One Giant Cargo Ship Pollutes As Much As 50M Cars 595
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.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:4, Informative)
Let us DRIVE our containers across the ocean!
While that likely wouldn't work, you do realize that for thousands of years we moved items by sea all across the globe via a completely free and environmentally method of propulsion: the sail.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They're in the middle of the ocean. (Score:4, Informative)
You actually have that correct.
This really is a bunch of bad science.
No discussion of VOCs or CO2 just particulate and SOX emissions.
Well particulates at see are probably going to be pretty harmless. They will fall into the sea.
SOX may or may not be an issue but motor vehicles really don't emit hardly any sulfur. I wonder what percentage total world emissions of sulfur this is.
At least in the US ships shift to cleaner fuel when in coastal waters. Yes reducing the sulfur is also a good idea but this is really a worst case the sky is falling story.
only for certain trace emissions (Score:3, Informative)
Like acid-rain forming sulfur dioxide.
This is fixable, you already are not allowed to burn bunker fuel in the "Diesel death zone" near LA and San Diego. And CARB has plans to extend the restrictions further.
Re:Another Slashverisement for HighGear Media? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:3, Informative)
As my earlier comment says, it's 500 times the *Sulfer* pollution of the world's vehicles....not climate change emissions
Proportions seem to be missed (Score:3, Informative)
"A car driven 9,000 miles a year emits 3.5 ounces of sulfur oxides--while the engine in a large cargo ship produces 5,500 tons."
But that car will haul maybe a tenth of a ton for that small number of miles, while the ship is expected to haul a hundred thousand tons "24hrs a day for about 280 days a year." You would think it might produce more pollutants.
The engine in the biggest ones is also far more fuel efficient than any gas or diesel car, exceeding 50% thermal efficiency. We like fuel efficiency, right? Yet they complain.
Re:They're in the middle of the ocean. (Score:2, Informative)
US Sulphur oxide emissions in 1999 were about 18,500,000 tons, mostly from coal power plants.
And gasoline and low-sulfur diesels mean comparing diesel-powered ships to cars is rather lopsided in the extreme.
Hell, if you only counted methane emissions, we'd all be up in arms about how badly a cow pollutes compared to a human.
Re:Which is worse? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:3, Informative)
It isn't just about cheaper, it is also about speed and consistency. IE If a shipping company needs to moves 400 million Tons, they can either have 50 ships going 20 mph or 100 ships going 10 mph. Which wastes more resources, building 50 more ships, or powering 50 ships... Also the Ports are scheduled to 100% capacity 6 months ahead, mis-port by a day because of low wind, you might be waiting a long time for another chance.
Also Apple doesn't want to load 6 months of supply of their Ipods into a container in china that will take 6 months to get to the US, then find out they were wrong, and either have a glut for months, or be stuck with inventory when they produce the next model.
"Going Nuclear" on cargo vessels (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Concentration (Score:4, Informative)
But that's exactly the point I'm making. Emission standards for cars aren't based on the 'sulfur emissions in Montana impacting a farmer in Wyoming' basis, they're set on 'sulfur emissions in New York impacting someone in New York.' By the time particulates from a ship in the middle of the pacific have diffused their way to population centers, they're insignificant. Otherwise LA's infamous smog clouds would cover the entire western seaboard.
Imposing the same standards on container ships doesn't make sense, since the standards are there to solve a problem that container ships don't have.
Re:Nuclear energy (Score:3, Informative)
Popular for aircraft carriers. Maybe for cargo ships too? How is the waste dealt with in an aircraft carrier. How do aircraft carriers and submarines avoid unplanned criticality excursions?
Can't go there. There's no good way to ensure that waste stays in the right hands. Just look at all the ships that get hijacked off the Somali coast.
Uh, we've been there. We had nuclear cargo ships. They were retired strictly because of the expense of running them, not over any concerns for nuclear waste. The Japanese built one that was so expensive, it never carried commercial cargo. The Germans built one, saw the bill for it, and then ripped out the reactor and replaced it with diesel engines. The US built a fine ship, and no one used it because of the costs involved. The Russians are the only ones that built them and actually used them for practical work, and mostly as icebreakers.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:3, Informative)
Large pieces of OAK were used, and OAK trees don't grow all that fast.
Re:Nuclear energy (Score:3, Informative)
NS Savannah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah [wikipedia.org]
Nuclear powered freighter...
Re:Not the same as carbon emissions (Score:4, Informative)
Those are the heavy particles like sulfur emissions, which are controlled close to the coast. The ships switch fuel when they are like 50 miles from a port. I think the logic is that these heavy emissions actually sink into the ocean in international waters at diffuse levels not harmful enough to do damage (also that it would significantly increase the cost of all overseas goods).
Something of note is that those ships are the single most efficient way to move massive amounts of cargo in the world. I can't find the graph, but there's one online somewhere that shows the difference between flight, car, rail, and ship efficiency, and it looks like an exponential growth curve.
One thing about the industry is that fuel costs are the single highest expense (even over the $100m/piece containerships), so it is in their best interest to be as efficient as possible. The most efficient container line has the lowest cost, and thus the highest profit or lowest rates. As long as regulations are in place to protect people from known harmful practices (like the fuel change in national waters), I don't think any more is necessary.
Re:Which is worse? (Score:3, Informative)
All the current Navy subs and ships that use nuclear reactors use reactors designed in the 60s / 70s. The decomissioned cruisers were expensive because of the cost of keeping enough trained personnel (like myself) on hand was much higher when you have to sustain those people out at sea; something like 50% of the staff of a nuclear cruiser was engine room staff.
We live in a new era as far as this technology is concerned - new designs are mostly automated and very efficient. We need to take this step forward, not just at sea but on land as well. Nuclear power is the best answer we have for large-scale power generation that could keep us moving forward until we discover a better energy source.
Or until world war breaks out and we all die. North Korea, South Korea... I'm looking at you.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:1, Informative)
Re:They don't pollute simply because they are ship (Score:3, Informative)
They also have to obey the laws of the ports they enter.
Re:Misleading statistics (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Stop Buying Crap! (Score:3, Informative)
Uh...
My iPAD was made in China...
Re:Could be a problem (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One can dream... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Stop Buying Crap! (Score:3, Informative)
It cannot be burned in cars. That stuff is bunker oil, the cheapest nastiest fuel you can get out of oil.
Multihulls lose in displacement mode (Score:4, Informative)
Now, what I wonder is, would a cargo vessel be less polluting if it used a multi-hull design to reduce drag
Multihulls are very good at going fast - as long as they don't have to push a lot of water. Their advantage disappears rapidly when the weight goes up. I am in the process of getting into cruising (I have a 40 foot sailboat I'm refitting), so I've followed the progress of multihulls for a while. Small multihulls such as for cruising and other recreational applications work well because they provide a lot of interior space, and a certain type of stability (although there are costs involved), and they are fast - but many cruisers have found that once they pile on all the junk you need to live on a boat, the cats sink lower in the water and slow down.
Boats in displacement mode are _very_ efficient movers of mass, as long as you don't try to go to fast. Most of the energy that is expended at the front of the boat moving the water out of the way is recovered at the back of the boat, as the water moves back into place. The faster you go, the more water is pushed vertically out of the surface, and most of that energy is lost. And when you get close to 'hull speed' (where period of the bow wave becomes close to the length of the hull), you rapidly multiply the energy required - you're basically always driving 'uphill'. The purpose of the big bulb on the front of big ships is to length the effective hull and increase the hull speed. But drop the speed to just a bit below hull speed, and you are back into the efficient displacement mode again.
Re:Which is worse? (Score:3, Informative)
I recently saw a list of new reactors under consideration. Some were supplemental reactors at existing sites, and some were for entirely new power plants, but what I noticed was that the Westinghouse AP-1000 -- designed to be produced essentially as assembly-line pieces -- was by far the most common design listed. Your wish may be coming true.
Re:Proportions seem to be missed (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Let's do the math! (Score:3, Informative)
CO2 emissions of 125 gram per kilometer are considered to be very good for a car - in the UK, that level of CO2 emission means your car tax is dramatically reduced. 125 gram per kilometer equals 200 grams per mile, or 1.8 tons per 9,000 miles. A very large cargo ship supposedly produces the same pollution per year as 50 million cars. That would be 50 million times 1.8 tons or 90 million tons. That would be 250,000 tons of CO2 emissions per day, assuming the vessel is in operation 360 days per year. Excuse me, but this number is nonsense.
On the other hand, a car typically transports maybe 100 kg on average (usually one, sometimes two passengers). One container = 24,000 kg, that is say the same as 240 cars. Large, but not extremely large, container ships carry 7,000 containers, that is the same freight transported as 1.7 million cars. A container ship can move at 20 knots, that would be 500 miles per day. Obviously it is not moving 360 days per year, 24 hours per day, but it should be more than 90,000 miles, ten times as much as the car in the calculation. So the freight transported is about the same as 17 million cars.
Re:One can dream... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Misleading statistics (Score:1, Informative)
In Addition to being 3 times the cost, use use twice as much to make up for the energy density.
You also have issues with engines being designed to handle x% of sulfur and that being figured into the lubrication of the fuel system, so the engine wares out even faster.
All bad things, hence the reason the US flagged cruise shipped I worked on several years ago as an engineer ran only HFO though it had the option of burning MDO. And unless we where blowing the soot from the turbos you could not tell if we where running HFO or MDO by looking at the stacks.
Re:Could be a problem (Score:4, Informative)
That is why the top 50 cargo ships should be nuclear powered. Clean, efficient, fast, consistent.
We've had some experience [wikipedia.org] with the use of nuclear propulsion for civilian ships, and specifically for merchant ships. However, the history seems to show that its not economically viable, or at least borderline so, since only one [wikipedia.org] is still going.
It did work very well for Soviet ice breakers, though.
Re:You don't need to be near the smokestack (Score:3, Informative)
How about everyone? Perhaps you've heard of global warming?
Did you read his post:
Cargo ships are the most efficient way, from a fuel and CO2 perspective, to move a given mass of freight
Or the article:
responsible for 3.5% to 4% of all climate change emissions.
Acid rain? You don't have to be anywhere near the smokestack for it to have a real effect on your life.
That is more of a problem, although still relatively near the ports, as acid rain tends to form up to 100's km from the source, not so much at 1000's km.
Re:One can dream... (Score:3, Informative)
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).
Witness the largest (and possibly most efficient) marine engine in the world:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer_RTA96-C [wikimedia.org]
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.
Cargo ships use fairly insane amounts of fuel, compared to how much we consumer-types are used to putting in our cars or even trucks.
Re:What are they going to do about it? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes you can and it's being done. No matter what flag a vessel has, if it wants to enter a port in usa/europe it has to abide safety standards and will be inspected (and can be grounded until it's fixed). Inspections come from local port authorities, Lloyds register ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd's_Register [wikipedia.org] ), ..
If you want to operate a shipping line between South America and Africa you can get away with using an old vessel that barely doesn't sink. Want to enter other ports ? Be prepared for high investments and maintenance..
Re:Misleading statistics (Score:3, Informative)
>>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
Only a few percentage points of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are due to ships. Most is due to power plants (~40%), cars and trucks (~30%) and cement plants (~10%) - at least in America. In other countries, you also have deforestation issues, which contribute about a third of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
I wouldn't call CO2 a pollutant, though, since it doesn't cause health problems for humans (cf the Pollutant Standards Index and similar measurements). CO2 is harmless except at levels hundreds of times higher than our current atmospheric concentration.
Re:One can dream... (Score:5, Informative)
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.