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by gonesilent 892 days ago
LNG ships are paying the big bucks in the auctions.
2 comments

It’s because LNG ships are cannibals.

Due to the nature of LNG storage, a small amount of the gas “boils off” every day (fraction of a %). The longer a voyage, the more cargo is lost. So LNG carriers are incentivised to deliver cargo as quickly as possible so they can maximise the delivered value of the goods.

(Fortunately because these ships themselves are LNG powered, they are designed to recapture this boiled off fuel to operate the vessel)

Too bad nobody can figure out a way to move fluids efficiently across land or seafloor. Impossible problem to solve.
Interestingly 40% of all cargo carried on ships globally today is oil, gas, coal and other fossil fuels.

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/12/any-fossil-fuel-phase-out-...

I really didn't expect "Panama channel bottleneck" to be one of the problems we can solve with renewables.
Continental pipelines exist but need a significant amount of power to operate the compressors along the path.

As for subsea pipelines: it's hard enough to lay these alongside the same continent, i.e. in geologically stable and relatively flat areas such as the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico... but no one has even attempted to run anything larger than a fiber cable across the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean.