China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship
-
To transport coal.
China Has Launched the World's First All-Electric Cargo Ship
China is now the proud owner of the world's first fully electric cargo ship and has already put the vehicle to use.
-
Is this the clean coal I have been hearing about?
-
I suppose it's a step up from using coal-powered cargo ships to transport coal.
-
@lb_ said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
I suppose it's a step up from using coal-powered cargo ships to transport coal.
In case of emergency, can it use its cargo for more fuel?
-
And it has the exact same problem as all other electric vehicles:
it can travel 80 kilometers (approximately 50 miles) after being charged for 2 hours
-
@gąska
you cannot be serious.
Fifty miles? In a cargo ship? What in the fuck is the purpose of that?
-
@gąska said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
And it has the exact same problem as all other electric vehicles:
it can travel 80 kilometers (approximately 50 miles) after being charged for 2 hours
Hey, 50 miles can (sometimes) be a very long distance in China!
-
@pie_flavor said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
@gąska
you cannot be serious.
Fifty miles? In a cargo ship? What in the fuck is the purpose of that?Well:
As reported by China Daily, the 2,000-metric-ton ship was launched in the city of Guangzhou last month and runs in the inland section of the Pearl River.
I'd guess that its route in the inland section of the Pearl River isn't more than 80km.
-
@cvi So, in other words, it's pointless, because the only air it's cleaning up is China's.
-
@pie_flavor said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
@cvi So, in other words, it's pointless, because the only air it's cleaning up is China's.
Well, except for the bit where the vast majority of their electric plants are coal-fired. But aside from that, it's...
-
@pie_flavor said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
@cvi So, in other words, it's pointless, because the only air it's cleaning up is China's.
Nah, man, it's emitting tons of electromagnetic pollution into the water.
-
@lolwhat said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:> Well, except for the bit where the vast majority of their electric plants are coal-fired. But aside from that, it's...
Not the "long tailpipe" nonsense again. That's been thoroughly debunked for years.Even if 100% of the electricity comes from coal-fired plants, it's still significantly cleaner because electric motors are 2-3x more energy-efficient than ICE engines. So yeah, it's not perfect, but it's a very good start.
-
@el_heffe said
China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship
@el_heffe said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
To transport coal.
-
@masonwheeler said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
Even if 100% of the electricity comes from coal-fired plants, it's still significantly cleaner because electric motors are 2-3x more energy-efficient than ICE engines. So yeah, it's not perfect, but it's a very good start.
Well, some of it is moving the pollution around (which might be a win in itself right there) and some of it could be improvements from switching to a very high temperature large-scale generation process, which is easier to control the pollution of than for a lot of smaller engines. The flip side is that there's losses in moving the generated electricity to where it is used, which is especially noticeable since batteries are not even close to 100% efficient.
-
@dkf In economics, there's a thing called "price" that's essentially a number attached to every item that tracks all the accumulated costs involved in making it. It lets you figure out which ways of doing things are more efficient (like "shipping a completed product" vs "shipping the components and assembling near the user"), regardless of how complex the industries get.
If the same principle could be used for pollution, we would be able to instantly tell which cars are cleaner, including material extraction costs, manufacturing costs, electricity, etc.
-
@dkf Thank you for making a well-reasoned response. I do have one quibble, however: China has a long, sordid history of lack of pollution controls. While they're supposedly making progress on that front, they still have a long way to go before one can believe that they're actually controlling pollution significantly, not just saying so.
-
@anonymous234 said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
there's a thing called "price" that's essentially a number attached to every item that tracks all the accumulated costs involved in making it
Sometimes, however, government sticks its thumb on the scale, causing prices to be distorted.
-
@anonymous234 said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
If the same principle could be used for pollution, we would be able to instantly tell which cars are cleaner, including material extraction costs, manufacturing costs, electricity, etc.
It's going to be difficult to do it for pollution, as that's harder to reduce to a single metric. There's just too many different variables involved, and too many ways it impacts on health and economic well-being.
@lolwhat said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
China has a long, sordid history of lack of pollution controls. While they're supposedly making progress on that front, they still have a long way to go before one can believe that they're actually controlling pollution significantly, not just saying so.
Yep. I'm happy to say that I've no idea what is going on in this case. ;) I could believe that the senior leadership of the Communist Party does want to do something about the pollution, in part because it's got bad enough that they can see it with their own eyes and breath it with their own lungs. They're probably more interested in improving local pollution before wider-scale things like global warming (because that's pretty much the priority of any politician).
But that's not to say that they're succeeding. For that, it's perhaps better to try looking at more reliable proxy metrics, such as the economic health of coal miners in Australia (given that we know where almost all their exports go). IIRC, the signs are that China is importing less coal than was projected by the miners, indicating either a slow-down in steel production or a shift towards generating power more cleanly. Or a bit of both. OTOH, it's been a few years since I paid much attention to that.
-
@dkf True. Another factor is that very large numbers of Chinese homes heat and cook with coal stoves. Those numbers could be dropping as well.
-
@lolwhat said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
Another factor is that very large numbers of Chinese homes heat and cook with coal stoves. Those numbers could be dropping as well.
That would make quite a big impact. The experience of the West is that switching cooking to locally-cleaner fuels helps a lot with pollution. One small coal (or wood) fire for cooking? No big deal. Millions of them? Major impact. A side effect will be not having so many fires out of control. That's also a real plus and one that the CP might well decide justifies “encouraging” a switch-over.
Another approach they could use would be to convert the coal into coke before selling it to ordinary people. That makes it a lot less polluting when burnt, and I believe the materials extracted in the coking process can be used as chemical feedstocks.
-
@dkf said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
convert the coal into coke before selling it to ordinary people
Even better would be to extract the thorium from the coal for "burning" in LFTR plants, then provide that cheap energy to homes and businesses. You could even use some of that energy to convert coal and other carbon-based material (plastic!) into petroleum also.
-
@el_heffe said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
To transport coal.
Well the powerplant that charges the electric ship needs fuel too
-
@dkf said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
It's going to be difficult to do it for pollution, as that's harder to reduce to a single metric. There's just too many different variables involved, and too many ways it impacts on health and economic well-being.
And we can't even entirely agree on what is or isn't pollution!
-
@dkf said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
Another approach they could use would be to convert the coal into coke before selling it to ordinary people.
I heard an interesting story over Thanksgiving about my wife's grandmother. When she was a child, her family was very poor. A thing poor kids did back then was to walk along the railroad tracks looking for coal that had fallen from trains. They'd heat their houses with it.
Apparently, one day she found some coke, which they burned and damaged / destroyed the stove (and of course she got into much trouble). So, this might not be such a great idea.
-
@lolwhat said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
@dkf Thank you for making a well-reasoned response. I do have one quibble, however: China has a long, sordid history of lack of pollution controls. While they're supposedly making progress on that front, they still have a long way to go before one can believe that they're actually controlling pollution significantly, not just saying so.
But... but, they're part of the Paris Treaty!
Also, I can't help but have this mental image when reading the headline:
-
To save money, Kentucky Coal Museum turns to solar panels
Museum's 80 solar panels on the roof are expected to save approximately $8,000 per year.
-
@ben_lubar I bet they cost >$100k to install, with 10 years lifetime.
-
@gąska said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
@ben_lubar I bet they cost >$100k to install, with 10 years lifetime.
I assume the $8k in savings was after costs.
-
There's one odd thing about pollution that I have never really gotten my head around, as it sort of short-circuits just about every argument for and against pollution controls which I am aware of.
You see, most of those chemicals going up in smoke as stack gas? Yeah, those are valuable industrial chemicals. Almost all of them. Ones which elsewhere people are spending a lot of money (and more energy) producing in volume.
Surely, there would be some way of harvesting all that carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, the various nitrogen oxides, phosphorus compounds, and who knows what else, rather than just literally pouring it into the air in a way that is actively harmful.
I mean, I can understand why smokestacks were all the rage in 1818, but we've come a long way in 200 years. What was literally useless poison in the early and mid 19th century was already becoming commercially important by the end of the era, and while recovering those chemicals may not have been practical or economical then, I would be quite surprised if it wouldn't be today.
Seriously, this isn't a cost center, it is a potential profit center, or at least a way to offset the operational costs. Would the recovery processes - which for all I know might well be as simple as just bubbling the stack gases through a tank of water and then chemically separating them from the resulting slurry - be so inordinately expensive that it doesn't make sense? I find that unlikely, yet... well, AFAIK, the closest we come to it is using electrostatic precipitators in the stack gas to force the soot out of aerosol, and even then, the recovered soot isn't actually used in any way AFAICT.
Does anyone here know anything about this? It just seems like a no-brainer, but I can only guess - and hope - that I am the one missing something, rather than it being the case that every power plant engineer and manager in the world never thought of this.
/me steps off of soapbox
-
@gąska said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
@ben_lubar I bet they cost >$100k to install, with 10 years lifetime.
From the USA Today article:
Putting solar panels on the roof of the coal museum is just one part of Benham's energy project, which is expected to cost between $400,000 and $500,000 and is being funded through philanthropic donations, according to Robinson. Plans to establish two more local solar-panel sites are in the works as well.
-
@scholrlea There's this thing called entropy...basically, recovering things from waste like that takes energy. Often more than it's worth.
Bubbling the exhaust gasses like that would (in my non-expert opinion) create a host of issues, including slowing down the exhaust and creating back-pressures that would have to be dealt with. And the labor/energy used in chemical separation, cleaning, and the increase in maintenance is tremendous. Add in the huge costs of installing the equipment in the first place on fully-amortized power plants, and it's economically way infeasible.
It's much better to not emit the valuable stuff in the first place. Most of the scrubbing and recirculating happens much earlier, in the actual combustion process. Combined-cycle natural gas is basically completely clean (emitting only CO2 and water) and super efficient. And that's what's going in for new power construction. Most of the power plant emissions, as I understand it, are from old power plants that are running because the equipment is fully paid for and the replacement capital costs are huge. Not to mention the remediation costs for cleaning up the plant location when you demolish one.
-
@benjamin-hall OK, that actually answers most of the question - and in a way that implies that it is, in fact, being addressed, at least in new plants.
My main question was actually about the entropy aspects, which I had been assuming was the major reason it hadn't been done - that it would use more energy than would be feasible, or would in some other way cost more than other types of pollution control. The problem was, I was under the impression - which I was hoping was wrong - that the question hadn't even been considered.
The bubbling idea was just an example, of course, the first thing that came to mind as a relatively low-tech (if still difficult from an engineering perspective) solution. I don't know enough of the chemistry to really know just how difficult it would be (though obviously, dealing with a highly acidic slurry of soot and dissolved gases wouldn't be easy), so I went with something simple, but unlikely to be practical - something that could be used as a baseline.
However, I can definitely see why cracking the coal to natural gas would be more effective for this purpose, as well as being cleaner during the combustion, and presumably more efficient as a means of producing energy (depending on the energy cost of the cracking process versus the greater efficiency of gas-fired turbines over coal-fired ones).
As for the resistance to replace existing installations with newer ones... this is one place where I hope that the actuaries really are in charge, rather than empire-building managers who are actively undermining both the environment and their company in order to hold onto their own sense of power and position. My own experience with corporations inclines me towards thinking otherwise, for the the same reasons Taylorism fell apart in the 1950s - the time when Scientific Management started getting applied to the managers themselves, funny that.
(Not defending Taylorism, mind you, but I find it telling that it was going strong so long as it didn't threaten to put the people at the top out of work - but the moment it did, well, obviously all this nonsense about time measurement and efficiency testing can't properly capture the necessary managerial spirit and entrepreneurial élan necessary for proper corporate function, can it?)
-
@scholrlea Current generation power plants are super clean. Because that's efficient. Being a wealthy society means that we can front the larger building costs and gain efficiency and lower total cost of ownership.
China needs so much more power (and is growing fast enough) that building expensive (up front) clean power plants costs more than they can afford. Over the life-cycle of the plant they end up paying more, but it's spread out over years instead of right now.
-
-
@adynathos said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
@el_heffe said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
To transport coal.
Well the powerplant that charges the electric ship needs fuel too
Yeah! We should convert that to electric too!
-
@boomzilla said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
Apparently, one day she found some coke, which they burned and damaged / destroyed the stove (and of course she got into much trouble). So, this might not be such a great idea.
The stove needs to be designed to work with the type of fuel it is intended to use. Coke (and anthracite) burn hotter than lignite (and wood).
-
@scholrlea said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
Does anyone here know anything about this? It just seems like a no-brainer, but I can only guess - and hope - that I am the one missing something, rather than it being the case that every power plant engineer and manager in the world never thought of this.
Yes, someone has thought of this:
https://www.duke-energy.com/our-company/environment/air-quality/sulfur-dioxide-scrubbers
When SO2 combines with limestone, a primary byproduct is calcium sulfate, commonly known as synthetic gypsum. A recyclable product, synthetic gypsum is used in the manufacturing of wallboard and cement, and as a soil amendment in agricultural and construction applications.
Much of the synthetic gypsum produced from Duke Energy’s scrubbers is reused in these and other applications. Unused byproducts are properly disposed of in approved landfills.
-
@benjamin-hall said in China Launches the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship:
It's much better to not emit the valuable stuff in the first place. Most of the scrubbing and recirculating happens much earlier, in the actual combustion process.
Recently, I was told about going further with this, even. The main point there was to have combustion in a (as far as possible) nitrogen free environment, as to avoid NOx and stuff (which apparently is expensive to remove from exhaust in large scale).
There are probably different approaches to this, the one that I heard about involved a secondary cycle that captures oxygen from the atmosphere by binding it to a metal-based carrier. This carrier is then the oxygen source for the actual combustion. You end up with a metallic compound and "soot" (particles), both of which are apparently relatively easy to filter, and a gaseous exhaust that is mostly water and CO2.
