Ports need more investment for bigger ships, resilience and decarbonization just as some of the bulk cargoes that funded them begin to decline.
Ports are being asked to make infrastructure decisions that will last thirty, forty or fifty years while several of the assumptions that paid for their existing infrastructure are changing at the same time. Ships are getting larger, requiring deeper channels, larger cranes and more capable tug fleets. Climate disruption is … [continued]
Tugboats combine brief demands for very high thrust with repeated operation inside the same ports, making their duty cycle unusually well suited to electrification.
Tugboats do not initially look like good candidates for battery propulsion. A harbour tug has to shove, pull and control ships weighing tens or hundreds of thousands of tonnes, sometimes in wind, current and confined channels where losing thrust is not an acceptable outcome. Modern ship-assist tugs consequently carry propulsion … [continued]
DNV says shore power, plug-in hybrids and fully electric ships could materially reduce future shipping fuel demand, but those pathways sit outside the simulation producing its headline 2050 fuel requirement.
DNV’s new Maritime Forecast to 2050 puts a very large number on shipping’s future demand for low-carbon molecules. In its strongest global-regulation scenario, internationally operating ships above 400 gross tonnes require about 185 million tonnes of oil equivalent of low-GHG fuel in 2050, roughly 7.7 to 7.8 exajoules. That implies … [continued]
Falling battery costs push freight toward electricity everywhere, but inherited road, rail and water systems determine where that transition lands.
Battery costs are falling globally, but freight does not begin from a common starting point. China, India, Europe and the United States move domestic cargo through very different combinations of road, rail and water, so cheaper batteries will not produce one standard freight-electrification pathway. Using the best comparable data I … [continued]
Hydrogen gets the lights and cameras, while scalable maritime electrification increasingly depends on the quieter infrastructure of grids, batteries and routine charging.
At the Port of Tilbury on the Thames, GeoPura recently put one of its hydrogen power units on a floating platform and used it to charge a commercial electric vessel. The system delivered 300 kW through five Ballard fuel cells. It was visually irresistible: a barge, hydrogen equipment, a working … [continued]
Future Proof Shipping gave hydrogen cargo shipping something most hydrogen shipping announcements never provide: working vessels. H2 Barge 1 and H2 Barge 2 were not artist renderings, conference-stage concepts or another memorandum of understanding. They were inland cargo vessels converted to hydrogen fuel-cell operation and put into real freight service … [continued]
Shipping’s transition starts by shrinking the fuel pool, then using electrons and scarce liquids only where they fit.
Maritime fuel debates usually start with the wrong object. They look at today’s bunker fuel demand, line up replacement molecules, and ask whether ammonia, methanol, hydrogen, LNG, biofuels, or synthetic fuels can scale far enough to replace it. That sounds like a practical question, but it skips the larger one: … [continued]
Maritime batteries do not have to electrify every ship to reshape fuel demand; short-sea, port-adjacent and hybrid-electric operations are already a serious wedge.
A useful paper has landed in the Nature family on the techno-economics of electrifying short-sea shipping, and the result should make the maritime fuel debate a little less vague. The paper does not claim that every ship becomes battery-electric. It does not need to. It finds that by 2030 a … [continued]
Engine-supported air lubrication may trim ship fuel use by reducing hull friction, but the useful number is net savings after the air has been compressed and delivered.
The interesting part of Everllence and Silverstream’s Engine Supported Air Lubrication concept is not that ships can reduce drag by pushing air under the hull. That has been known for decades, and commercial systems are already in service. The interesting part is where the air comes from, because air lubrication’s … [continued]
BYD and Shenzhen Port Group recently signed an agreement to expand cooperation between the automaker and port operator. While this news largely flew under the radar, the scope of the agreement goes far beyond BYD’s home ports to develop international logistics and decarbonize global shipping. As reported by Chinese shipping … [continued]
