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The World's Largest Cruise Ship and Its Supersized Pollution Problem (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader cites a report on the Guardian: When the gargantuan Harmony of the Seas slips out of Southampton docks on Sunday afternoon on its first commercial voyage, the 16-deck-high floating city will switch off its auxiliary engines, fire up its three giant diesels and head to the open sea. But while the 6,780 passengers and 2,100 crew on the largest cruise ship in the world wave goodbye to England, many people left behind in Southampton say they will be glad to see it go. They complain that air pollution from such nautical behemoths is getting worse every year as cruising becomes the fastest growing sector of the mass tourism industry and as ships get bigger and bigger. According to its owners, Royal Caribbean, each of the Harmony's three four-storey high 16-cylinder Wartsila engines will, at full power, burn 1,377 US gallons of fuel an hour, or about 96,000 gallons a day of some of the most polluting diesel fuel in the world.
A 747 burns through 3,600 Gallons of fuel per hour for just over 416 Passengers. This ship burns 1/3 of that for nearly 9000 people.
Total occupants is 8880. That means it burns 0.16 Gallons/(hour person).
By contrast:
Lets say a car gets 30 miles per gallon on the highway. That means in an hour at 60 miles per hour, the car will burn 2 gallons of fuel or 2 gallons/hour. Now lets say the car is at full capacity of 5 people. That means the car is burning 0.4 Gallons/(hour person).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oasis-class_cruise_ship
First off, those engines will only run at full power at the very start of the journey, if even then to get to, well, _cruising_ speed, which is around 22 knots, which is around 25 miles per hour. It IS a lot of fuel to use in any case - but per-person, it's not so bad as these blind numbers in headlines.
http://business.tenntom.org/why-use-the-waterway/shipping-comparisons/
Bulk shipping by large ship is actually pretty efficient a method of transporting our stuff. Yeah - they often use the nasty fuel when they can get away with it - but in terms of per-unit cost, it really isn't that bad by scale. The entire transportation industry DOES need to get off carbon fuels - but compared to the fuel used to give everyone groceries and trade, the impact of vacation resources isn't that large a cost. People always eat, the extra fuel to eat on this boat isn't a very large extra percent.
I don't think it's terribly productive to label folks taking vacations as wasteful, when really, it's our entire current system that needs to get its resource usage into a sustainable state.
I think if you'd compare it to environmentally 'friendly' activities like touring Alaska's wildlife, it uses far less fuel per person.
Ryan Fenton
Most cruise ships are powered by bunker fuel, an extremely low-quality, high-polluting fuel blend. Carnival first experimented with scrubbers several years ago, installing a system on a Holland America ship, Tom Dow, Carnival's vice-president for public affairs, explains. However, it took up too much space and released large amounts of polluted wastewater. Carnival scrapped the program. No, cruise ships predominately use bunker fuel. Source: http://www.theguardian.com/sus...
WÃrtsilà engines are among the best performing and cleanest in the world (I work there) and there's been a huge push to make them even cleaner. Unless they use some low-grade bunker oil without filters, I don't really see what's the problem with emissions. There are quite strict limits in the EU what type of fuel you can use in the first place.
1. Your math is wrong. It's actually 1.14 gallons per passenger per hour.
2. As others have noted, the measure of productivity is passengers per mile, not total occupants including crew per hour.
3. The true figures are here.
I never understood why people would want to go on a cruise on one of these mega-ships. They have nothing to do with nautical travel - you're no closer to the actual sea than in a beachfront hotel room. You're stuck for many days inside cramped quarters with nothing interesting to do.
Oh, and loading/unloading process is so horrible (doubly so for international travels) that it would make TSA officials go green from envy. Waiting for half a day in line to get off that freaking ship? You betcha!
I had misfortune to lose a raffle and get a ticket for a four-day roundtrip cruise. I left by plane from the midpoint of the trip.
... Its bunker, not bumper fuel, and its the sulfur thats removed from refined oil products, not sodium. There is no compound known as sodium dioxide, but i'm thinking you mean sulfur dioxide.
Why? It's a cruise ship. It doesn't really go anywhere in specific, but it does go there for 4 or 8 or 7 days or whatever. per passenger-hour is the correct measure of efficiency. It just doesn't compare well to automobiles where per passenger-mile is the proper measure.
Possibly someone can come up with a conversion, but it's not a straight miles-to-miles parity.