[hef19898]

Regarding a ship running on LNG:

https://www.ship-technology.com/projects/viking-energy-cargo...

The same vessel will be launched early next year with an ammonia fuel cell.

LNG can be produced using green energy, the actual engine doesn't care how the fuel was produced.

Regarding the green hydrogen project: it was a proposed pilot production site to produce green hydrogen. And the business case was actually positive. No idea where that project is now, tuey needed EU funding and that was hard to come by during Covid. And after, I stopped being a freelance consultant.

[defrost]

Liquified Gas can be produced using green energy, Natural gas was produced via "green energy" a very very very long time ago.

There are several green gas projects under way - capital plants take time - eg. the Gibson Island project won't be online and producing until 2026.

https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/our-projects/gibson-island

[Manuel_D]

Synthetic methane is limited by the sources of carbon dioxide. Existing prototypes use either biomass or industrial byproducts for concentrated CO2. This is not available at scale. Biomass does not grow fast enough to sequester enough carbon.

Prometheus Fuels is the main player trying to do direct atmospheric sequesteration. But they've not succeeded yet.

[defrost]

Interesting but tangential to Gibson Island and other Fortescue Future projects as they're not attempting to sequester carbon or use biomass.

Andrew Forrest [1] has laid out plans to dramatically increase global green hydrogen production on the back of western australia's mining of close to a billion tonnes of iron ore per year (ie. experience of industry at large scale).

https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/green-energy-research/green...

The aim is to do whatever required to directly fuel existing mining truck fleets and bulk carriers.

[1] https://youtu.be/h1Y22iC90Xo?t=331

[Manuel_D]

Ships running off natural gas are nothing new. LNG carriers have been propelled by natural gas for decades. The real challenge is producing carbon-neutral natural gas, which your link says nothing about.

Synthetic natural gas has all the same problems as green hydrogen, with the added challenge of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. It's only been cheaply produced using byproduct CO2 from industrial processes. Which isn't actually carbon-neutral, it's just using CO2 that would have been released into the atmosphere anyway.

[hef19898]

There you go:

https://www.valves-community.com/en/cryogenic-air-gases/synt...

But honestly, why am I doing your internet searches for you? And why don't you know any of this already?

[Manuel_D]

That plant is not sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide. It's using waste carbon dioxide from a nearby biomass plant. This is far less challenging than removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

But unfortunately this method does not scale. The amount of fuel produced would be limited by the amount of carbon sequestered by plants. You'd be cutting down forests faster than they replenish if you tried to fuel cargo ships with this method.

> And why don't you know any of this already?

I do, and unlike you I understand how existing power to gas prototypes are using biomass or industrial byproduct CO2 rather than direct atmospheric sequesteration. This is sidestepping the most challenging part of producing synthetic hydrocarbons on a large scale.

Prometheus Fuels are the main player in attempting to solve direct atmospheric sequesteration of carbon dioxide. But they've still not delivered on that objective.

[hef19898]

And the last small scale nuclear reactor project, NuScale, was completely cancelled. So the amount of power produced by this reactor type seems rather limited, trending to zero even. And guess what, we need snall reactors to power ships, reactors we don't have (no, those half dozen Russian ones don't count).

See how this game can be olqyed in both directions? Difference being, all the real money, and industry, is going for green fuels and not nuclear power when it comes to ships. I tend to believe those people.

[Manuel_D]

NuScale wasn't building maritime propulsion.

Again, how many ships have been powered by green fuels? How many have been powered nuclear reactors? One of those is infinitely larger than the other. One of these technologies has over half a century of real world usage.

Comparing white papers about synthetic fuels with the cost history of actual nuclear powered ships that were built and operated for a decade or longer is comparing apples to oranges.

[ZeroGravitas]

Green fuel ships exist now. They're still in the early stages but plenty of big names in the business are putting their weight behind then.

Plenty of "normal" ships are already hybrid electric like trains, so swapping out the diesel generator isn't particularly a science project and doesn't affect the already electric propellors.

You mostly need a financial incentive to burn clean methanol, ammonia or whatever. That's the hard part.

[hef19898]

You just don't get it, do you? There is no readily available reactor tech suitable for commercial maritime use at the moment, none.

We do have technology so to produce green fuel for ships, and the whole shipping industry, from carriers to builders, is pursuing that in their goal of carbon neutral in 2050.

Of course there is still the possibility of those people being oart of a grand anti-nuclear conspiracy. Or they analyzed the tech and costs and came to an informed solution, one that is now global policy. You pick.