The shipping industry is predisposed to assume that molecules are required for energy. Some of that is simply that the history of shipping for the past two hundred years has required them. But much of it is also due to the industry moving molecules for revenue. It’s hard for them to conceptualize or accept a world with a lot fewer molecules being moved around, including the ones carrying energy like maritime bunker fuel, reports Forbes.
Molecules
But it’s starting to sink in that the replacement molecules for energy stories that they have been being told by the ammonia and methanol industries have been lacking a vital bit of reality. At the container shipping industry’s top event this year Jeremy Nixon, the CEO of Japanese liner Ocean Network Express, told attendees to expect double or triple the fuel costs per container. Based on work I’ve done multiple ways over the past several years, I believe that’s likely optimistic.
If only there were alternatives that could be suitable for a great deal of shipping. And there are. As this series explores electrifying everything everywhere all at once as a key wedge in climate change action, today’s question is how much of major segments of water traffic will end up with batteries.
Some short-sea routes that stay close to shores are anything but short, however. A ship that stays mostly within the site of shore steaming from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Caracas, Venezuela would be travelling roughly 9,000 kilometres, far more than the distances usually travelled across the Atlantic Ocean by ships.
Inland watercraft are also much smaller than short sea ships, which are also smaller than deep-water behemoths. While there are a dozen 300-meter tankers on the Great Lakes, they are the exception. A major container ship crossing oceans might carry 24,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers and be 400 meters long. An ultra-large crude carrier in the Pacific could carry 400,000 metric tons and be 415 meters long. Lake, riverboats, and canal boats in most cases are a fraction of that size, and coastal are half or a quarter of that scale.
The combination of both shorter routes and smaller sizes begs the question: is it possible to electrify them with batteries instead of low-carbon burnable fuels? This isn’t an idle question. As the series has been making clear, anything that can electrify directly through grid ties, batteries or both will electrify simply because the economics make that inevitable. Directly using green electricity in high-efficiency drive trains will always be the lowest total cost of ownership low-carbon alternative. Only burning long-buried hydrocarbons and using the atmosphere as an open sewer is cheaper, and that’s no longer a viable alternative.\
The answer is yes. Every watercraft operating on lakes, rivers, and canals will be battery-electric. All port utility vehicles will be battery-electric including tugs, lighters, and tenders. All pleasure craft will be battery-electric. It’s already happening.
How can we be so sure? There are a few data points to consider. First, there are a lot of electric working vessels already in operation. Echandia is a firm that retrofits large boats and small ships with batteries. It uses lithium titanium oxide batteries and has a solution for 75-kilometer ranges. That battery chemistry is a third of the energy density that is in the ones Tesla uses in its Semi. Just using Tesla-grade batteries provides a range of 225 kilometres, which is almost sufficient for Rotterdam to Harrich.
But this year CATL, the world’s largest electric vehicle battery manufacturer, started shipping a new battery with an energy density twice Tesla’s. That would provide 450 kilometres of range, virtually enough by itself for the average inland water trip and a significant portion of short sea shipping.
But this is just the beginning of battery energy density improvements. The current Holy Grail battery energy chemistry — and not the last one in my assessment — is silicon. Yes, the same silicon that’s in the chips in all of our computerized devices and solar panels. It has a theoretical maximum energy density five times that of CATL’s battery. Multiple firms and practical research organizations on at least three continents are commercializing early versions of batteries with it, having overcome a specific technical limitation in three different ways.
Alternative sources
Silicon is cheap and plentiful. At least one and likely two of these solutions will successfully commercialize and have the characteristics necessary for use in ships. Even if the batteries only double CATL’s current density, that’s sufficient for the average short-sea trip as well, which if you’ll remember had a conservatively longer average than is likely true.
But at five times CATL’s density, all but the longest short-sea routes are addressable. The potential range is 2,250 kilometres. When I was debating maritime decarbonization for Stena’s lead maritime engineers and designers in Glasgow earlier this year, I asked them if any of the firm’s scheduled routes were that long. None were.
This narrative suggests the following in my opinion. All inland shipping and two-thirds of short-sea shipping will be battery-electric. All other ships will end up as battery-electric hybrids with some burnable fuel, operating in coastal waters and ports under quiet, non-polluting battery power and replacing auxiliary power units with batteries and shore power. They will burn fuel only at sea, and it will be low-carbon fuel. Which low-carbon fuel is next in the series, let’s return to data.
This year saw the launch of twin ships from the Yangzhou shipyard in northern China, inland from Shanghai on the Yangtze River. They are 700 TEU ships, and remember large oceanic container ships can carry 24,000 TEUs. They are going to be travelling a 1,000-kilometer route up and down the Yangtze River to and from the world’s largest container port on the Yellow Sea.
And they are running on batteries.
The batteries are in 36 containers. Just as other containers are winched on and off the ships in ports they pass through, discharged battery containers are winched off for onshore charging, and charged containers are winched back aboard. Container ships and crews are already used to plugging in containers as they do so with reefers — refrigerated containers — today. China has an explicit strategic goal of decarbonization of all inland shipping in the next couple of decades, and the pathway is direct electrification.
The Yangtze container ships are not alone. There are innumerable personal electric watercraft already. Battery-electric ferries and tugs are operating on waterways and in ports globally. In Europe, Zero Emissions Services is upgrading a 132 TEU inland ship to swappable battery containers. As in every other domain, they are cheaper to purchase and much cheaper to operate than hydrogen fuel cell alternatives. This is the beginning of a massive transformation of roughly half of shipping to batteries.
There are headwinds, of course. Over the past decades for a variety of reasons including the USA’s Jones Act, manufacturing of new ships has relocated to South Korea and China. There are no major shipyards with access to sophisticated battery gigafactories in North America or Europe that can build these new vessels rapidly and inexpensively. Just as with Maersk’s new 9,000 TEU methanol dual fuel ships being manufactured in South Korea and requiring delivery to Europe, so too will there be a new spate of Asian shipbuilding. Of course, at least the USA will be resistant to this, so will likely lag as it is on the electrification of freight trains. But lagging is not the same as not electrifying.
Over the coming decades, this is an inevitable channel. Reusable batteries which are recyclable at the end of a life filled with electrons from wind and solar powering high-efficiency electric motors will be used everywhere that they can be. Burning single-use molecules to power ships will be relegated to the portion of shipping that remains after fossil fuels are no longer crossing our oceans.
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Source: Forbes
