Flying boats and artificial photosynthesis for cleaner shipping

bbc.com

Submitted by perpetual_C000009A t3_105qinq in Futurology

The Pioneer, developed by Artemis Technologies, is the world's first electric foiling workboat to be brought to market.

The foil, a wing-like structure underneath the boat, lifts the hull out of the water, greatly reducing drag.

Combine with an electric motor and you have, according to Artemis, a vessel which reduces fuel costs by 90% and is emission-free.

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SkyPork t1_j3c9xeh wrote

Hydrofoils are cool, but I'm fairly sure that's not what "flying" means. Good job, BBC.

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Napo5000 t1_j3cdhtm wrote

It’s also nothing new… Edit: And it cannot be easily scaled up to container ship size

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SkyPork t1_j3cdtme wrote

Oh man it'd be fun to see them try to put foils on a ship that huge though....

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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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FuturologyBot t1_j3c9km7 wrote

The following submission statement was provided by /u/perpetual_C000009A:

This article details a vessel that has a submerged "wing", allowing it to "fly" over the water. This means less drag, less fuel consumption, and less wake generated by the passage of the vessel. Which in turn means less erosion of the shoreline and allowing the vessel to move faster in coastal waters and harbours.
Also detailed in the article is an artificial photosynthesis technology being developed in Cambridge, UK to produce synthesis gas, which can be used in place of gasoline.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/105qinq/flying_boats_and_artificial_photosynthesis_for/j3c61iy/

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oo7_and_a_quarter t1_j3hqqgk wrote

I could see a future with a fleet of automated drone shipping to replace the current behemoths, but what about hydrofoil strikes with sea life, such as whales?

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TheMace808 t1_j3imbux wrote

Yeaaah that could be a big problem for a hydrofoil, far more so than a regular hull

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perpetual_C000009A OP t1_j3c61iy wrote

This article details a vessel that has a submerged "wing", allowing it to "fly" over the water. This means less drag, less fuel consumption, and less wake generated by the passage of the vessel. Which in turn means less erosion of the shoreline and allowing the vessel to move faster in coastal waters and harbours.
Also detailed in the article is an artificial photosynthesis technology being developed in Cambridge, UK to produce synthesis gas, which can be used in place of gasoline.

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DiscoveryOV t1_j3dylrk wrote

Hydrofoils are nothing new, like at all. The trouble is they generally require a pretty smooth surface to work, something that doesn’t really exist in the ocean.

Maybe they’ve found a way to make them less sensitive.

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