Electrification is seen as a crucial pathway towards decarbonization throughout all sectors, as it offers a higher efficiency of tenergy conversion combined with a potential to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through increased deployment of low-GHG energy sources, reports zero Carbon shipping.
Battery-powered vessels
Battery-powered vessels have also entered the shipping segment in applications with short ferry crossings or in hybrid installations with internal combustion engines (ICE). Short-sea ships such as the ferries Ellen, Aurora, and Tycho Brahe have been in commercial operation for several years.4,5 These ferries have an installed capacity of about 4 MWh, sufficient for the short sea passages the vessels are deployed on.
Consequently, they decided to launch a study of battery-powered vessels, utilizing the combined knowledge and expertise at the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping (MMMCZCS) to derive a position on the following questions:
- Is battery-electric propulsion a viable transition pathway and, if so, at what scale?
- In which vessel segments and sizes could battery-electric propulsion be a technically viable pathway?
- In which vessel segments and sizes can battery-electric propulsion represent a solid business case?
- How big is the potential of battery-electric propulsion to save renewable energy from a life-cycle perspective compared to usage of e-fuels?
In this report, they identified technological and economic barriers to the uptake of battery-electric propulsion in deep-sea shipping and the development required to help marine batteries overcome these barriers. Based on analyses of the global fleet in container, tanker, and dry-cargo segments, we derive case studies that enable us to explore the design and arrangement of battery rooms for each case and how operations can be optimized to accommodate for battery-electric propulsion.
Based on an analysis of the global fleet in the container ship, tanker, and dry-bulk vessel segments, we derived study cases for the investigation. We chose to focus on 1,100 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) container ships, Handysize product tankers (40k deadweight tons (DWT)) and Handysize dry-bulk vessels (35k DWT).
While pure battery-electric propulsion systems face both technical and economic limitations, a ‘hybrid power plant’ approach—combining battery-electric components with ICE—offers a promising solution. This hybrid approach ensures overall gains in life-cycle energy efficiency and operational flexibility for seagoing vessels.
They find that battery-powered container ships applying the hybrid power plant philosophy have a viable business case compared to equivalent vessels powered by methanol dual-fuel internal combustion engines. This assessment considers current prices of the baseline vessels as well as projected prices for battery systems, electricity, and methanol.
From a life-cycle perspective, the demand for renewable energy is reduced by more than 65% in our battery-powered case studies compared to the methanol dual-fuel ICE baseline. As a result, targeting smaller-sized merchant vessels on short voyages for partial electrification ultimately has the potential to address up to 17% of today’s carbon dioxide emissions in the entire respective vessel segments. Furthermore, by increasing the life-cycle energy efficiency in this way, an additional 1.8 exajoules of renewable.
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Source: Zero-carbon shipping
