Fun fact: through the 1800s coal-powered steamships mostly replaced sailing vessels for the transportation of people and time-sensitive cargo around the world. But steamships were highly inefficient and required frequent re-coaling, and locally available coal was dirtier and contained less thermal energy than the good stuff that Britain (who was doing by far most of the shipping) got from Wales and other places on their island. Because steamships could not efficiently and cheaply haul the coal that they needed around the world to restock the coaling stations, this was done instead by an enormous fleet of sailing colliers. So the “steam revolution” of the 1800s was actually a steam/wind-power hybrid. It wasn’t until the advent of triple- and quadruple-expansion steam engines, turbines, and greatly improved boilers in the early 1900s that steam-powered vessels could efficiently and economically haul their own fuel. And even with that, wind-powered cargo vessels remained economically viable and operating in significant numbers right up until the start of WWII (that’s II, not I).
A great read is The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby, about his time as a sailor aboard Moshulu (a large steel sail-powered cargo ship) in 1938-1939. Moshulu went on to star in The Godfather Part II as the ship which brings young Vito Corleone to New York, and is now weirdly enough a floating restaurant in my city of Philadelphia (I’ve never eaten there but I want to).
These chairs they have inside it would make me not want to eat there.
Once you realize the byproducts of oil and how essential some are and the fact that rich countries aren’t going to change their way of life and the fact that developing countries will industrialize in the same way western countries have and will start to produce similar environmental emissions things look pretty bleak in terms of that average temperature rise.
the fact that developing countries will industrialize in the same way western countries have and will start to produce similar environmental emissions
That’s not a fact. It makes more sense for developing countries to skip directly to renewable energy sources.
You’re right it’s not a fact. But I would say large percentage of developing nations aren’t pursuing such options because it’s easier to use things like coal. If you take a look at the new coal plants under construction as the moment, the top 15 are from developing countries. https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-just-15-countries-account-for-98-of-new-coal-power-development/
China and India account for 3 billion people alone and they’re still building new coal plants to account for their growing energy needs despite using renewable energy.
That’s because those plans and policies were drafted 10 years ago when coal was cheaper. These days the plans being made are based on solar, because solar is the cheapest.
Water/wind/solar is cheaper now, and it’s not even close. It’s electrifying communities that never had any sort of electrification before since they can buy a few panels and bypass the (often corrupt) power utility in the country. The intermittency is a problem, but it’s still better than not having it at all.
So yes, it looks like they’ll skip carbon-based energy entirely. This is similar to what’s happened with landlines in these regions; they skipped straight to cell phones.
That said, you know where 95% of new coal power plants are being built? China.
Sadly many developing countries are further along in EV uptake because they have access to $4k EVs without tariffs
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And destroyed the Baltimore bridge because their backup engines were split between legal fuel and “international waters” fuel.
What’s with the math in the middle of your comment?
hyphen became a plus? Dalí didn’t have a spare engine because their working spare engine wasn’t purged of fuel that wouldn’t be legal to burn in US coastal waters.
It was that in combination with the “engine-generators” yes. Made it unclear.
this is arguably fine, because this way ships make clouds of sulfate aerosols, which have slight cooling effect and no one is bothered by it when it’s released over sea
It’s only fine until those sulfates react with water vapor in the atmosphere to form sulphuric acid. That stuff rains back down and contributes to ocean acidification which is causing serious harm to all sorts of marine ecosystems.
Good thing humans are the only life on earth.
Yeah, what a luck, isn’t it?
This is wrong in some many ways. To add to the already mentioned. Ocean water is the largest carbon dioxide buffer by absorbing CO2 to become carbonic acid. As the sulfur acidifies the Ocean, this “competes” with the carbonic acid, increasing the CO2 emissions from the Ocean.
In other words, all geoengineering tropes end up being horseshit.
I swear every time I see an argument like that one, if they zoomed out and considered a system in total instead of one process they would see that it’s bullshit
Either they are naive or arguing in bad faith…
Also, the cooling effect sulphate aerosols can cause only really happens at high altitudes. At low altitudes the reflected light is less likely to escape to space, and the aerosols fall out of the air faster.
Even if they reached high altitudes, one of the effects of being in the atmosphere is moving with the wind, across entire hemispheres. And at tropospheric heights, sulphates, their products, and other byproducts of combustion may destroy ozone at significant levels.
There may come a day where aerosol-based geo-engineering becomes a part of climate management, but it’s definitely not with bunker fumes.
Some of these ships would carry green hydrogen and new lithium batteries and old lithium batteries (to be recycled) and whatnot. Also at least some oil would be still needed for fine chemicals like meds or (idk what’s proper english term for that) large scale organic synthesis like plastics, or even straight distillates like hexane (for edible oil extraction) or lubricants. Some of usual non-energy uses of oil can be easily substituted with enough energy like with nitrogen fertilizers but some can’t
We aren’t consuming batteries anywhere near the rate we consume oil and coal. Hydrogen even less than batteries.
So the amount of ships needed would still be a fraction of what we use now.
not now, but if hydrogen were to be used as an energy source/storage, then it’d be used plenty. same with batteries
While true, it’s very unlikely we’ll use hydrogen. It’s very impractical for this use compared to alternatives
If you have water you have hydrogen.
there’s no reason to transport hydrogen if they build infrastructure to use it as a fuel they will build a process to make it on site
the argument for renewable energy isnt that we should stop using oil, its that we shouldnt burn it. why turn our limited supply of oil into CO2 and water when we can turn it into plastics, medicine, solvents, etc? around 3/4 of crude oil is used as fuel, but if renewable energy was used, the number of oil tankers would decrease by more than 75% bc local supplies would generally be sufficient for industrial, non-fuel uses
ikr, but that tweet implies that all of oil/gas/coal ships would be unnecessary
bc local supplies would generally be sufficient for industrial, non-fuel uses
this is assuming that its not just cheaper to import that needed oil? This is always going to be a fundamental problem, though maybe we already happen to produce plastic with native oil idk.
That is true, but part of improving our environmental impact will be decreasing that transport of raw materials, localizing chemical industries near the sources of their raw materials.
And oil for Styrofoam. And met coal for steel.
There’s alternative processes, and if you avoid burning oil and coal for fuel you can basically do all that with the amount of oil that’s in easy reach instead of using tar sands or drilling into even more difficult to reach places.
You have to be careful when talking about steel because coal is both an ingredient (steel is iron + carbon) and used for heating afaik. You can take coal out of the heating step (confusingly called steel making) but not out of the ingredient step, unless you want to find a different carbon source.
There’s (admittedly comparatively expensive) alternative processes, and even if you stick to the old process and just stop using coal for electricity generation you’d cut coal use by 75%.
Not to mention, the carbon that stays in the steel doesn’t actually go into the atmosphere, so there’s less CO2 emissions for that specific use if you can substitute the fuel used for heating.
That’s why I said met coal for steel.
you’re probably talking about direct reduced iron and it’s really a problem that can be dealt with easily, just chuck a piece of coke when it’s molten for the second time in electric arc furnace (and maybe electrodes introduce enough carbon). substituting coke with hydrogen works also on “ingredient step” if you mean by that fuel needed to reduce iron ore to iron
maybe there’s a way to make electrowinning iron economical, and it’d be pretty green too, but i don’t know if it is workable
e: you can also avoid need for met coal if you use methane or syngas for direct reduced iron process
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the problem with tar sands is a fundamental energy conversion issue. It’s really hard to refine because you don’t get nearly as much energy out as you put in, compared to something like fracking.
It may become reasonable in the future with really cheap renewable energy and higher oil prices for example, but as of right now, it’s economically unviable.
Everything that comes out of a petrochemical plant can be made without oil, in fact BASF had recipes in place for decades now and is switching sources as the price shifts. Push come to shove they can produce everything from starch. It’s also why they hardly blinked when Russia turned off the gas.
The carbon that actually ends up in steel is a quite negligible amount (usually under 1%, over 2% you get cast iron), you can get that out of the local forest, and to reduce the iron hydrogen works perfectly, the first furnances are already online.
coal can be substituted to some degree with processes like direct reduction. hydrogen works but syngas from biomass or trash also works
file styrofoam under plastics
I’m guessing most countries would try to recycle batteries locally. Or/and throw them onto solar systems straight away
That wouldn’t really need to be shipped around though, domestic supply can cover those needs almost everywhere.
Won’t someone think of the seamen?
I’m constantly thinking of seamen
Capt’n Pugwash and Seaman Stains will both be out of jobs.
correct me if I’m wrong, but the United States doesn’t even have oil refineries that are capable of making gasoline out of American oil? like we need the type of oil that the middle East has, so we’re constantly trading oil back and forth even though we have plenty of it
I think I’ve heard this is true. something about politicians wanting to look environmentalist and therefore preventing the building of any more refineries
No, there’s a significant amount of oil infrastructure locally. They’ve even got a colonialist extension with Canada: crude oil crosses over to be refined and sold back to Canada
No, it is true. It is not the quantity of oil infrastructure, but the grades and types they are. The US crude is mostly light sweet crude after the shift to oil shale. The refinery infrastructure was originally built for heavy crude with high sulfur content. Thus the US imports the type of oil our refineries were built to handle, and exports the portion of the oil that is domestically produced, but the wrong type.
The lack of investment in the types of oil refineries to refine US oil domestically isn’t as much for optics purposes. But that relative to the amount of investment required to build new refineries to compete with the current foreign ones isn’t a good return on investment relative to the up front cost and the existing profits of the current arrangement.
the government should at least subsidize a couple so in the event of an apocalypse we can make our own gasoline.
it’s also to do with prices. There is a certain amount of this that is true, but the primary reason is oil prices.
yeah from what people are telling me, we have the capability of processing lower quality crude oil so it makes more sense to export our high quality stuff, then buy the cheap stuff since we can already refine it.
yeah thats pretty much the TL;DR here. It’s complicated since oil is complicated and there isn’t really a “insert oil” oil to talk about, there are a lot of variations of it, and a lot of ways to refine it, and a lot of different resultant products from it as well.
The fact that the modern petro industry even works is kind of insane.
yeah it’s wild to me that petroleum jelly and kerosene come from the same thing
that is quite simple actually.
Butter and skimmed milk also come from the same source. You have a complex mixture of stuff that is differently viscose, so in mixture it all ends up with a certain viscosity. Now you separate it and you get stuff that is almost solid and you get stuff, that is very liquid, or in the case of crude oil you get some gaseous fractions.
Only butt-munchers will reply to this comment about something vague regarding US gasoline production
yes but how much of that gasoline was made from American crude oil? America has plenty of refineries, just none of them designed for American oil
Crude oil us primarily classified based on density and sulphur content. It’s all hydrocarbons and a portion of all of it can be turned into gasoline.
dude. we are not talking about the gasoline. we are talking about the oil being used to make the gasoline. what percentage of the crude oil being refined into American gasoline is American produced crude oil?
Anyone know how much of the oil transported is actually used for plastic, percentage wise?
≈15%
So what you’re saying is the companies that own those boats will lobby the government so that this never happens? Sweet.
actually, it’s already happening, why do you think LNG is such a massive export from the US right now?
Now I’m waiting for the news report,
“Green Energy will cost jobs!”
yeah, free market economies baby, making everything more efficient!
gotta burn fuel just to get more fuel. Zeno’s paradox but capitalistic economic collapse
Ships need gas inside to keep the dihydrogen monoxide at safe levels
Yeah but if I’m not mistaken, emissions from shipping are quite low anyways. It’s something like 2-5℅ of all our emissions, so it’s pretty low priority.
Idk man 5% sure sounds a hell of a lot better than 0%
all freight traffic is a pretty significant dent, i think the net total for all of transport is something like 15-20% of total emissions, so.
to be perfectly clear, this probably wouldn’t help much, since we would likely just move to shipping something like hydrogen across the ocean anyway…
Hydrogen is just worse natural gas. They crack natural gas to produce hydrogen, and its fucking terrible. Hydrogen creates about 4 times more CO2 than diesel, simply by how the vast majority of it is manufactured
you think i was saying they would manufacture hydrogen from natural gas?
ok.
There is green hydrogen which is completely renewable, it’s just more expensive
Hydrogen isn’t about energy production, it’s about storage
Yes, a potential future application, in a system where we basically always have more renewable electricity than we can use could see some great hydrogen-based storage in hydrogen.
But that’s not the world we live in today.
