Skip to main content

Decarbonizing Shipping

 


It is a question that may not have occupied much of the brain energy of those of you who follow my humble blog, EVEN those of you who are concerned about and follow with some care issues about carbon emissions and climate change. 

How much carbon is emitted by all those commercial vessels in the ocean. Vessels travelling across the Pacific from, say, Shanghai, China to Long Beach, California, packed with consumer goods, automobiles, and so forth. Aren't they driven forward with diesel fuel? 

Are efforts underway to decarbonize ocean shipping? If so: how have they fared? 

I have looked into this in more depth that I care to expound upon just now. All I will say is:

1) Yes, such efforts are underway,

2) They may have made a modest contributions to the supply chain problems now being blamed on the Covid epidemic, but

3) the market is readjusting, and green shipping may be an industry-defining reality a lot sooner than green commercial transport on land. 

Labels:

Comments

  1. Paul D. Van PeltAugust 3, 2022 at 8:19 AM

    This is, certainly, an area of concern. But how might we address it? I can envision some ways, however one or more of those entail the 'law' of diminishing returns. We could build more nuclear powered vessels, for peacetime applications like shipping. But these are expensive and, like conventional ships, would presumably have limited useful lifespans. Possibly, we might re-visit wind power. I imagine work is being done there, though I don't know how much. I think of the fabulous sailing craft, depicted in the Costner movie, WATERWORLD. There are other projects, aimed at renewable power sources such as hydrogen. So, well---just thinking in script.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ChristopherAugust 4, 2022 at 10:18 AM

      As an early step, a lot of progress has been made away from diesel toward LNG. Although still a carbon fuel, nat gas burns cleaner than the other hydrocarbon fuels. As more complete solutions, there are as you mention hydrogen cells. There is also the prospect of ammonia. Here's a discussion of ammonia's fuel prospects if you're curious. https://www.maholick.com/blog/post/green-shipping-ammonia-as-hydrogen-carrier-and-marine-fuel/#:~:text=Ammonia%20is%20generated%20by%20combining%20nitrogen%20extracted%20from,fuel%20is%20burnt%2C%20it%20produces%20no%20carbon%20dioxide.

      Delete
    2. ChristopherAugust 4, 2022 at 10:25 AM

      That https "link" doesn't work as a link. If you copy it and paste it as a URL, though, it will get you there.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more