so cargo shipping s
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A mat might be an idea. Or a series of barges, but I wasn't sure how much drag they would create.
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Have you looked at a modern ship? While you might get away with solar panels on the deck with something like a tanker, a ship built to carry containers does not really have any usable deck area at all. It's containers from down in the hold as high as they can safely stack them. No room for solar panels, unless you mount them on top of the containers (which you would have to do before every sailing, then remove when the ship docked).
For the "wings" idea.... I mean, you realize the purpose of the ship is t
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Have you looked at a modern ship? While you might get away with solar panels on the deck with something like a tanker, a ship built to carry containers does not really have any usable deck area at all. It's containers from down in the hold as high as they can safely stack them. No room for solar panels, unless you mount them on top of the containers (which you would have to do before every sailing, then remove when the ship docked).
Sure, but there's no reason they need to be on the deck. Ships have been using rigged structures supported by masts, etc. for thousands of years. Something similar could be employed to create a movable canopy over the cargo. There's no reason that the structure even needs to be connected to the main ship when it docks.
For the "wings" idea.... I mean, you realize the purpose of the ship is to move cargo?
I realize that, yes. That's why I kept referring to it as a "cargo ship"
You've now built massive structures around the ship making it impossible to get near the dock, and your hypothetical design makes the ship 400% longer (meaning that if you could somehow get the ship into port, the port would only be able to handle 1/5 as many of them).
The 400%+ longer version is the fully solar powered version, just to be clear. It would be more of a barge towed by the
I have read TFA (Score:2)
But i fail to see how the shipping companies can achieve carbon neutrality. Less carbon intensive by using better fuels, sure. They can't be serious about giant fuel cells and hydrogen is not made by electrolysis but by steam reforming of hydrocarbons.
And anyway fuel cells aren't stable.
And they aren't talking about sail cargoes or nuclear.
Not impossible, but not easy (Score:5, Interesting)
The good news is many new ships are recapitalized and sold on the used market after 5 years, run another 15 years or so, then broken up in places like India and Bangladesh. So 20 years out it's possible to recapitalize the global merchant fleet to ships using newer technologies.
The bigger challenge is the technologies and the engine hardware. One way or another, you're burning something to move a ship. The biggest ships in the world primarily use engines that burn HFO (as it's the cheapest stuff out there) and are optimized that way. Some engines can burn alternatives; many diesel electric ships of the USN can burn highly refined JP5 as well as bunker fuel for example. But net-zero fuels need to be qualified on the big engines to make a big 15,000 TEU ship have the same speed and equivalent maintenance schedule as HFO. It should be close to HFO in cost, but it's unlikely biofuels or some other synthetic will get to cost parity of HFO, so close is ok.
Not impossible, but not easy either. However a statement like this might get the big engine guys to design newer models to incorporate alternative fuel features.
For reference of the kind of engines we're talking about, this is a Wartsila RT-Flex96C; typically installed on ships of approximately 10,000 TEU and up. This is the kind of power output you need to move these ships, and is the only thing that scales well with size. You can basically get a lot more power out of a bigger engine which translates to bigger sized ships really well; alternative energy (like solar or wind for power generation) do not scale to this kind of size that well, so unfortunately you have to burn something to move these big ships. https://www.zmescience.com/science/biggest-most-poweful-engine-world/
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As with all these things, they'll hope you forget within 20 years, given the current state of the media, they'll forget in about 3 weeks and make excuses why they can't reach their goals when we're halfway there.
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Nice PR move.
Yep. Push anything out 20+ years and it looks good but everybody forgets before the time comes.
Ships will still be burning bunker oil in 20 years. And farmers will still be growing coffee beans.
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No idea about the economics and risks associated with operating these, but they keep building them so I presume they think they are best solution for that niche. Perhaps a shift away from fossil fuels will open opportunities for marine nuclear power.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Merchant_ships
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I'm surprised that they don't go to some kind of serial hybrid type setup, I would think it would allow for better control of the different parts, and a possible swap of the generator side later when there is something better invented. Many trains run a diesel electric serial hybrid arrangement, so it seem slike the technology should be there to do that on a ship. It would let them spread out the power generation more as well, as you could have multiple generators producing the power instead of one big en
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HFO? Heating fuel oil? No, pretty sure ships burn MFO, marine fuel oil. There was a time when BFO was common, bunker fuel oil, but that's fuel that is so thick that it has to be heated before it can be pumped out of a tank. Fuel this thick can be put in the old coal bunkers and not leak out the bottom, which gave it its name, it's almost like candle wax and so can be shoveled out of the bunkers like chunks of coal. This fell out of use because it was necessary to run the fire risk of heating the fuel o
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I really doubt there will be any nuclear powered ships owned by private civilian organisations anytime soon (I don't think the Russian ice breakers are privately owned)..
Suddenly half of the world will have access to large amounts of radioactive material. And some of those are places where you don't want the locals to have access to any of that, as much as possible.
And imagine pirates hijacking one of these ships.
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HFO? Heating fuel oil? No,
No indeed. Heavy Fuel Oil.
There was a time when BFO was common, bunker fuel oil, but that's fuel that is so thick that it has to be heated before it can be pumped out of a tank. Fuel this thick can be put in the old coal bunkers and not leak out the bottom, which gave it its name, it's almost like candle wax and so can be shoveled out of the bunkers like chunks of coal. This fell out of use because it was necessary to run the fire risk of heating the fuel or needing more labor to s
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There's also the idea of bringing back an ancient idea: sailboats [slashdot.org]. The Oceanbird claims it can reduce emissions by 90% (it still requires an engine for maneuvering in and out of port). That's not 0 emissions, but a 90% reduction is certainly still admirable.
If only (Score:2)
In the interim, if only there were a way to reduce fuel consumption by using some sort of renewable energy. Like, something that kind of pushes the ships along.
I wonder if there's anything that just kind of...pushes. Invisibly. In the air.
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Sure but maneuvering them was costly in lives. An average of one death per passage of the Cape Horn in the old times of the clippers. That said you have the canals now.
Also you would have to pay a lot of personnel for the rigging. I would love that though. In a more reasonalbe fashion i have read about tests of giant kite surf sails to lower the consumption of cargoes. But it lowers the carbon footprint. It doesn't reduce it to zero.
Re: If only (Score:2)
if you saved powered motion for ports and canals, you likely reduce the fuel needs by 75% or more for transatlantic or transpacific shipping. However it's slower in two ways, it doesn't produce the same constant velocity and requires specializing the route. Even with specialized routes, kites alone won't do enough. Kites might reduce by 20% but that seems hopeful.
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If the goal is to reduce consumption practically, 20% is a huge number when you consider absolute values of consumed fuel and emitted pollution, so I think that would be worth it. It's one of those things where we should be doing it just because even small percentage savings really pay off, and we can keep iterating on completely clean solutions in the mean time.
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Yes but this is a significant trade-off in speed. Sinces kites can only allow you to travel at the speed of the wind, and average global wind speeds are around 7 knots, with shipping containers average speeds around 23 knots, then we are effectively talking work case tripping the time of the journey. Now I know we agree they want be kite sailing the whole trip but we are probably talking close to double the travel time when we include the legs of their journey powered by kites. So the business sense of doub
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the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind (Score:5, Informative)
and forbes had a rundown on alternatives in 2020:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/n... [forbes.com]
End of externalities? (Score:2)
So strange saying that Amazon was responsible for shipping pollution rather than the customers so desperate to buy something at rock bottom prices that it pretty much guarantees it would never be financially viable to produce a product locally.
Maybe if they simply charge a shipping carbon tax on all their goods we'd get things made at home for a change.
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Because all those tariffs the con artist implemented against Chinese and other goods which people paid when they bought those products spurred manufacturing in this country.
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The problem with the orange moron is that regardless of what he did everyone knows the reasons he did it and that they don't withstand any scrutiny and therefore aren't here for the long haul.
If you were a company deciding on an investment opportunity and you're faced with two scenarios:
a) A complete moron somehow becomes president, has a hard-on against China with no actual plan other than to attempt to cause chaos, and puts in place trade barriers which very much were likely to be overturned by the WTO be
This right there... (Score:2)
...IF actually properly executed, will probably do more for the environment than banning incandescent bulbs, straws, plastic shopping bags and just about anything they tried loading off onto the populace.
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...IF actually properly executed, will probably do more for the environment than banning incandescent bulbs, straws, plastic shopping bags and just about anything they tried loading off onto the populace.
From my point of view, none of the things "loaded off onto the populace" has caused me any trouble. LED bulbs save me a bit on my electric bill, and last longer than incandescent bulbs. I already re-used plastic shopping bags years before shops started charging for them.
What could save a great deal of energy is not shipping so much stuff in the first place. Apart from the security and politics angle, having China as the world's factory entails shipping goods vast distances.
Lifespan? (Score:3)
So 10-15 years lifespan for those container ships mean that within 5 years no fossil ship should be sold?
By 2040 ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... they hope everyone will have forgotten their promises, or they will have bailed out with their golden parachute and not give a flying fuck whether the promise is carried out. Promises with deadlines more than 2 years in the future aren't worth the air expelled while voicing them.
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But it's also impossible to do a switch in 2 years. A new ship takes anywhere from 5 to 10 years to go from concept to design. You have to anticipate what people might want.
The technologies now available for ships don't make it
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... they hope everyone will have forgotten their promises, or they will have bailed out with their golden parachute and not give a flying fuck whether the promise is carried out. Promises with deadlines more than 2 years in the future aren't worth the air expelled while voicing them.
Or they hoping there will be some technology breakthru happening in the next decade or so. And if nothing happens, and 99% of the ships are still using fossil fuels, what are they going to do? Shut down the business due to lack of alternative powered ships? They will just blame the industry, and say they tried, but there is nothing available to make it happen.
they are going to power the ships with hot air.... (Score:1)
since they have excess hot air in their PR departments.
win win.
Meh, it's been done (Score:3)
Meet the NS Savannah, genuine 1960s tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Look up Green Ammonia (Score:2)
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2) Green Ammonia can be created at the well head by cracking methane, capturing the CO2 and injecting the CO2 back into the well. The energy of cracking comes from CH and the Nitrogen comes from the air.
Saudi is moving towards this so they can still sell Ammonia as a fuel when the world moves off carbon.
Speed of Light (Score:1)
A whole new industry! (Score:2)
Building ships that are a square kilometer in size, are covered with windmills and solar panels, and can move at 1.5 kmph (and stop in only 6 kilometers).
Sailing ships (Score:2)
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What happens when some pirate somewhere seizes a nuclear-powered cargo ship, takes it somewhere, rips out the radioactive material and turns it into a dirty bomb or something?
Or what happens when governments or port operators decide they wont allow these nuclear ships in? (New Zealand already has bans in place for any nuclear powered ships)
Oh and how do you expect the people who typically crew these cargo ships to be able to safely operate a nuclear reactor? The people who operate nuclear reactors in the US
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Nuclear
LOL, Good luck with that. The USN has a bitch of a time with disposing of their nukes. They're very expensive. They'd have to have an end to end solution for it and you can bet it'll be expensive with all the crazy environmentalists. They don't even want land based nukes.
Reduce Globalization (Score:2)
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... it's reasonable for production to move closer to the point of consumption to reduce shipping costs and delivery time.
In my line of business, which involves electronic manufacturing, I have seen printed circuit board manufacturing steadily disappear in the UK, in favour on Chinese manufacture. The prices are far cheaper than I used to pay for local manufacture, and the delivery times can be just as good, despite the shipping distance. The PCBs must be coming by air, I think, in order to meet such deadlines, and that would have a considerably higher energy cost than water-borne transport.
I think one of the problems with mo
Roman technology (Score:2)
Nuclear (Score:2)
Why not not nuclear.
Mass manufactured to bring down the price. No refueling.
The Nuclear Navy has logged over 5,400 reactor years of accident-free operations and travelled over 130 million miles on nuclear energy, enough to circle the earth 3,500 times.
From the time of the USS Nautilus in 1954, to the present, no civilian or military personnel on these ships has ever exceeded any Federal radiation limit
it's a brilliant, foresightful idea (Score:2)
...as long as one knows nothing about cargo shipping.
The people who know how such things work laugh at this stupid crap and go back to their real jobs.
The people who deeply care about such announcements will forget about it in a week or three.
free PR, no substance (Score:2)
... now if they said they would require a 5% increase each year (basically the same as 100% by 2040), it'd mean something.
Easy enough to do now (Score:1)
All you have to do is pay carbon tax and *poof* - you're a zero carbon emitter.
Too many games created by people trying to shift wealth around.
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All you have to do is pay carbon tax and *poof* - you're a zero carbon emitter.
Too many games created by people trying to shift wealth around.
Yes.
The trade winds still work. It's about half the speed and ships are a fraction of the size, however they work. Getting off of Diesel container ships will be tough.