Alt enrgy & Oil scarcity effect on shipping

So with oil scarcity on the horizon in the coming decades, and the shipping industry being 100% reliant on diesel, what are some alternative energy sources we'll likely see to replace diesel for our mighty container ships?
>Nuclear
Unlikely, that would make simply building a boat unreasably expensive. There's also the issue of meltdowns and waste water polluting the oceans.
>Wind
This would be really interesting to see. Is this even possible?
>Fusion
We probably won't get cheap fusion reactors until we're way past the point where we're out of oil.
>Biodiesel
Possible stop gap solution. Id be concerned about its effects on farmland though, since right now it's only viable in Brazil and Brazillian land degradation is a pretty serious issue right now, so who knows how this will fare as a long term solution.

Any ideas Veeky Forums ?

Other urls found in this thread:

shipmap.org/
youtube.com/watch?v=CODdHkbz6o0
youtu.be/Ws6HPTom2AY
fzt.haw-hamburg.de/pers/Scholz/dglr/hh/text_2004_02_26_Cryoplane.pdf
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Slave labour like the good old days.

Well that answers my question. Mods delete the thread please.

Are you not aware of the fact that a large number of nuclear-powered ships already exist?

I'm aware of submarines and gunships using nuclear. Are there any container ships? Are they economical?

Yes to both. Nuclear is super economical, and all nuclear ships use modern reactors that don't run the risk of melting down and are less hazardous to the environment.

And where do you intend to obtain said forced forced labor? If slaves were to be used to keep up with modern level shipping. We will have to deal with shortage of manpower and mutiny on a daily basis.

Give plebs paper backed by nothing more than confidence that it has value.

Arent the ships expensive in and of themselves? I thought nuclear reactors weren't easy to make.

What about GMO biodiesel.

Could we genetically modify a plant that would make better biofuel?

We'd still have to have it widely available at every port. Oil is everywhere, biodiesel isn't.

>This would be really interesting to see. Is this even possible?
What, like they've been using for millennia prior to the invention of the engine?
Unthinkable!

Have you ever seen a boat bigger than a galleon use sails?

>shipping industry being 100% reliant on diesel
large modern ships do not burn diesel. they have special bottom feeder engines that run on 'bunker oil', a tarry substance that has to be preheated to become semifluid and combustible. asphalt, the cheapest and dirtiest fuel in the world. just 16 of the world's largest ships emit more sulfur (largely into the hydrosphere) than all the world's cars combined emit into the atmosphere.

Good!
shipmap.org/

Less unnecessary shipping is the answer. Make the whole world great again with domestic production. Population reduction to make biofuel production meet the demand.

There are at least three companies developing power kites as at least auxiliary drives for shaping. The efficiency of the wing kicks traditional sails in the butt, but on the other hand there are some control issues that need to be worked out.

>oil scarcity

What is this 2008?

>>Wind
>This would be really interesting to see. Is this even possible?

Are you asking is wind powered ships are possible o.0

>Have you ever seen a boat bigger than a galleon use sails?

Dunno, how big is a galleon, n your mind? But we know sails work, though at the moment using oil s cheaper and easier.

But...we need the fuel to move the fuel? Biofuel is a net energy sink for now so more a problem than a solution.

What are you saying? Abiotic oil theory? Renewable and green energy will replace oil? Looks like light sweet crude peaked in production about 2010, digging up the goo at the bottom of the wells already with relentless growing demand. 21st century, cheap energy picture looks grim.

Related -- using rotating cylinders to generate "Magnus Effect" and move a ship.

youtube.com/watch?v=CODdHkbz6o0

>domestic production vs trade meme
found the 12 year old

Massive Sails to supplement and reduce fuel costs? Would probably require a much larger crew for the ships, but would make it worthwhile I think.

Self sufficiency is not a 'meme' it is the prudent policy of any sovereign nation.

Fossil fuels move themselves do they? We need fuel to move those too.

Someone will probably turn coal into a more condensed fuel.

>Wind
>This would be really interesting to see. Is this even possible?

This has got to be a ruse.

Ya'll motherfuckers need a merchant sailor in this thread.

There have only ever been two nuclear merchant ships ever made, the SS Savannah, courtesy of the greatest nation on Earth and a Russian ship that nobody cares about.
While nuke power is amazing, most of the people I work with are barely literate, so while I think dirty hippies have land nuke power all wrong, I actually think that having some of these guys try to run a PWR is going full-retard.

Wind power is at BEST inefficient. Modern ships are simply too heavy when they're unladen and the sail surface required to move them at 11 knots (container ships typically run at about 20 at sea speed), would dwarf the size of the ship significantly, thus reducing their stability and drastically increasing the number of marine casualties.

While it is true that large marine diesel engines use heavier fuels like IFO180, the cracking process in refineries has improved to the point where using heavy fuels is almost uneconomical.

We could go back to slave labor, but then we'd just look like Thailand, China, or the Philippines where everyone would madly scramble to the one country that doesn't use slave labor to run their ships.

Biodiesel is a meme put forth by corn farmers. Food for fuel is not an option when there's no surplus stock to pull from.

Fusion?
Now we're talking. Stop holding out on us Lockheed Martin! We know you have spheromak technology!

Also for wind I forgot to mention the fact that our current shipping lanes run against the wind half of the time. To change this would vastly increase the amount of time before delivery of your RealDoll and vastly reduce the maneuverability of any vessel. This would in turn drastically increase the number of shipwrecks and RealDolls lost to the depths.

Yes. More easily would be vats of bacteria, like what's done with insulin or amino acids.

Mate it's 2017, we have thousands of wells that are untapped because oil is 50$ a barrel, OPEC has become irrelevant, fracking technology has opened up many more thousands of fields than in 2008.
We've found more oil, created more efficient ways to extract it and have stabilized demand. We have bigger worries than oil scarcity these days.

this rubs my autism in a really good way

>oil scarcity on the horizon
>shipping corporation execs don't care
stay the course

So we've kicked the can pretty far down the road, instead of running out of oil in the 2020s as the alarmists of the 70s and 80s predicted, we'll probably make it to 2080-2100. So we can keep doing what we're doing now but sooner or later, it's gonna run out

Banpo desu
youtu.be/Ws6HPTom2AY

Theyre expensive, but a very large ship with a long service life can justify the cost. Large supermax ships could utilize a cost-effective nuclear propulsion system.

>>wind
Haven't you heard of clipper ships m8? They were used for rapid transit of perishable goods during the age of sail. Some even exceeded the speed of current day container ships. They fell out of favor because of the cost of the crew necessary to adjust the sails

Other than that, there is no reason we couldn't make ships powered by hydrogen. Hydrogen has a higher energy density by mass than gasoline, but its volumetric energy density sucks. But if we use fuel cells and electric motors rather than internal combustion we can be much much more efficient at chemical to mechanical energy conversion.

So we don't need the volumetric energy density of gasoline to get the same effective range. With modest improvements in fuel cells and hydrogen storage technology we could even get more effective range than diesel.

>> nuclear
Is not as unlikely as you think.

This is neat. Thanks.

Hydrocarbons won't run out..."ever".

We're way less than 10 years from peak oil demand. By 2030 or so nobody buys ICE cars. ICE prices start collapsing mid 20s, starting with used cars as nobody wants to be left holding worthless scrap metal. Yuuge dealer discounts, 30, 50, 70 % off just to clear inventory. Still most ICE cars after 2025 will be converted to electricity or sold for scrap. Gas stations start closing en masse or converted.

Let's not even talk about global warming, mileage standards etc. Just doesn't matter. China is going to add 4-5 gigafactories worth battery production capacity in 5 years and those batteries will be used. All of them. My guess is even Musk will have to give up or use Tesla car margins to subsidize his own battery production.

2017-2018 will be to EVs what 2007-2008 was to smartphones. The production scaling will be much slower, but still exponential.

Das war interessant. Danke.

Wind turbines/solar producing liquid hydrogen in mass quantities which then is coverted back to electricity in fuel cells, which can be anywhere? Ships...even airplanes?

Self sufficiency is a meme. There are no countries that could survive without trade. The World economy exists because countries tend to specialise in different areas. For example Germany and engineering, France aerospace, India cotton etc etc.

banpu desu~~

>oil scarcity
Someone doesn't keep up with the latest in the energy industry, do they?

Have you ever read about the bronze age collapse? Well there will be a petrol age collapse.

i've thought about this and i think it's going to be a mix of wind ( think sails ), reusable electricity ( solar, wind and tidal maybe ) and whatever oil there's left to use

>it has never been done
>therefore it cannot be done

>airplanes
Yes, in fact a feasibility study was done and found that it would be feasible to use "liquid hydrogen as an aviation fuel in all categories of commercial aircraft."
fzt.haw-hamburg.de/pers/Scholz/dglr/hh/text_2004_02_26_Cryoplane.pdf

It's not that far off either, existing aircraft wouldn't be too hard to modify for short range flight. We could start seeing commercial aircraft running off of liquid hydrogen in the year 2015, with most of the time spent getting aviation companies slowly accustomed to liquid hydrogen fuel. There are no big technical issues other than that we don't have hydrogen infrastructure. But places like Scandinavia and Japan could easily start putting limited hydogen infrastructure in place for short hop flights within that time.


I mean we're about to buckle the fuck down on this greenhouse gas emission thing right? Although, "if efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions are effectively stalled for a long time by some political initiative, the date may well shift by many years."

Oh wait, it's 2017 and we still don't have hydrogen planes. Gee, I wonder what happened?

>Oh wait, it's 2017 and we still don't have hydrogen planes. Gee, I wonder what happened?
Peak oil never materialised?