Synthetic fuel has a lot of difficulties. One, it requires hydrogen as an input which is typically produced through steam reformation [1], a process that emits CO2. Electrolysis is less efficient and hard to scale as equipment is subject to intense corrosion.
Second, CO2 is at very low concentrations in the atmosphere. Direct atmospheric carbon sequestration is expensive and slow. The biggest startup in the synthetic fuel business is behind schedule and is struggling to solve these two main challenges [2].
We need to massively scale up green hydrogen production under basically any scenario where climate change is avoided. Hydrogen is an input for many industrial and agricultural processes.
Biofuels do not require hydrogen or atmospheric CO2 capture, well beyond growing plants.
Also something I learned recently is that the idea that biofuels are a no go because they compete with food is a simplistic deflection. Looking at Brazil as an example the biofuel crops like sugarcane and groundnuts are grown in marginal land in the south that wasn't being used for agriculture. The main driver of Amazonian deforestation is cattle ranching.
Biofuels produced by growing plants is limited by the available biomass. Brazil powers it's automobiles with biofuel, but not ships. And more importantly, Brazil is a huge country with massive amounts of arable land.
Ammonia also requires hydrogen as an input. Ammonia is essentially a storage mechanism for hydrogen, eliminating the need for cryogenic or compressed storage. Basically, you need to find a carbon-neutral alternative to the Haber process [1] to produce ammonia as fuel.
The Haber process only produces CO2 if you consider the steam reformation to generate the feed hydrogen to be part of the Haber process. Technically, the Haber process itself is carbon-neutral, it's just that the hydrogen feedstock is almost never carbon neutral at the current time.
In the context of hydrogen storage, was it not obvious what "ammonia" refers to?
We do not need an alternative to the Haber process, the idea is to use electrolysis to produce hydrogen from sea water. There is room for improvement in the process but the technology is old and well understood.
There are other ways to store hydrogen, and it's far from certain ammonia will win out in the marketplace, but there are no serious alternatives to hydrogen as an energy carrier in the long term for this application. Everything else is just impractical and even more expensive.
Just like flight fuel, it has seen little change because it is quite heavily subsidized in its current form. The day we collectively stop and start taxing it like other fuels, the market will change overnight.
Which we have already. And that wouod be a great solution to the problem of storing electricity / energy. And it could even use, partially, existing gas infrastructure. Green hydrogen absolutey is a thing, bow we just need to deploy it at scale.
No, almost all of our ammonia is produced via the Haber process which emits carbon dioxide. Less than a tenth of one percent of our hydrogen is produced via green hydrogen:
> As of 2021, green hydrogen accounted for less than 0.04% of total hydrogen production. Its cost relative to hydrogen derived from fossil fuels is the main reason green hydrogen is in less demand. For example, hydrogen produced by electrolysis powered by solar power was about 25 times more expensive than that derived from hydrocarbons in 2018.
But honestly, I reached the point where I claim the same "just build it" approach the pro-nuclear crowd is using regardless of data and facta. Especially since I know from a project I was involved in before COVID hit, that green hydrogen produced PV is absolutely feasible and commercially viable. To do so at tue scale needed requires political action and subsidies, and the tech has still a lot of room for improvement. I say this is good news.
> Especially since I know from a project I was involved in before COVID hit, that green hydrogen produced PV is absolutely feasible and commercially viable.
It'd be really great to link to that project and actually demonstrate this claim of commercial viability. We have at least one demonstration of a nuclear powered merchant ship operating over the span of a decade. Can we say the same for a green-fuel powered vessel?
The same vessel will be launched early next year with an ammonia fuel cell.
LNG can be produced using green energy, the actual engine doesn't care how the fuel was produced.
Regarding the green hydrogen project: it was a proposed pilot production site to produce green hydrogen. And the business case was actually positive. No idea where that project is now, tuey needed EU funding and that was hard to come by during Covid. And after, I stopped being a freelance consultant.
Synthetic methane is limited by the sources of carbon dioxide. Existing prototypes use either biomass or industrial byproducts for concentrated CO2. This is not available at scale. Biomass does not grow fast enough to sequester enough carbon.
Prometheus Fuels is the main player trying to do direct atmospheric sequesteration. But they've not succeeded yet.
Interesting but tangential to Gibson Island and other Fortescue Future projects as they're not attempting to sequester carbon or use biomass.
Andrew Forrest [1] has laid out plans to dramatically increase global green hydrogen production on the back of western australia's mining of close to a billion tonnes of iron ore per year (ie. experience of industry at large scale).
Ships running off natural gas are nothing new. LNG carriers have been propelled by natural gas for decades. The real challenge is producing carbon-neutral natural gas, which your link says nothing about.
Synthetic natural gas has all the same problems as green hydrogen, with the added challenge of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. It's only been cheaply produced using byproduct CO2 from industrial processes. Which isn't actually carbon-neutral, it's just using CO2 that would have been released into the atmosphere anyway.
That plant is not sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide. It's using waste carbon dioxide from a nearby biomass plant. This is far less challenging than removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
But unfortunately this method does not scale. The amount of fuel produced would be limited by the amount of carbon sequestered by plants. You'd be cutting down forests faster than they replenish if you tried to fuel cargo ships with this method.
> And why don't you know any of this already?
I do, and unlike you I understand how existing power to gas prototypes are using biomass or industrial byproduct CO2 rather than direct atmospheric sequesteration. This is sidestepping the most challenging part of producing synthetic hydrocarbons on a large scale.
Prometheus Fuels are the main player in attempting to solve direct atmospheric sequesteration of carbon dioxide. But they've still not delivered on that objective.
And the last small scale nuclear reactor project, NuScale, was completely cancelled. So the amount of power produced by this reactor type seems rather limited, trending to zero even. And guess what, we need snall reactors to power ships, reactors we don't have (no, those half dozen Russian ones don't count).
See how this game can be olqyed in both directions? Difference being, all the real money, and industry, is going for green fuels and not nuclear power when it comes to ships. I tend to believe those people.
Again, how many ships have been powered by green fuels? How many have been powered nuclear reactors? One of those is infinitely larger than the other. One of these technologies has over half a century of real world usage.
Comparing white papers about synthetic fuels with the cost history of actual nuclear powered ships that were built and operated for a decade or longer is comparing apples to oranges.
Green fuel ships exist now. They're still in the early stages but plenty of big names in the business are putting their weight behind then.
Plenty of "normal" ships are already hybrid electric like trains, so swapping out the diesel generator isn't particularly a science project and doesn't affect the already electric propellors.
You mostly need a financial incentive to burn clean methanol, ammonia or whatever. That's the hard part.
List some examples of cargo ships powered by green fuels that are presently in operation. Not small prototype ships, but green fuel powered ships comparable in capacity to the NS Savannah and other nuclear powered civilian ships: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Ci...
You just don't get it, do you? There is no readily available reactor tech suitable for commercial maritime use at the moment, none.
We do have technology so to produce green fuel for ships, and the whole shipping industry, from carriers to builders, is pursuing that in their goal of carbon neutral in 2050.
Of course there is still the possibility of those people being oart of a grand anti-nuclear conspiracy. Or they analyzed the tech and costs and came to an informed solution, one that is now global policy. You pick.
This technology not only exists, it's being used presently. And that's on top of the other three nuclear cargo ships that were previously built. We still have those proven designs.
> We do have technology so to produce green fuel for ships, and the whole shipping industry,
We do not. Existing synthetic gas plants are not capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. They are either using biomass or industrial byproduct CO2. The former of which does not scale, the latter is not truly carbon free it's just using carbon that would have been released into the atmosphere anyway. Neither is a pathway to producing green fuels at scale. Startups are pursuing atmospheric carbon sequestration, but it's proven elusive so far.
Solutions for green hydrogen generation from sea water do exist, and are even competitive depending on volume produced. One (!) nuclear powered cargo vessel, built as a specialized ship for fleet support in the Russian arctic seaa and capable of going through 1.5 meters of ice (thus requiring the power output of a nuclear power plant, same reason Russian icebreakers use NPPs) and bein used for supply missions to the Russian naval base in Murmansk, doesn't really count.
Again, those other cargo ships, NS Savannah, Otto Hahn and the Japanese one, were all economical failures, the Japanese one was even a technological failure. That makes a grand total of around 7 civilian maritime NPPs in operation, all Russian, with less than one built per year. Global shipping needs hundreds of those, at cost point competitive with alternatives to be viable. That tech, or capacity to build those numbers, simply doesn't exist. heck, that is even mentioned as a direct quote in the Reuters article that is being paraded around.
They were economic failures relative to fossil fuel powered ships - not relative to green fuels powered ships.
Again, if you're going to say that civilian nuclear maritime propulsion doesn't exist, because there have only been 7 such ships built by four different countries then green fuels powered cargo ships don't exist either. Again, how many cargo ships have been powered by green fuels? How many have operated for more than a decade?
Yes and while it may be early days for green hydrogen, it once was for solar and wind as well. And as it did with solar the European Union is leading the way in developing policy frameworks that will grow the industry.
Big batteries? https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-07-28/making-waves-e...
Hydrogen fuel? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-powered_ship
Yeah, those options seem simpler.