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Spider-Like Catamaran Travels 5,000 Miles On One Tank
Lucas123 writes "Proteus, a Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel that looks like a spider, is so fuel efficient that it can travel 5,000 miles on one load of diesel fuel. The 100-foot-long, 50-foot-wide boat rides on metal and fabric pontoons that have hinges and shock absorbers to flex with the motion of the waves, which helps it to skim over the water at a max speed of 30 knots. It made its debut yesterday in New York harbor."
Large cargo ships are incredibly efficient at moving stuff around. The fuel costs are essentially zero to move a pound of stuff from China to here in a container. A vague ballparky number that'll get you in the area is 40 gallons per TEU per 1000 miles. That's 40 gallons of bunker fuel to more one 20 foot container 1000 miles, and that with a smaller ship.
It's all the everything else that costs money and fuel.
This thing sounds sort of crummy in terms of efficiency, which isn't too surprising. It's small, it's got a lot of stuff up in the air, relative to its size. It's probably moving pretty fast. At 12 tons all up, and 2 tons of cargo capacity, it's in the same ballpark as say a 40 foot sailboat (which happen to have easily-driven hulls, so the fact that it has sails is irrelevant), and a 40 footer will drink maybe 1 gallon per hour at 6 knots. That would take her 12,000 miles on the same 2000 gallons.
Note, however, your 40 foot sailboat wouldn't have anything like 2000 gallons on board. More like 50 to 100.
I'm having a littke trouble buying the 2000 gallon tank, on this thing, since that would run about 6 or 7 tons right there, which seems all out of proportion to the rest of the boat.
Finally, Ugo Conti is the inventor, but Jim Antrim from the bay area actually did the design work and the engineering. I think it was built up in Washington (Anacortes, maybe?)
The article sucks.