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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.
- Depending on the engine, perhaps. But this still releases CO2. This is not about supply limitations.by zahlman
- Good point, liquid and gas fuels will continue to be important into the future where energy density is needed, fuel cells could be a good option also.by seiferteric
- All too often those have bad environmental impacts of their own. Coconut oil ends up being grown in plantains that require clear cutting natural forests. The agricultural process to plant, grow and harvest sunflowers produces significant CO2 just as it does for growing corn for ethanol.by Tagbert
- Sure you can burn them, doesn't mean you're accomplishing anything from a thermodynamic point of view.
Metric to look at is EROI - Energy Return on Investment. How much energy do you put into growing these crops to get a unit of energy out?
Corn ethanol in the US is stupid because it's a 1.6:1 return at best, often a 1:1. To get a unit of energy out of corn ethanol, you need to put almost a unit in. And that's economic inputs, we know the sunshine is free. Sugarcane is a bit better, but you can only grow it in the tropics.
For reference, solar tends to be something like 4:1 - 10:1, wind is 10:1 +/- onshore or offshore, fracked oil tends to be down around 5:1-8:1, and a saudi well is (or at least used to be) 40:1.
by floatrock - 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
- How many wells (and how deep) and on what area one needs for a 1 (one) GWe sustained over 100 years? Timespan is critical too you know, you are cooling the rock below, so heat flow must be kept constant over the life of the plant.
Any numbers for that?
by lstodd - >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 - The Netherlands uses the largest and most powerful dredging ship in the world, The Queen of the Netherlands. Each of the dredging pumps are 8,000 horsepower (6 MW) and there are two of them. Even the short-range ship-to-shore connections used by container ships are in the 2 MW range. Running "wires" would be ambitious.by smallerize
- For canals, I'd say yes. I mean related, before steam / fossil / etc we'd have a "trekschuit", which was a canal boat pulled by people and / or animals that walked on a path alongside the canals. Wired propulsion, if you will. I can see a system similar to trains/trams but for ships would work.by Cthulhu_
- 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 - I kinda like the idea of using prison labour for environmentally friendly dredging.
But The Netherlands abolish prison slave labour in 2021 so that is no longer possible.
by retired - > Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.
So do care about the environment but many "green" activists do not care at all for the environment: for those it's just another version of communism. They want to crush the notion of the individual: they cannot understand the notion of a free, happy, individual.
They're rather have unhappy people united in communism, living miserably like under the USSR, than having a more advanced, richer, country if more advanced and richer means people are free.
Many don't care a yota about the environment: it's just an excuse to try to remove freedom from others.
- Many enviromentalists want to move past the enshitified present, and get a place where responsibly utilised technologys can be maintained ,repaired and modified. Doing repair and maintenance to a wide variety of equipment from many different erras, while building new things is part of my life.I am getting most of my energy from solar and renewable sources, but with engines for more energy intensive things like welding and transportation so thinking about ways to reasonably move forward has me very interested in electric battery cars,trucks,boats,airplanes,tractors and the rest, like megga massive earth moving equipment or say a dredge, which is where we agree, but it has to be a thing that is intuitive to operate and fix, reliable, and reasonably safe, but not priced so high that only capital can own it, this last bit is the part that makes the past atractive, as it is a place where if nothing else, people had agency as the default.VS the nagging nanny nightmare of enshitification and bieng institutionalised in there own skin.by metalman
- 1) they don't know what the past was like 2) they don't actually think humans deserve what we have 3) technology isn't natural, somehowby chermi
- >some wires.
Id look into that statement some more if I were you: There’s much difficulty building houses and starting industry because the net is congested.
As always: if it’s as easy as a random commenter suggests, it’s probably not that easy.
by Moosdijk - Well, for a techno-utopian perspective, a page called "Low Tech Magazine" might not be the right place to search. :)
Besides, the page linked is actually powered entirely by solar panels, although intentionally not battery backed in this instance.
- I read the whole article figuring that the question in the title would be answered. Like you enjoyed the history but was frustrated by the fact that the question was never addressed.by intrasight
- > Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.
They don't. That's fossil fuel propoganda that you've fallen for and are now spreading.
In reality fossil fuel is crap and we don't need it.
by onraglanroad