Betelgeuse has a declination of 7 24.5' which barely varies at all, meaning it's visible from the North Pole all the way down to 75 South of the equator at least at one point during any 24 hour period. Most populated areas will get to see it at least 30 degrees above the horizon (the closer you are to 7 North, the higher up in the sky you'll see it, and the longer it will be visible each day).
So if it happens, you can watch it at home unless you live on Antarctica. If you have preferences as to seeing it at sunset, midnight, sunrise or midday, you might need to travel East or West.
Not really. Many goods have a density higher than that of seawater. The addition of extra fresh water from melting ice caps will help reduce the density of seawater. This will increase the range of products that can be thrown overboard to be delivered to underwater wastelands.
Also, higher sea levels will make it easier for bigger ships to sail right into the heart of sunken cities. This will further increase the efficiency of shipping, and reduce the need for secondary transport systems.
Now please, stop crashing the "glass half full"-party.
I love how some people can be so determined in saying humanity has hardly any impact on our planet. Consider the changes in human lifestyle over the last 100 years. Consider population growth. Consider consumption or natural resources. Consider how much of the Earth is changed by human development. Consider the combined effect of those, and then tell me it's a good idea to keep doing what we're doing.
It feels to me like some people are giving in to the fact that we did in fact evolve from monkeys, and they've found another noble cause to hang on to.
How can you be so sure that there is little we can do to stop it? The fact that we can't prove that we're responsible for global warming doesn't prove that we're not. And if you do a proper risk assessment, like this guy does in his series of videos that are very much worth viewing despite his silly hats, you'll find that the smart thing to do is to try and do something about it.
Your line of thought sounds like "the Earth is going to hell but we might not be responsible so let's just see where this goes". Consider the possibility that we are responsible, and/or (they don't even have to be connected) the possibility that we can do something about it.
Tunneling really isn't that hard in most places. All you need is a deep hole on each side to assemble tunnel boring machines. You might run into problems with pipelines, wires and other tunnels, but you can always go deeper.
In the '90s, a feasibility study was done in the Netherlands for an Underground Logistics System. It involved little carts that could drive themselves, and carry a variety of cargo pallets. The idea was to connect Amsterdam's Schiphol airport to a nearby train station and a flower market. They never built it because the financial risks were too big.
More recently, a Belgian engineering firm proposed an Underground Container Mover for the port of Antwerp, which is basically a large underground conveyor belt for containers. It would run in a circle connecting container terminals with other terminals and highways on the other side of the river. This could remove a lot of trucks from the busy highways, especially the tunnels.
The basic idea is that as ground is becoming more and more rare, we shouldn't waste it on cargo transport. Moving most of it underground makes a lot of sense. And we've actually managed to move a lot of it (up to 90% in some areas) underground already, in terms of tonne-miles of goods transported. Just think of drinkable water, gas and sewage, but also oil and a lot of chemicals in industrial zones. Pipelines are transporting more than most people can imagine, and they're great. Trying to move boxed goods in a similar fashion is the logical next step, there are just a few problems we haven't figured out yet.
You can't disconnect fuel efficiency from pollution efficiency, because you can't disconnect internal combustion engines from exhaust gases.
ICEs need something to burn, and it doesn't matter much what that something is. It can be carbon, hydrogen, sulfur, nitrogen, or in this case, all of the above. You'll always have oxides as exhaust, and most of those are harmful to the environment. The exception here is hydrogen gas which forms water (steam) when burned. Unfortunately hydrogen gas has to be man-made, which requires energy. That energy usually means exhaust gases of some sort.
You should also consider the fact that fuel oil is around 80% carbon and around 2% sulfur. That means you're emitting 40 times more carbon dioxide than sulfur oxides. With cars, you're emitting 84000 times more CO2 than SOx.
Another fun fact is that the reason "car fuel" (gasoline and diesel oil) have so little sulfur in them is that all the sulfur in crude oil is left in there while valuable "clean" oils are extracted, and what's left is the fuel they use on ships. So basically, ships are burning the sulfur that would otherwise be burned in cars.
It does, but the added cost is insignificant. Say a 300,000t ship uses 300t fuel per day, and carries enough fuel for a month. That's 9000t, or 3% of the entire mass of the ship (numbers roughly based on the Emma Maersk). Fuel consumption increases slower than total displacement (weight), so you'll use at most 3% more fuel.
So all you need to make it worthwhile is a price difference of 3%. I recently saw a price difference in fuel oil of around 80$/t between Saint Petersburg (Russia) and Antwerp (Belgium), on a price of around 500$/t. That's a 16% difference, and that's by no means extraordinary.
making it illegal to sell high sulfur fuel in US ports would be a huge step forward.
Most ships have enough fuel on board to cross a few oceans, so they could just bunker up somewhere else. It might be an improvement for US coastal shipping, but that's not a very big part of the shipping industry.
The British needed 5000 to 6000 trees to build a single (large) warship, back in the day. That's quite a lot of wood if you ask me. In fact, that's a pretty big forest.
Ships' funnels are generally placed aft, and their speed means you've got a nice headwind blowing your exhaust gases away from the ship - you're just out of luck if the wind is in your back and going slightly faster than your ship.
The air you breathe standing outside on a ship is quite clean, probably a lot cleaner than the air most of us are breathing right now.
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?
Multi-hull designs actually increase drag because they have a larger wet surface. They are also much more expensive to build and to maintain.
Filtering out the worst of the exhaust gases, specifically the sulfur oxides they're referring to in the article, isn't feasible on board ships. It's much easier to remove the sulfur in a refinery, but this simply doesn't happen because refineries don't want giant mountains of sulfur in their backyard. Leaving it in and burning it up is just the most economic thing to do.
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'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.
Exactly. The "50 million times more" thing is about sulfur oxides emissions, and honestly this number doesn't seem extraordinary to me. Diesel oil and gasoline have virtually no sulfur in them, while the Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) that powers most ships is about 2% sulfur.
HFO is what's left when all the "good stuff" is extracted from crude oil. This "good stuff" is mostly shorter hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane, propane and butane (gases with 1 to 4 carbon atoms in them), gasoline (roughly 5 to 7 carbon atoms) and diesel oil (8 to maximum 21 carbon atoms).
What's left is an incredibly dirty, viscous, and nearly useless goo (asphalt is one other use, there aren't a whole lot). It still has a high energy density which makes it a decent fuel, but it's so viscous (because it consists mostly of very long hydrocarbon molecules) that you have to heat it up to around 80 degrees centigrade (176F) to even pump it into an engine. It also has high amounts of pollutants, because all the "clean" stuff has been taken out and you're left with all the dirty stuff. It is technically possible to remove most of the sulfur from this goo, but that means refineries would end up with giant piles of sulfur that nobody wants, and they'd have to dispose of it somehow. That's a cost refineries aren't willing to pay, so they just leave it all in to be burned up.
Legislation is being made to reduce HFO use in some heavy traffic areas (such as the North Sea in Europe), forcing ships to switch to clean diesel fuel in those areas. Of course, shipowners are against this because diesel is about 3 times as expensive as HFO. If all the ships in the busiest sea in the world suddenly start burning diesel fuel, you can expect the price to go up for everyone. Which is why we keep on burning the bad stuff.
You cannot reach infinity, therefore you can't reach the end of the series, therefore you can't reach the 1 at the end of the series. Which means you can't use the 1 at the end of the series to disprove the proof.
The whole point of "infinity" is that there IS no end. You can't say "but suppose there is" and use that to prove something.
You're comparing cycling to swimming here. You can go on for a few hundred meters without pedaling on your bike, but you'll be still in the water after a few meters if you stop swimming.
Depending on the size and speed of the ship, without engine power you'll be dead in the water after a few miles. Ships most definitely use their engines 100% of the time at sea.
Your math seems solid, but taking the Emma Maersk as an example doesn't quite work.
Container ships carry time-critical goods, meaning they have to be fast. The Emma Maersk is among the fastest cargo ships in the world, doing 25.5 knots. Tankers sail much slower, for example the Hellespont Alhambra does 16.5 knots, which is quite fast for a tanker. Lower speed means you need less engine power, which means you consume less fuel. While the Emma Maersk has an 80MW main engine and five auxiliary engines of 6MW each (totaling 110MW), the Hellespont Alhambra makes do with a main engine of 36.9MW along with three auxiliary engines generating 1.5MW each (totaling around 41.5MW).
Another difference is that containers have a very low density, meaning container ships have a relatively low deadweight tonnage (carrying capacity). The Emma Maersk can carry 156,907 tonnes, the Hellespont Alhambra can carry 442,470 tonnes.
This means the Hellespont Alhambra carries 2.82 times the amount of cargo, using only 37.7% of the Emma Maersk's fuel while running at 64.7% of the Emma's speed. This means it is (2.82*0.647/0.377) 4.84 times as efficient as the Emma Maersk.
Napkin math aside, they'd use smaller tankers for this, since Alaska doesn't have any ports that can accommodate supertankers with their 24m (80ft) draft.
They probably wouldn't use crude oil carriers, more likely product carriers which usually carry stuff like gasoline or gasoil. These products are much easier to clean than crude oil, a high pressure fresh water/detergent mixture would probably do the trick. A couple more fresh water rinses would get all the detergent out.
Lining the tanks with rubber isn't feasible. Tankers have on-board cargo pumps located just above the keel (the lowest possible location). Cargo pumps have to be at this level to be effective, otherwise you'd never get a high enough pressure at the pump inlet, causing all sorts of problems such as cavitation. For more information, check out Wikipedia's page on Net Positive Suction Head.
Lining the tanks with rubber would block the pipes going to the cargo pumps, and since you can't use shore-based pumps to unload the cargo, there'd be no way to unload except with a pump lowered into the tank through one of the manholes. That would only allow for very small pumps to be used (they'd have to fit through a manhole), meaning it would take weeks or months to fully unload the ship.
Slashdot Mirror
Betelgeuse has a declination of 7 24.5' which barely varies at all, meaning it's visible from the North Pole all the way down to 75 South of the equator at least at one point during any 24 hour period. Most populated areas will get to see it at least 30 degrees above the horizon (the closer you are to 7 North, the higher up in the sky you'll see it, and the longer it will be visible each day).
So if it happens, you can watch it at home unless you live on Antarctica. If you have preferences as to seeing it at sunset, midnight, sunrise or midday, you might need to travel East or West.
Not really. Many goods have a density higher than that of seawater. The addition of extra fresh water from melting ice caps will help reduce the density of seawater. This will increase the range of products that can be thrown overboard to be delivered to underwater wastelands.
Also, higher sea levels will make it easier for bigger ships to sail right into the heart of sunken cities. This will further increase the efficiency of shipping, and reduce the need for secondary transport systems.
Now please, stop crashing the "glass half full"-party.
I love how some people can be so determined in saying humanity has hardly any impact on our planet. Consider the changes in human lifestyle over the last 100 years. Consider population growth. Consider consumption or natural resources. Consider how much of the Earth is changed by human development. Consider the combined effect of those, and then tell me it's a good idea to keep doing what we're doing.
It feels to me like some people are giving in to the fact that we did in fact evolve from monkeys, and they've found another noble cause to hang on to.
How can you be so sure that there is little we can do to stop it? The fact that we can't prove that we're responsible for global warming doesn't prove that we're not. And if you do a proper risk assessment, like this guy does in his series of videos that are very much worth viewing despite his silly hats, you'll find that the smart thing to do is to try and do something about it.
Your line of thought sounds like "the Earth is going to hell but we might not be responsible so let's just see where this goes". Consider the possibility that we are responsible, and/or (they don't even have to be connected) the possibility that we can do something about it.
Also, much shorter shipping routes from China and Japan to the U.S. East Coast and Europe.
Let all those kids know the book is in the public domain and they can legally download the original version with the bad words and sex scenes in it.
In case you're wondering, mentioning the sex scenes is to make sure they'll actually read the book.
Tunneling really isn't that hard in most places. All you need is a deep hole on each side to assemble tunnel boring machines. You might run into problems with pipelines, wires and other tunnels, but you can always go deeper.
In the '90s, a feasibility study was done in the Netherlands for an Underground Logistics System. It involved little carts that could drive themselves, and carry a variety of cargo pallets. The idea was to connect Amsterdam's Schiphol airport to a nearby train station and a flower market. They never built it because the financial risks were too big.
More recently, a Belgian engineering firm proposed an Underground Container Mover for the port of Antwerp, which is basically a large underground conveyor belt for containers. It would run in a circle connecting container terminals with other terminals and highways on the other side of the river. This could remove a lot of trucks from the busy highways, especially the tunnels.
The basic idea is that as ground is becoming more and more rare, we shouldn't waste it on cargo transport. Moving most of it underground makes a lot of sense. And we've actually managed to move a lot of it (up to 90% in some areas) underground already, in terms of tonne-miles of goods transported. Just think of drinkable water, gas and sewage, but also oil and a lot of chemicals in industrial zones. Pipelines are transporting more than most people can imagine, and they're great. Trying to move boxed goods in a similar fashion is the logical next step, there are just a few problems we haven't figured out yet.
they do have a pretty well oiled Lobby and PR machine.
Almost as well oiled as the Mexican Gulf!
You can't disconnect fuel efficiency from pollution efficiency, because you can't disconnect internal combustion engines from exhaust gases.
ICEs need something to burn, and it doesn't matter much what that something is. It can be carbon, hydrogen, sulfur, nitrogen, or in this case, all of the above. You'll always have oxides as exhaust, and most of those are harmful to the environment. The exception here is hydrogen gas which forms water (steam) when burned. Unfortunately hydrogen gas has to be man-made, which requires energy. That energy usually means exhaust gases of some sort.
You should also consider the fact that fuel oil is around 80% carbon and around 2% sulfur. That means you're emitting 40 times more carbon dioxide than sulfur oxides. With cars, you're emitting 84000 times more CO2 than SOx.
Another fun fact is that the reason "car fuel" (gasoline and diesel oil) have so little sulfur in them is that all the sulfur in crude oil is left in there while valuable "clean" oils are extracted, and what's left is the fuel they use on ships. So basically, ships are burning the sulfur that would otherwise be burned in cars.
It does, but the added cost is insignificant. Say a 300,000t ship uses 300t fuel per day, and carries enough fuel for a month. That's 9000t, or 3% of the entire mass of the ship (numbers roughly based on the Emma Maersk). Fuel consumption increases slower than total displacement (weight), so you'll use at most 3% more fuel.
So all you need to make it worthwhile is a price difference of 3%. I recently saw a price difference in fuel oil of around 80$/t between Saint Petersburg (Russia) and Antwerp (Belgium), on a price of around 500$/t. That's a 16% difference, and that's by no means extraordinary.
making it illegal to sell high sulfur fuel in US ports would be a huge step forward.
Most ships have enough fuel on board to cross a few oceans, so they could just bunker up somewhere else. It might be an improvement for US coastal shipping, but that's not a very big part of the shipping industry.
except for the externalized costs.
Unfortunately, in the business world, there's no such thing as externalized costs.
The British needed 5000 to 6000 trees to build a single (large) warship, back in the day. That's quite a lot of wood if you ask me. In fact, that's a pretty big forest.
Ships' funnels are generally placed aft, and their speed means you've got a nice headwind blowing your exhaust gases away from the ship - you're just out of luck if the wind is in your back and going slightly faster than your ship.
The air you breathe standing outside on a ship is quite clean, probably a lot cleaner than the air most of us are breathing right now.
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?
Multi-hull designs actually increase drag because they have a larger wet surface. They are also much more expensive to build and to maintain.
Filtering out the worst of the exhaust gases, specifically the sulfur oxides they're referring to in the article, isn't feasible on board ships. It's much easier to remove the sulfur in a refinery, but this simply doesn't happen because refineries don't want giant mountains of sulfur in their backyard. Leaving it in and burning it up is just the most economic thing to do.
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'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.
Exactly. The "50 million times more" thing is about sulfur oxides emissions, and honestly this number doesn't seem extraordinary to me. Diesel oil and gasoline have virtually no sulfur in them, while the Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) that powers most ships is about 2% sulfur.
HFO is what's left when all the "good stuff" is extracted from crude oil. This "good stuff" is mostly shorter hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane, propane and butane (gases with 1 to 4 carbon atoms in them), gasoline (roughly 5 to 7 carbon atoms) and diesel oil (8 to maximum 21 carbon atoms).
What's left is an incredibly dirty, viscous, and nearly useless goo (asphalt is one other use, there aren't a whole lot). It still has a high energy density which makes it a decent fuel, but it's so viscous (because it consists mostly of very long hydrocarbon molecules) that you have to heat it up to around 80 degrees centigrade (176F) to even pump it into an engine. It also has high amounts of pollutants, because all the "clean" stuff has been taken out and you're left with all the dirty stuff. It is technically possible to remove most of the sulfur from this goo, but that means refineries would end up with giant piles of sulfur that nobody wants, and they'd have to dispose of it somehow. That's a cost refineries aren't willing to pay, so they just leave it all in to be burned up.
Legislation is being made to reduce HFO use in some heavy traffic areas (such as the North Sea in Europe), forcing ships to switch to clean diesel fuel in those areas. Of course, shipowners are against this because diesel is about 3 times as expensive as HFO. If all the ships in the busiest sea in the world suddenly start burning diesel fuel, you can expect the price to go up for everyone. Which is why we keep on burning the bad stuff.
Just needs some reverse engineering.
I don't like to nitpick*, but that chart mentions Saudi Arabia 13% + Iraq 6% + Kuwait 2% = Middle East 21%.
* That was a lie. I love to nitpick.
You cannot reach infinity, therefore you can't reach the end of the series, therefore you can't reach the 1 at the end of the series. Which means you can't use the 1 at the end of the series to disprove the proof.
The whole point of "infinity" is that there IS no end. You can't say "but suppose there is" and use that to prove something.
You're comparing cycling to swimming here. You can go on for a few hundred meters without pedaling on your bike, but you'll be still in the water after a few meters if you stop swimming.
Depending on the size and speed of the ship, without engine power you'll be dead in the water after a few miles. Ships most definitely use their engines 100% of the time at sea.
Your math seems solid, but taking the Emma Maersk as an example doesn't quite work.
Container ships carry time-critical goods, meaning they have to be fast. The Emma Maersk is among the fastest cargo ships in the world, doing 25.5 knots. Tankers sail much slower, for example the Hellespont Alhambra does 16.5 knots, which is quite fast for a tanker. Lower speed means you need less engine power, which means you consume less fuel. While the Emma Maersk has an 80MW main engine and five auxiliary engines of 6MW each (totaling 110MW), the Hellespont Alhambra makes do with a main engine of 36.9MW along with three auxiliary engines generating 1.5MW each (totaling around 41.5MW).
Another difference is that containers have a very low density, meaning container ships have a relatively low deadweight tonnage (carrying capacity). The Emma Maersk can carry 156,907 tonnes, the Hellespont Alhambra can carry 442,470 tonnes.
This means the Hellespont Alhambra carries 2.82 times the amount of cargo, using only 37.7% of the Emma Maersk's fuel while running at 64.7% of the Emma's speed. This means it is (2.82*0.647/0.377) 4.84 times as efficient as the Emma Maersk.
Napkin math aside, they'd use smaller tankers for this, since Alaska doesn't have any ports that can accommodate supertankers with their 24m (80ft) draft.
They probably wouldn't use crude oil carriers, more likely product carriers which usually carry stuff like gasoline or gasoil. These products are much easier to clean than crude oil, a high pressure fresh water/detergent mixture would probably do the trick. A couple more fresh water rinses would get all the detergent out.
Lining the tanks with rubber isn't feasible. Tankers have on-board cargo pumps located just above the keel (the lowest possible location). Cargo pumps have to be at this level to be effective, otherwise you'd never get a high enough pressure at the pump inlet, causing all sorts of problems such as cavitation. For more information, check out Wikipedia's page on Net Positive Suction Head.
Lining the tanks with rubber would block the pipes going to the cargo pumps, and since you can't use shore-based pumps to unload the cargo, there'd be no way to unload except with a pump lowered into the tank through one of the manholes. That would only allow for very small pumps to be used (they'd have to fit through a manhole), meaning it would take weeks or months to fully unload the ship.