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amitym t1_j3cxw1y wrote

All good news! I'm not sure how much a light hydrofoil is going to contribute to shipping, but every action to defossilize what we do is going to be needed.

Meanwhile there actually is all-electric container shipping going on right now. The application is relatively small scale and the range sucks at the moment, but it's sufficient to handle shipping between iirc Denmark and Norway. And it's very new technology so the hope is that it will improve rapidly.

Defossilization is happening. It's our hand on the lever that controls how fast we get it done.

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MeteorOnMars t1_j3gq20s wrote

“Hand on the lever”… I’m going to steal that phrase.

I often try to emphasize with people that the rate of progress in any particular direction is so fundamentally based on how much we care and try.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j3ifpoh wrote

The endgame for container ships is probably synthetic fuel produced with excess renewable power. Large container ships already only release like 100g of carbon per ton of freight per kilometer traveled. It’s ~2tins of co2 to get a ton of freight across the pacific, which is like 11k kilometers.

Ideally synthetic fuel will be carbon neutral because it’s made from ammonia derived from green hydrogen. Analysts expect it to account for ~15% of marine fuel in 20 years…

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