Cargo ships must cut their emissions in half by 2050 - Sensationalist Headlines

A new, hard-fought international deal will set limits on greenhouse gas emissions from international shipping for the first time. Delegates to the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization, or IMO, met for a week in London to hash out the details of the plan. On April 13, more than 170 states agreed to the new road map, which aims to reduce shipping emissions at least 50 percent below 2008 levels by 2050. Currently, international shipping emissions make up about 2 to 3 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane. That’s roughly on par with Germany’s annual emissions. And a 2014 IMO report calculated that international shipping emissions were on track to increase 50 to 250 percent by 2050. These emissions were not included in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the international pact to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (SN: 1/9/16, p. 6). Every year, tens of thousands of cargo ships crisscross the ocean, hauling everything from cars to coffee. Such ships largely rely on heavy fuel oil, which both contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and is a public health hazard, containing as much as 1,800 times the sulfur of diesel fuel, says James Corbett, an expert in global shipping at the University of Delaware in Newark. The new agreement focuses on the carbon emissions. It lays out an initial strategy to reduce emissions by encouraging shipping companies to make their ship designs more energy efficient, use alternative fuels or energy sources and streamline operations so that they consume less energy. The deal is an important milestone, Corbett says. “Clearly the IMO is moving into the 21st century,” he says. “The main issue that the IMO will continue to have to wrestle with is timing.” The organization, he adds, will need to walk a line between allowing the shipping industry time to adopt and prove new ship technologies — but not allow the industry to delay too long to meet environmental targets. Shipping industry groups have hailed the new agreement as a landmark deal. Peter Hinchliffe of the International Chamber of Shipping in London called the deal “a Paris Agreement for shipping” in a statement released April 13. Climate activists, who had hoped for more stringent regulations, had a more muted reaction. Veronica Frank, a Greenpeace International political adviser, told Reuters that the plan was “far from perfect, but the direction is now clear — a phaseout of carbon emissions.” Cargo ships must cut their emissions in half by 2050 | Science N..

totally agree this is one of the biggest problems of globalization

maratime law is painfully antiquated in general, its inexcusable that companies are allowed to register their ships in 3rd world countries to ignore regulations and often to mask the country of origin for the vessel itself.

It will be hard to pull off. Cargo ships are already running very large low speed diesel engines that get about 52% efficiency. Getting another 25% efficiency is simply not happening. Batteries for a cargo ship that burns 5000t of bunker oil on an average journey won't be replaced with batteries. I can only really see hydrogen as a replacement. Given the size of a cargo ship and predictable fuel consumption perhaps cryogenic hydrogen would work?

Could nuclear fuel be viable for a cargo ship? I googled it, and found an article about a ship built in the 50's, called the NS Savannah. Other cargoships could haul several times more cargo than the Savannah, but the ship was able to circulate the earth 14 times over at 20 knots without needing a refuel of Uranium, and with no emissions. It had drawbacks though, it couldn't carry as much cargo as a dedicated diesel-cargo ship (obviously), and it had to dump lots of radioactive waste accumulating from its reactor. Technology has progressed since then though, and maybe nuclear could be viable if you had large battery-banks on the ship. Large cargoships have a shitload of inertia, so most of the energy is spent manoeuvring, accelerating and stopping. Coasting from A to B could put less strain on it's powergrid, and thus maybe recharge the batteries? Just some thoughts. Don't really know much about ships so correct me if I'm wrong

Still has the same regulatory problems and potential security issues. Let alone the problem of having a ship sink. Think they are also way too expensive.

Nuclear powered ships should be cheaper in the long run but you have to pay a lot more up front. Shipping companies prefer cheaper upfront costs as a better hedge for market uncertainty. It allows them to pay off the ship faster and if the market tanks they've lost less money. Savannah wasn't really a cargo ship, it was a mixture of yacht, technology demonstrator and cargo ship. Comparing it's cargo carrying capacity to any other ship is asinine. The radioactive waste issue is overblown. Most nuclear reactors store gaseous short lived fission products and then release them after a few weeks. It's not a hazard.

Easiest way to do that would to increase fuel quality (like a dude said, they basically buy literal trash tier diesel and burn it), the second, more difficult, is to make an internal combustion engine with at least 50% efficiency for starters - eternal reminder that in order to extract the idiotically toxic lithium for batteries you basically gotta scrape a massive area, plus that the improved combustion engine would be much more powerful than a battery powered electric one. Of course, an electric engine with it's theoretically infinite rotation speed is the best, but may only work via overhead wires/direct powering

funny enough though, wind shows enormous potential with very little up front modification to the ships themselves and the added bonus is that they can power that using solar

Solar on ships would be pretty fantastic. Would allow for smaller batteries too, since cargo ships move largely on their inertia anyway. One idea could be to roll out panels on top of the containers considering the big surface area there. Possibly the best solution would be diesel generators and batteries for driving electric motors, where the diesel generators are only used when accelerating or slowing down from/to port, and the solar and battery power could handle all other maneuvers. That'd reduce emissions by a decent factor.

technically speaking, molten salt batteries are more than possible on cargo ships given how they already have to heat their fuel tanks up hundreds of degrees just to liquify the fuel

By 2050? What a joke. We don't have another 30 years to address this problem. It's happening now.

Lot of new builds are moving towards natural gas which would be a lot cleaner than bunker fuel. But some analysts have questioned it's long term viability.

“What is on the table is the bare minimum, and it’s not good enough,” Netherlands delegate to the IMO meeting Bas Eickhout told reporters on April 10, after the draft plan was revealed. No shit. The timeframe alone is absurd.

2050 is a really fucking generous timeline. That's like making a 10 page report due 6 months after it's assigned.

Switching to natural gas won't get you another 25% efficiency. The very best thermal engines can only make 63% overall, and this is for very large (say 1000MW) combined cycle gas turbines. In somethine small enough for a cargo ship (say ~100MW) you've be luck to get 55% which is only slightly better than low speed diesel engines.

Those smaller tramp vessels aren't the problem. The problem is those massive fuckers that can carry thousands of containers in a single load, or the supermax tankers. Ya know, the ships so large and so heavy that they make US Supercarriers look like fucking bass boats in comparison? Throw reactors in those things and the target goal is met. Simple as that. We have no reason to rely on internal combustion in maritime propulsion when we have proven safe nuclear naval propulsion that's practical in ships down to just a couple thousand tons(The typical weight of a fast attack sub) and up to 150,000 tons(Supercarriers). Even in worst case scenarios where we've lost nuclear powered submarines in waters several miles deep we have never recorded any nuclear contamination of the environment from their reactors, nor have any of them ever had any issues with reactor meltdown. Nuclear naval propulsion, quite literally, has a perfect safety record, and it is proven practical in a wide enough size range of ships that there's no reason not to be pushing for retrofits in civilian vessels. ESPECIALLY in the supermax and panamax freighters that are being discussed whenever this topic arises.

You're going to see that safety record go up in flames if you force companies to retrofit their ships. For starters, they were not designed with the nuclear reactor in mind, so you're going to weaken the ship by installing one. Secondly, you're going to have to make sure that all of their personell are adequately trained. Since shipping companies enjoy using cheap foreign labor, that is going to be an extremely hard proposition and they are going to look to cut costs wherever possible. In our current climate I do not think it is honestly possible to equip nuclear on cargo vessels.

The biggest limiting factor to nuclear in the merchant fleet is that no company can afford to do it. Companies like Maersk or CMACGM might have the resources to explore it, but even then, installing reactors in their biggest ships would severely limit their profit margins in a hurting industry as it is. The industry thrives on ways to cut costs and no ones gonna put a nuclear reactor that will require skilled labor and engineering to operate. Not to mention these ships are treated as commodities themselves, so the reactors need to be highly modular and easily removed or they'll be a nightmare to deal with in the end of life cycle of a ship(which can happen at a moments notice if the industry flips on its head. I've heard of new build ships going to scrap because they were no longer projected to make a profit) Typically ships are sold to a breaker and are torn apart on the shores of Bangladesh in an extremely dirty process. Adding nuclear would add another layer of complexity and servicing to prep the ship for decommission. The biggest ship in Maersk's fleet, the Triple E Class cost just $185 million and is one of the cleanest ships in her class in terms of emissions per mile. Through economies of scale, new engine developments, and hydrodynamics, we've been able to reduce emissions from the big ships by strides already. The reactor's you're expecting them to outfit their $185 million dollar ship with cost around $100-$200 million dollars to produce alone going off military estimates. Now factor in the crewing/salary requirements, and the decommissioning costs, and you have something that is prohibitively expensive to basically every shipping company. https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-build-the-reactor-in-a-nuclear-submarine-aircraft-carrier-or-ice-cutter And that's using a generally responsible, Danish company as an example. Now we also gotta expect Chinese and other companies to not cut costs to a dangerous extent, and then welcome those ships into our ports. Oh and don't forget the regulatory costs and further associated costs. I'm all for nuclear, I just think it's a dream to expect the whole world to conform to and develop the idea to put them in merchant ships. As it stands, nuclear power in the merchant fleet is prohibitively expensive. Nuclear is only viable for governments for the foreseeable future. Unless the world governments agree that letting nuclear on private ships is A-okay, and a company introduces a reactor that costs millions instead of tens or even hundreds of millions, and crewing companies can employ safe, reliable, competent nuclear engineers to fill these ships, and safe, clean decommissioning can be assured, then maybe nuclear in the private world will happen. 2050 will have likely passed by then. As for ships going down, it happens quite frequently but not as often with the really big ships. The few general maritime disasters I can name off the top of my head are the El Faro(2015), the Sanchi(2018) which was a Suezmax, and the Stellar Daisy(2017), which was a VLOC. Here's a list of all the current shipwrecks in 2018, though not all of them are merchant ships, or very large.

Go run the numbers on how much one of those massive ships costs to run throughout its lifetime. Betchya that number will be bigger than the numbers you're bringing up now...

Nuclear powered ships sinking is not an issue. Water is a very VERY good neutron moderator. A couple feet of water will block the vast majority, if not all radiation. Nuclear material hundreds of feet below the surface is probably the safest place for it to be in terms of radiation release.

The fuel the run is dirt cheap, it's quite literally bottom of the barrel stuff. Uranium costs and most importantly qualified staff would cost a lot more then the current stuff.

Bunker fuel is about US$500/t and a ship will burn 5000t of the stuff on a trip from China to Europe. A naval reactor burning 20% U235 (the most enriched uranium on the civilian market) requires 45 SWU/kg of fuel at US$36/SWU, and 40kg NatU at $100/kg, for a fuel cost of US$6.6k/kg. A reactor might need 500kg of fuel for 5 to 10 years service or about ~US3.3m every 5 to 10 years.

I agree that it would make economic sense in a long term fuel calculation because these ships are stupid expensive to fuel, and that would justify the high upfront to a certain point. Though there's still other costs associated with having to have civilian infrastructure to deal with nuclear fuel reloading, insurance, and political support. Not just from governments but people too. The Mutsu was faced with heavy public opposition and fishermen blockaded it out of port after a nuclear accident. People get looney about nuclear, so companies would need assurance that their $250 million dollar flagship doesn't have to fight through a floatilla of hippies every time it comes into port. Container ships and other large ships have the benefit of running in liner service though, so you would only need to outfit some of the biggest common ports with nuclear infrastructure/security systems. We'd also need to get insurance companies on its side, and approval from governments. Someone's gonna have to eat up a lot of initial cost to get things rolling, but if you get the government and insurers in favor, it might make a viable come back. If you don't care about the hippies. Is there any kind of total cost estimation for how much this whole project would cost, from design, construction, certification, insurance, crewing, infrastructure, decommissioning, etc? I'm not against the idea, I just feel like the initial costs to get it going see going to be stupidly expensive without government assistance. Do you think that everyone is assuming it's not viable so there hasn't been any good studies into it? That the costs are wildy over-assumed?

Just based on security alone nuclear-powered cargo ships would be a goddamn nightmare, never mind any economic calculations.

What's stopping the phasing out of the shitty fuel ? It really is what's causing the pollution and changing to a higher quality fuel would only increase one cost of the whole operation without affecting any other parts of the ship.

Personally I believe we should just bring back the 17th century triple masters. It costs a bit of wood, but that's it. They look great and it gives people a great chance to experience scurvy in the modern era.

Tall Ships, as much as I love them (I’m a Tall Ship sailor), are not viable in a modern shipping economy. They are too small, cannot carry enough containers, and would be entirely reliant on wind and tide - something that would not be sustainable today in a world where scheduling is extremely tight.