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.
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/
Hydrofoils are cool, but I'm fairly sure that's not what "flying" means. Good job, BBC.
It’s also nothing new… Edit: And it cannot be easily scaled up to container ship size
Oh man it'd be fun to see them try to put foils on a ship that huge though....
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.
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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“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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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?
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…
Yeaaah that could be a big problem for a hydrofoil, far more so than a regular hull
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.