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- Hacker News
- You do know you can burn stuff that is not dug up from the ground right? From ethanol to sun flower and coconut oil. You can pretty much just pour them in a gas tank and the engine will just work.
- Reminded me of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-1Af96gYVI
"The insane plan to dam the North Sea."
by amelius - The honest answer is that this is one of the edge cases that will probably electrified late. There are of course a lot of other use cases where electrification is a lot easier and more doable (e.g. tug boats are already being electrified).
There are probably a few practical ways it could be done economically. One simple way that comes to mind is to use battery ships that connect to the main ship via cables. Those could move back and forth between charging spots and act as a mobile power supply. The question then becomes how much battery can be fitted on these ships and the practicalities of connecting ships with cables. 1mwh is about ~4 tonnes at current energy densities. Small barges commonly carry hundreds of tonnes of freight.
Another obvious one is using small nuclear reactors. Not a popular solution with environmentalists but doable technically.
Bio fuels are an alternative to fossil fuels. In the same way hydrogen or derived fuels are a valid alternative. More expensive than fossil fuels, but it would work.
And if you apply system thinking here, a valid question is whether using more but smaller ships could work. People are getting hung up on electrifying the same huge ship. The only reason that huge ship is economical is the economies of scale you get with large engines and relatively expensive fossil fuels.
As the article notes, dredging is something that used to be done manually and assisted by wind power. So, it can be done. It's just a lot more labor intensive that way. But we have ways to make these more autonomous now. So, an army of smaller battery operated dredge robots might replace a big dredging ship. They'd be moving back and forth between charge points and where the action is.
It all boils down to cost, economics, and practicalities.
- I think, crucially, we cannot do so without damaging the environment even without fossil fuels. In time, presumably environmental concerns will result in sufficient acceleration of depolderization until the Netherlands no longer has such a large environmental damage footprint. Fortunately, they have made strides on this[0] but in time they will hopefully mitigate the terrible damage they have done here.by arjie
- I wanna plug Fervo energy, as advanced geothermal, where they've got a plant in the US where it's up and running. They tunnel into the Earth and use that to heat up water, and use that temperature differential to generate electricity. Expertise in drilling oil wells can be translated into drilling geothermal pipes instead!by fragmede
- >those ships would require enormous chemical batteries, which is not practical or sustainable
Since 2018 when the article was written the cost of batteries has dropped about 50% https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline. And will probably do another 50%+ with sodium ion batteries that use common and abundant materials.
A human working at a normal kind of rate probably does about 2 kWh worth of work in a day or similar to a $200 battery which can be recharged for <$1. Batteries would be way cheaper than human labour already and similar to the cost of diesel.
by tim333 - > those ships would require enormous chemical batteries
In many cases they can't be all that far from land, could one set up a way to run wires?
I also wonder about the possibility for some kind of permanent installation in select places, where small amounts of sediment are continually removed (as opposed to large amounts of sediment occasionally removed). Being permanent means you can hook it up to the grid.
by BigTTYGothGF - Electricity generated from wind and solar with some wires to the dredge would be way easier than dredging by hand.
Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.
The historical aspects of this article are a good read though. Very interesting technology.
by an_account