With Laurent's segal and from London and Gerard Reed from Berlin. This is redefining
energy minutes. So this is the minutes and I forgot which it is the
number it is and Jar's not there. But with the privilege of avin a
friend and the partner Michael Barnett, Laurent so so pleased to be able to
momentarily replace Nostra damas. Let's start by the number of the week. Do
you have a number? I do, sixty five, sixty five and sixty
five tons of biodiesel. I've just finished my series on maritime decarbonization on Forbes,
closed out with the big reveal that it's batteries in biofuels, and so
sixty five. If you take a ton of green hydrogen and you turn it
into ammonia and you put that on fields, the crops you get back,
they enhanced crops you get back, So turns into sixty five tons of biodiesel,
or you can put into a ship and burn at once. So it's
vastly better to turn green hydrogen into biofuels for maritime shipping and aviation than to
use it directly. Okay, so that's going to be the theme of our
little discussion. What you're saying is that there's sixty times more energy content in
the biofuel that you create from hydrogen than in hydrogen. Yeah, it's about
eighteen percent of ammonia, which is a primary fertilizer, is hydrogen. Yeah,
And we put a ton of ammonia fertilizer in a field, you get
about twenty eight tons of enhanced crop stuff because every plant that we grow is
one to five percent nitrogen. Because that's the green revolution. It's actually fossil
fuel based, and we need to replace that with green hydrogen obviously, So
you get twenty eight tons dry them, about fifty percent of the biomass is
wet dry, and get fourteen tons about point four tons of biofuel from a
ton of biomass. And the math is very straightforward. It's all very standard.
Stuff is all very and so this is part of the reason why it
makes a lot more sense to make green ammonia for fertilizer than green ammonia into
ships, or green methanol into ships, or hydrogen into ships. And of
course all inland and a lot of near short shipping is just going to be
battery electric. I saw recently that Stenalne is taking delivery of two more battery
powered ships. But they're interesting. They're not huge. They're ferries, but
they're trifuel, not dual fuel, but they actually have about nine megawat hours
of batteries. They have methanol tanks and engines that can burn methanol, but
they also have diesel tanks. Maritime industry is really trying to hedge its bets
about which way it's going to go. First, you talk about the purelyification,
so let's try to solve it. We had two years ago the chairman
of Covers Energy on the show, and so you talking about like actrifying tugboats
and ferries on short distances, and we saw that this ship on the Yon
Sikyong was fully electric. It's about moving a lot of content. So do
you think, in your opinion, everything that's on river or coastline that's going
to go electric within say twenty years, absolutely, possibly thirty years, but
definitely all electric. I'll give you the example from last year on the yank
Sea. Right now, they're two ships. They hold seven hundred containers each.
It's not small ships, not huge ships, but seven hundred containers is
a decent sized river ship, and the Yanks is navigable for fifteen hundred or
eighteen hundred kilometers. It's a huge inland river river. Fifty percent of all
inland shipping is in China, and so last year they launched twin seven hundred
container ships that run a thousand kilometer route along the Yanks Sea River on batteries.
They actually bought thirty two containers with batteries about one point nine megawatt hours
per container, and they just leave them in ports along the way to recharge.
When the ship comes in. They winch it on just as they would
winch on any other container, and so that containerized battery model is very standard
now in the industry for grid storage and for everything else. The Tesla Mega
pack right now is actually slightly larger than twenty feet, it's twenty nine feet,
but it contains three point nine megawatt hours of batteries. You can go
a long way on three point nine megawatt hours of batteries and a highly efficient
marine drive train. Okay, so I think case closed within the generation every
inland shipping on any river. Wilton Electric. Oh yeah, I did some
battery energy density calculations last year I was working with the Steneline in Glasgow.
There's a guy from a Chandia there and they have like titanium oxide batteries.
They get forty nautical miles of range out of titanium oxide. But titanium oxides
about half the energy density of Tesla's or third actually, so you know they
can get one hundred and twenty nautical miles with Tesla's batteries, and c ATL
of course drop their more higher density batteries get double that end up with two
hundred and forty nautical miles arrange. And then you get silicon which is coming
along, you can get up to twelve hundred nautical miles arrange. And as
I ask the sten of people, they run a lot of scheduled routes in
Northern Europe in their row packs and row row and ferry system, and none
of their scheduled lines crossing the North Sea, crossing the channel, any of
that stuff are that long. Okay, So now let's move to the ocean.
We hear multi fuel. Can you explain a bit and you've been working
with MERSK what are those multifuel ships? Basically they are trying to figure out
what they're going to burn in the ship, and so they have. The
big winner last year was methanol, and methanol is just wood alcohol, the
alcohol that if you drink it you go blind and die. And so methanol
burns cleanly, it's got a no sulfur, it's got money if you're particulous.
It's an alcohol like that, and it doesn't emit as much carbon as
diesel. CO two is diesel because it only has it's like the same amount
of carbon as methane. So that's all advantages if you're going tank to wake,
But if you're going well to wake, it turns out that methanol made
today is actually much worse. It's about three times worse in terms of emissions
than just burning diesel. They've been claiming they're going to clean up the back
end of it and it's going to be cheap, but in reality, I've
gone through all the math and I've done best case scenario. Methanol will be
four to six times as expensive as current maritime diesel very low sulf or fuel
oil for the same distance traveled, which in the industry is only starting to
wake up to this. Last year, in February, head of Ocean Network
Express, which is one of the big container shipping companies, set up in
February and said, yeah, these replacement fuels are going to be two to
three times more expensive, No, four to six times more expensive biofuels,
which are we're currently bunkering a lot of Like there's nine hundred and thirty thousand
tons of blended biofuels, thirty percent biofuels, seventy percent diesel were bunkerd in
Rotterdam and Singapore alone in twenty twenty two. We're already bunkering probably a million
tons of biodiesel from marine shipping, and it's only two to two and a
half times is expensive, so you kind of like look at that and go
four to six times. And by the way, ammonia is another big one,
which is just bizarre because ammonia kills people, So sailors will die,
port staff will die, and people living near ports will die. If fomonia
it becomes the shipping fuel of the future, yeah, yeah, but even
beyond that, you will need a special bunkering infrastucture that does not exist.
Whereas bio fuels it's a drop in fuel. You use the existing boats.
I mean, you use the existing tanks very easy. Exactly right now,
Marisk is buying small ships. They're like nine thousand containers. If they're not
the twenty four thousand container megaships that are powering across specific they're more of the
shorter route one. So nine thousand container ships big but not the biggest.
Their dual fuel ships are costing them an extra fifteen million dollars per ship.
Normally one hundred million dollars for a ship of that scale, they're paying one
hundred and fifteen million. And that's simply to hedge their bets about methanol versus
biodiesel. I suspect that Marisk and the other organizations that are buying methanol dual
fuel ships are just going to bunker a lot more biodiesel over their lifetimes.
Okay, so that's your generalic conclusion, and I hear you because you've been
working much more than me on the subject. Is shorthouse electric long routes is
going to be biodiesel. And that's it. In less than fifteen minutes,
we have solved the problem, are we Well, it's slightlyly more nuanced.
I think even the transoceanic ones are going to be hybrid with batteries because you've
still got particulate matter and air pollution and noise pollution that are concerns around port
areas. And if a lot of them situt there and run on auxiliary power,
which are generators burning resid and bunker fuel to provide electricity on board,
so you just put batteries on those things instead. They cross the International waters
Line, they switch over to batteries, They cruise silently into port, they
stay on battery power. You know, they get containers of batteries or a
big cable plucked into them from an electron bunkering barge and no pollution or noise
imports. So that's it. It's done. It's just a question of cost
yep and the operational cost of biofuels is going to be much better than the
operational cost of green ammonia or methanol, So that's just going to win.
It's just going to win in the market and batteries. Anything you can electrify
with batteries always wins. It's on these great worlds of wisdom that we close
this chapter. Thank you so much, Michael, marriedtime dec organization case closed.
Have a great day, Laurel. It's a pleasure chatting with you.
As always, thank you for listening to Redefining Energy. Don't forget to rate
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