Autoblog: Anti-car ecomentalists take note: 15 ships = pollution from all the world's cars

[Blind_Io]

Leave my cars alone and go after shipping. The world's 5 largest ships equal the pollution from all the planet's 760 million cars combined. But, hey, I'm sure the increased petrol prices and congestion charges are making a big difference, so keep it up you half-wits!

Says James Corbett, professor of marine policy at the University of Delaware: "Ship pollution affects the health of communities in coastal and inland regions around the world, yet pollution from ships remains one of the least regulated parts of our global transportation system." It sounds serious, but how bad could it be? Staggeringly, if a report by the UK's Guardian newspaper is to be believed. According to their story, just one of the world's largest container ships can emit about as much pollution as 50 million cars. Further, the 15 largest ships in the world emit as much nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide as the world's 760 million cars.

The problem isn't necessarily with the ships' 109,000-horsepower engines that endlessly spin away 24 hours a day, 280 days a year. In fact, these powerplants are some of the most fuel efficient units in the world. The real issue lies with the heavy fuel oil the ships run on and the almost complete lack of regulations applied to the giant exhaust stacks of these container ships.

The good news is that pressure is building from various governments around the world, including the United States, which just recently introduced legislation to keep these ships at least 230 miles away from U.S. coastlines. Similar measures are likely to follow in other countries like the United Kingdom.

[Labcoatguy]

Considering that just about everything physical traded is now transported on container ships, it'll be interesting to see how much this raises the prices of just about everything imported anywhere.

[Lupin_IV]

I say we specifically tax the trade of regenerative braking systems.

[ja404]

Well I guess it's back to sailboats!

[MadCat360]

Originally Posted by ja404

Well I guess it's back to sailboats!

That would be prettier.

I wanna see a high-tech and massive sailboat design that would be used for shipping. That would be cool.

But in reality I bet they'd return to fleets of smaller (than we have now) ships.

This article made me lol. Now I have more ammo to shoot at them.

[Gophermuncher]

Originally Posted by ja404

Well I guess it's back to sailboats!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=18292644

Welcome to the "green" age of commercial shipping. A German-made cargo ship will soon set sail, literally. The ship will be carried over the water partly by wind power.

The sails are from a German company called SkySails, and they're really more like giant parachutes. Each sail is about the size of a football field.

Adam Weiss, from the Current Science and Technology Department at the Museum of Science in Boston, says the use of these giant sails could revolutionize the commercial shipping industry. Drawing some power from wind could cutting a vessel's use of fossil fuels by 30-35 percent. Over the course of a year, the giant sail could save the shipping firm about $1,600 a day.

[Spectre]

The irony of all this is that back in the 50s, they planned to make nuclear-powered merchant ships and container vessels but the envirowackos and "nukesbadnukesbadnukesbadnukesbadnukesbadnukesbadnukesbad" idiots stopped that. So now we have giant mass polluting cargo ships wandering around instead.

[Gophermuncher]

Other than the fact that in the 50's nuclear power was barely understood and giving civilians the responsibility of taking care of nuclear reactors and keeping their ships from falling into enemy hands at every port they docked at was a bad idea?

[Spectre]

There were plans to build them up until the 70s, and the idea was to have the reactor be a sealed module that nobody could access. When the ship needed to be refuelled, you just swapped out the drive module.

That said, France seems to have done quite well with 1950s US-designed reactors, so we must have known what we were doing...

[DanRoM]

Originally Posted by Spectre

the idea was to have the reactor be a sealed module that nobody could access.

Yeah right...

[Spectre]

Originally Posted by DanRoM

Yeah right...

Well, that was plan A. Plan B was for each (US-flagged) ship to have a contingent of US Marines aboard (note that this design was for truly enormous ships only), which, given current events around Somalia, doesn't seem to be a bad idea.

Plan A is still achievable. Encase the drive/reactor module in concrete, and it'll still weigh less than the diesels or the fuel oil they burn. Take you a few weeks to get through that.

[argatoga]

Or use something like this:

http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com

Portable reactors like these should be the future. Imagine buying one and having it produce Hydrogen all day. Fuck electric batteries and the massive strip mining required to supply the rare metals.

[Ramseus]

Their website sucks. So what is that, a small nuclear reactor? It would be nice if their site said something about what it is/how it works - such as; is that all it is? Where's mah turbinez at?

Well, I just love ecotards. They hate the meat and don't care how it's made. They keep buying imported hybrids ffs. Ignoring the added manufacturing and mining needed for their little electric motors, their ugly little Prii are all made in Japan and shipped around the world in a cloud of emissions. Good job eating only local food while ignoring where all your material goods come from, dumbasses.

[static]

Originally Posted by Blind_Io

Leave my cars alone and go after shipping. The world's 5 largest ships equal the pollution from all the planet's 760 million cars combined. But, hey, I'm sure the increased petrol prices and congestion charges are making a big difference, so keep it up you half-wits!

The title is a bit misleading.
We're NOT talking about CO2 pollution here. Only nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide which aren't considered that big problem anymore as catalysators remove most of them anyway.

And CO2 pollution is why car industry is being beaten.

[Jacobfox]

I've been studying this crap all quarter (fuck core physical science) and my final exam's tomorrow so here it goes.

The whole goal is to minimize CO2 emissions because we can better handle that than methane. Even though CO2 is band-saturated to a much greater extent than methane or N2O or other nasty polar asymmetrical molecules, the problem we're running into is that we're releasing so damn much of the stuff that the natural feedback loops that regulate CO2 levels can't keep up and we're seeing higher CO2 equilibrium levels. Think of it like a sink, without obstructions and with the faucet on. The water level in the sink will balance when drainage equals input of water. Then put an orange peel or something in the sink. Assuming that it obstructs the drain somewhat, the equilibrium water level will be higher. This in turn traps more IR light, heating the planet very slightly. There are a ton of other feedbacks involved (water vapor, etc.) but this is the simple explanation. The concern is that if the temperature rises, glaciers will melt. Glaciers have a lot of CO2 sequestered inside of them. This then goes into the atmosphere. The process repeats. The same issue happens in sedimentary rock in the oceans, where you have a veritable shit ton of methane and CO2 sequestered. The fear is that this snowballs.

How does this relate to the ships, you may ask? These fuckers are floating around belching that crap into the atmosphere. The whole adding massive sails to the cargo ships idea is becoming more and more popular with everyone really. The shippers like it because it saves on fuel costs. The ecomentalists like it because it reduces the amount of emissions the ships belch. We (car nuts) like it because it means we don't have to crush our camaros and trade the scrap for little griefboxes immediately. Having said that, we need to use our brains and come up with more clever ways to make power in cars. Ford's got the right idea with the ecoboost engine. We don't want crap like the prius. We'll be able to make hydrogen cars fun in the not so distant future. In the meantime, we need to come up with a way to make our engines more efficient and then we won't have to sacrifice (and we'll save a mint on fuel, with higher mpg, which will drive down demand and hence drive prices down). Plus if we're dumping blown sixes into our muscle cars and blown fours into our sports sedans, we'll end up with stuff like the 2002tii and the Falcon XR6.

So in short: we don't need to sacrifice our way of life to keep from getting screwed over by climate change. We just need boost.

[nsx_23]

More turbos for everyone!

[otispunkmeyer]

Originally Posted by static

The title is a bit misleading.
We're NOT talking about CO2 pollution here. Only nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide which aren't considered that big problem anymore as catalysators remove most of them anyway.

And CO2 pollution is why car industry is being beaten.

NOx can be handled quite well with catalysts, but you have to be careful as with a cat, lean burning of fuel does absolutely nothing for NOx reduction in the catalyst....however its good for the other two main emissions CO and uHC's (unburnt hydrocarbons)...converting them into CO2. you need to run rich to stoichiometric to get good NOx reduction...however most diesel engines today are almost exclusively lean burn... i think the lowest AFR with diesels today is around 16:1 (stoichiometric is around 14.7:1)

three way cats on petrol cars effectively lock the engines AFR to just around stoichiometric at all load cases or else you get major problems with emissions. only problem is maximum power lies just slightly rich and best economy slightly lean...but you cant really go to either of those points because the of the cat.

i guess the ships will have the sulphur problem as well since their fuel will not be like the nearly sulphur free diesel we put in our cars. fuel oil is horrific.

bar getting rid of using the fuel all together its just impossible to avoid some form of pollution if you burn a HC fuel. Though i know Ricardo's engineering in the UK have devised a car engine that is capable of Zero NOx using combinations of EGR and HCCI (homogenous charge compression ignition).

there are plenty of ways to make the fuel go further though.... i wouldnt be suprised if a lot of ships run rankine cycles or similar to extract power from the waste heat in the exhaust. Cat designed a Rankine system running on R245fa (a refrigerant designed to replace R123 and specifically designed for the rankine application) that extracted around 350kW from the exhaust of a 2MW natural gas genset. thats not bad going at all is it.


nuclear ships would certainly be some form of answer but i dunno... we'd probably be fine on our side of the world but shipping things from the east/middle-east is rather risky as it is. even if you made a sealed unit or manned the ship with marines....if someone wanted that uranium/plutonium then theres a good chance they will get it.

twould be pretty cool if a low energy way of making hydrogen was found. imagine sucking water in at the front... stripping the Hydrogen off it, storing it and then feeding it through the fuel cell to make electricity. self sufficient, never need refuelling... no emissions except water and oxygen.

[Brother Michael]

Originally Posted by Jacobfox

We just need boost.

Originally Posted by nsx_23

More turbos for everyone!

I couldn't resist

[AiR]

Yes, we need to put more pressure on the shipping industry to make them better themselves. No question about that.

[vikiradTG2007]

Originally Posted by Spectre

Plan A is still achievable. Encase the drive/reactor module in lead-laced reinforced concrete, and it'll still weigh less than the diesels or the fuel oil they burn. Take you a few weeks to get through that.