Slashdot Mirror
One Giant Cargo Ship Pollutes As Much As 50M Cars
thecarchik writes "One giant container ship pollutes the air as much as 50 million cars. Which means that just 15 of the huge ships emit as much as today's entire global 'car park' of roughly 750 million vehicles. Among the bad stuff: sulfur, soot, and other particulate matter that embeds itself in human lungs to cause a variety of cardiopulmonary illnesses. Since the mid-1970s, developed countries have imposed increasingly stringent regulations on auto emissions. In three decades, precise electronic engine controls, new high-pressure injectors, and sophisticated catalytic converters have cut emissions of nitrous oxides, carbon dioxides, and hydrocarbons by more than 98 percent. New regulations will further reduce these already minute limits. But ships today are where cars were in 1965: utterly uncontrolled, free to emit whatever they like." According to Wikipedia, 57 giant container ships (rated from 9,200 to 15,200 twenty-foot equivalent units) are plying the world's oceans.
Impose tariffs based on what kind of cargo ship the stuff came in on. That's what they can do about it.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Sailing ships don't require that: WOODEN ships do. Though ships of old were typically wooden, there is no requirement at all that a sailing vessel be made of wood (and modern sailing vessels typically aren't).
Don't confuse the proposal that we use sails more as a proposal that we go back to using Spanish Galeon's. You can merge the concept with a more modern approach as needed.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Honestly, how much of our current problems would go away if we just stopped buying the cheapest crap we can find? Trade imbalances? Global pollution? Landfill? We really have to get away from the whole "I want it right now, and I want it cheap, and I don't care how crappy it is if it just makes me happy for a few minutes." Here is an idea: Do some research. Buy a quality product that will last you the rest of your life instead of one you have to throw away next week. And if you can't afford it right now? Save up until you have the money for it. Trust me. You'll appreciate it more.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
It doesn't really tell the whole story. The way the story's worded, you'd think that car emissions are a drop in the ocean (ha ha ha) compared to cargo ship emissions, but that's only true for a certain range of pollutants, and it's certainly not remotely true for carbon emissions.
Saying that one ship pollutes as much as 50million cars is misleading. To be completely accurate, you must say one ship produces as much sulfer-pollution as 50million cars.
Now I have no doubt that this is still quite bad, but this doesn't mean that it has 50million times as much carbon emissions as cars. A quick google search shows that this can cause breathing problems and acid rain (both very bad) it doesn't seem to be a global warming problem. When you blindly say it pollutes 50million times as much of something cars now pollute very little of, it makes good headlines but it's bad science.
If they completely relaxed emissions rules for cars then regardless of whether world-wide pollution decreased we would have smog in all the major cities, just like before emissions controls were put into place. Different types of pollution have different area ranges where their effects are felt, and our laws need to take this into consideration.
Point taken, but consider the following:
1. If the technology had continued to be developed, I'm sure we would have seen larger, faster, and more sophisticated sailing vessels used for shipping, likely resulting in far greater efficiencies today even with sailing compared to then.
2. When you consider the utter mess we're making of this planet, reduced shipping capacity isn't that bad of a thing to accept. It's akin to finally realizing that though racking up credit card debt can net you a lot of goodies, eventually you have to stop. That may mean a reduction in life style, but it's something you have to accept eventually. As it is now, there's no damn reason why the spoons and forks in your local stores should need to be shipped from halfway across the friggen planet. Manufacture some of the small trivialities closer to home. Make sure that the stuff we're shipping across the oceans have a legitimate NEED to travel that distance. Artwork? Family heirloom? Passengers? Sure, send those over. The knick-knacks at the dollar store though? I don't have much sympathy if that particular valve is shut off.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Actually sailing ships required the destruction of vast forests (one of the reasons Britain wanted North American colonies was for the wood to build ships with). They generally didn't last that long and had to be replaced frequently. So their effect on the environment wasn't minimal.
Bullshit. Ships didn't require THAT much wood, and Britain didn't want North America simply to build wooden ships. They wanted North America because things like you know, houses are still made of wood. But more importantly, they wanted America for its other resources, including sheer space for colonization.
As for the ships not lasting all that long... by what standard? A typical non-aircraft carrier, steel-constructed US Navy vessel has a service life of around 30 years. Wooden commerce and naval vessels from the 1600's onwards had service lives of about.... 30 years. Navies went to steel because they made better warships, not because of any scarcity of wood. Nelson's favorite warship, HMS Agamemnon, was in service 28 years and was still one of the prime warships of the Royal Navy when she was wrecked in bad weather in 1809. It wasn't uncommon for navies to put a ship in the yards after 15 years, cut her in half, and literally splice in a section to maker her bigger, then return her to service as a larger vessel for another 15 years or so.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I suspect the resistance to using a nuclear cargo vessel has less to do with anti-nuclear fears and more to do with the cost of operating them.
This has come up before, and I'll say it again for good measure: naval nuclear reactors are expensive. If they weren't, you can be sure the military would use them on cruisers and destroyers. As it stands the only vessels that use a nuke plant are carriers and subs, both expensive as hell, and the latter only use nuke plants because they don't need to surface for oxygen (on a pure operating cost basis diesel-electric subs win out).
Plans for nuclear surface ships below carrier weight have been put forward, and axed repeatedly, almost always on the basis of cost alone. And if the American navy says something is too expensive, believe me, it's too expensive.
Now, what I wonder is, would a cargo vessel be less polluting if it used a multi-hull design to reduce drag and was fitted with more advanced filtration system to mitigate the worst of its exhaust? That's a lot more achievable than the nuclear option, and wouldn't sacrifice cargo capacity, unlike the sail option put forward earlier in the thread.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Though ships of old were typically wooden, there is no requirement at all that a sailing vessel be made of wood (and modern sailing vessels typically aren't).
We know that the only things that float are wood, ducks, witches, and the occasional very small pebble. If not wood than what, ducks? A duck can't even carry a coconut without sinking. Small pebble can't carry very much, and witches are incredibely difficult to work with. So tehre you have it: wood. So sayeth the Ways of Science.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
One big ship or lots of smaller ships? Is it time to lose "the fear" and go nuclear on cargo vessels?
Fear has nothing to do with it. Expense does. We've built nuclear merchant vessels before. They're just too expensive to operate. We built a fast, beautiful nuclear merchant ship (the NS Savannah) as a technology demonstrator, and when companies looked at the costs involved, they simply didn't see the point. Only a handful of nuke cargo ships were ever built, and only the Russians used them for any length of time.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
This whole thing is so distorted. The REASON that we don't mandate these ships use strong pollution controls or clean fuels is specifically because pollution is part quantity, part location. If there's nobody to breathe a pollutant before it degrades, it's not hurting anyone. Car exhaust is released at ground level in populated areas.
In terms of fuel consumed and CO2 released, ship pollution from transporting a car (and all of its component parts) is a small fraction of the fuel consumed and CO2 released in the vehicle's lifespan. Cargo ships are the most efficient way, from a fuel and CO2 perspective, to move a given mass of freight (even more than trains), at nearly 500 miles per gallon per ton. You can haul your average car from Tokyo to LA using under 20 gallons of fuel. Now, there's going to be all sorts of soot and sulfur released from that fuel because the regulations are so lax -- but who's it going to hurt in the middle of the Pacific's vast nutrient-devoid dead zones? You're probably doing more to fertilize them than hurt them.
The actual pollution problems, BTW, are when the ships show up in port. The "last leg" of travel causes the vast majority of their health consequences, and there's a lot of work underway to clean it up.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
I'll quote some math I did about a year ago in this post.
While the amounts of HFO burned by, say, the Emma Maersk are enormous (about 300 metric tonnes per day at full operation), this is almost nothing when compared to trucks. Assuming 300mt/day at a cruise speed of 25 knots (over 45km/h), that equates to roughly 30 tonnes per 100 km. A semi-trailer truck pulling two TEU containers runs at around 30 liter per 100 km (that's around 8 mpg). This means the Emma Maersk, carrying 14000 TEU, uses 1000 times as much fuel as a truck carrying 2 TEU, which makes this ship about 7 times as fuel efficient as trucks.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
Small nitpick, wooden shipbuilding techniques before ~1800 required long pieces of wood for the strakes, and specifically curved pieces of wood for the scantlings. Shorter pieces worked too much at sea, making the ships hog and sag, and creating leaks. A typical third rate 72 gun ship of the line required over 5,000 old growth oak trees to build. Finally, thirty years was the service life discounting rebuilds, which could extend the life of a ship to double that, or more.
I have heard the theory that Britain wanted American wood for ships in other places before this. We have a type of oak, White Oak, that is particularly suited to shipbuilding due to its strength and resistance to splintering.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Well, I agree with you that we need to take the nuclear option much more seriously, for power generation purposes. Something needs to replace all those coal fired power plants, and we're still a ways off from being able to build commercial fusion reactors.
However, I'm a realist. I can't imaging nuclear power ever winning points on cost. And the reason for this is not just that the current crop of 40 year old+ reactors is expensive to operate.
If you want to make any piece of technology virtually failure safe, you can do so. You can make a building that will survive every earthquake. Or a computer that cannot crash. Or (insert-imaginary-perfect-machine-here).
What you can't do is make such technology cheap. Systematic redundancy, backups upon backups, religious levels of maintenance, every piece of equipment built to specifications that vastly exceed the operational reality - all of these are possible, and they all cost a fortune.
There are only a couple of areas of human engineering where we build with such precise paranoia around failure. Nuclear power is one of them. And the reason for doing this with nuclear power is that we're properly paranoid about it, because failure carries with it such consequences. An excellent study in this is to contrast Three Mile Island (where the safeties were well designed) with Chernobyl (not so much).
Nuclear power done right is going to be expense. We can cut more corners with anything else. Now, this doesn't mean we shouldn't use nuclear power, but it does mean that the best use for it is in large commercial power plants.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
This has been developed and put into use by a German company: SkySails. They report fuel savings of up to 30% in some conditions.
And yes, cutting speeds by about 10% reduces fuel use for the same distance by about 20%. This happens all the time in economy dips. Since fuel is the largest cost in shipping and its share in total costs keeps rising, it's an easy way to save a lot of money by offering up a little time. Maersk, the big container line, has reduced the operating speed on its ships from 22 to 20 knots because of the global economic recession. This is a pretty hard thing to do for them, because their ships operate on a schedule and have to stick to it, so changing operating speed means changing the schedule worldwide.
In other types of shipping such as bulk carriers and tankers, this practice is much more common. When there is little demand, ships can go slower to save money so they make more profit per job. When the economy is doing well and demand is high, shipping prices can suddenly skyrocket. In this case, sailing a little faster is the best way to transport more cargo in the same time, and thus complete more jobs. In fact, increasing speed is the short-term version of building new ships: it virtually creates more carrying capacity instantly. Building a ship takes months or years, so it can't be used to respond to sudden changes in demand.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
The majority of open ocean is a nutrient-poor environment even for algae and plankton.
It is a less productive desert than just about anywhere else on Earth.
What 'nutrient-rich zones that died off' am I missing?
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
I worked as a tree thinner a long time ago. Our job was to go into an area (in the national forest) and thin the little baby trees down to about one every 10 feet. Then the ones that were left would grow faster, straight and tall - and since we preferentially removed less valuable species, the ones that remained tended to be the more valuable ones. I figured out that I was killing about 12000 baby trees per day (over about 10 acres). The ones that were left would be about 430 per acre, so ten acres would provide about 4300 trees. So it's not a very big forest in pure acreage. The time it takes to GROW the trees is significant, of course. There's a long time between a four-foot sapling and a mighty Douglas Fir - especially for the big diameter trees where you get more of the 'clear' knot-free wood.
Old boat builders (and some present-day boat builders) look especially for certain parts of trees. For example, the curved sections where the tree spreads out its roots tend to be very good for 'knees', taking advantage of both the curved grain and the extra density and strength that the trees develop in that area.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
That is why the top 50 cargo ships should be nuclear powered. Clean, efficient, fast, consistent.
The most energy efficient ground transport, I've been told, is a horse riding a bicycle.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Chlorophyll map of the world's oceans.
Now pay close attention to the scale at the bottom. Even the stuff in green has 1/20th the photosynthetic activity as the stuff in red. Note how tiny of an area is in red.
Most of the world's oceans are *extremely* poor in life. The limiting factor for photosynthesis in most of the world's oceans is not light or CO2, but iron. Iron sinks in aggregate and is poorly soluble.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Since a few years ships are already required to switch to low-sulfor fuel when they come near the coast or enter ports..
Several types of marine fuel exist: MGO, MDO, HFO,..
HFO (heavy fuel oil) is getting banned in some parts of the world.
And yes this means vessels actually have 2 or 3 different types of fuel on board and switch over from one type to another.
The economic crash of 2 years ago was beneficiary for the environment btw.
The years before it, prices for renting a ship (baltic dry index) was so high that only the rent made up the largest part of the cost, fuel costs were low in comparison. So cargo vessels were instructed to go full speed (and consume/pollute more).
Now the BDI dropped, the rent is lower and it's again a matter of optimising days at sea / consumption (slower speed = less consumption, so renting a vessel 1 or 2 days longer can be better because fuel savings are more than the extra rent you pay for these days).
A lot of old (and more polluting) vessels also were laid in docks or are scrapped the past 2 years as there suddenly wasn't enough cargo to transport..
disclaimer: I work at the it department of a group of companies that operates cargo vessels.. have worked on a program to register their trips and optimize fuel costs/speed/...
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
Nope, he was pretty close. Your figure is way out - there's no way a gallon of fuel put into a cargo ship would move 1 ton 500 miles (or the inverse)....Fuel consumption is listed as 3.80 litres per second, or 1 gallon per second (3600 gallons/hour). That's a hell of a lot of fuel, and far off your 1 gallon = 1 ton moved 500 miles.
So, 3600 gallons/hour. The engine you mentioned is on the Emma Mærsk. Say it cruises at about 20 mph (speed is given as 29, but let's be conservative). That's 180 gallons/mile.
Now, to get 500 ton-miles/gallon you need to be carrying 500*180 = 90,000 tons. The Emma Mærsk can actually carry 154,000 tons. That works out at 856 ton-miles/gallon.
So, he may have been wrong, but in the opposite direction to the one you thought. Cargo ships do use an insane amount of fuel, but they also carry an insane amount of cargo.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat