WEBVTT

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With Laurent's segal and from London and
Gerard Reed from Berlin. This is redefining

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energy minutes. So this is the
minutes and I forgot which it is the

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number it is and Jar's not there. But with the privilege of avin a

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friend and the partner Michael Barnett,
Laurent so so pleased to be able to

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momentarily replace Nostra damas. Let's start
by the number of the week. Do

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you have a number? I do, sixty five, sixty five and sixty

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five tons of biodiesel. I've just
finished my series on maritime decarbonization on Forbes,

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closed out with the big reveal that
it's batteries in biofuels, and so

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sixty five. If you take a
ton of green hydrogen and you turn it

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into ammonia and you put that on
fields, the crops you get back,

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they enhanced crops you get back,
So turns into sixty five tons of biodiesel,

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or you can put into a ship
and burn at once. So it's

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vastly better to turn green hydrogen into
biofuels for maritime shipping and aviation than to

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use it directly. Okay, so
that's going to be the theme of our

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little discussion. What you're saying is
that there's sixty times more energy content in

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the biofuel that you create from hydrogen
than in hydrogen. Yeah, it's about

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eighteen percent of ammonia, which is
a primary fertilizer, is hydrogen. Yeah,

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And we put a ton of ammonia
fertilizer in a field, you get

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about twenty eight tons of enhanced crop
stuff because every plant that we grow is

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one to five percent nitrogen. Because
that's the green revolution. It's actually fossil

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fuel based, and we need to
replace that with green hydrogen obviously, So

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you get twenty eight tons dry them, about fifty percent of the biomass is

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wet dry, and get fourteen tons
about point four tons of biofuel from a

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ton of biomass. And the math
is very straightforward. It's all very standard.

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Stuff is all very and so this
is part of the reason why it

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makes a lot more sense to make
green ammonia for fertilizer than green ammonia into

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ships, or green methanol into ships, or hydrogen into ships. And of

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course all inland and a lot of
near short shipping is just going to be

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battery electric. I saw recently that
Stenalne is taking delivery of two more battery

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powered ships. But they're interesting.
They're not huge. They're ferries, but

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they're trifuel, not dual fuel,
but they actually have about nine megawat hours

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of batteries. They have methanol tanks
and engines that can burn methanol, but

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they also have diesel tanks. Maritime
industry is really trying to hedge its bets

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about which way it's going to go. First, you talk about the purelyification,

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so let's try to solve it.
We had two years ago the chairman

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of Covers Energy on the show,
and so you talking about like actrifying tugboats

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and ferries on short distances, and
we saw that this ship on the Yon

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Sikyong was fully electric. It's about
moving a lot of content. So do

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you think, in your opinion,
everything that's on river or coastline that's going

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to go electric within say twenty years, absolutely, possibly thirty years, but

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definitely all electric. I'll give you
the example from last year on the yank

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Sea. Right now, they're two
ships. They hold seven hundred containers each.

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It's not small ships, not huge
ships, but seven hundred containers is

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a decent sized river ship, and
the Yanks is navigable for fifteen hundred or

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eighteen hundred kilometers. It's a huge
inland river river. Fifty percent of all

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inland shipping is in China, and
so last year they launched twin seven hundred

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container ships that run a thousand kilometer
route along the Yanks Sea River on batteries.

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They actually bought thirty two containers with
batteries about one point nine megawatt hours

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per container, and they just leave
them in ports along the way to recharge.

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When the ship comes in. They
winch it on just as they would

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winch on any other container, and
so that containerized battery model is very standard

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now in the industry for grid storage
and for everything else. The Tesla Mega

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pack right now is actually slightly larger
than twenty feet, it's twenty nine feet,

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but it contains three point nine megawatt
hours of batteries. You can go

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a long way on three point nine
megawatt hours of batteries and a highly efficient

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marine drive train. Okay, so
I think case closed within the generation every

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inland shipping on any river. Wilton
Electric. Oh yeah, I did some

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battery energy density calculations last year I
was working with the Steneline in Glasgow.

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There's a guy from a Chandia there
and they have like titanium oxide batteries.

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They get forty nautical miles of range
out of titanium oxide. But titanium oxides

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about half the energy density of Tesla's
or third actually, so you know they

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can get one hundred and twenty nautical
miles with Tesla's batteries, and c ATL

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of course drop their more higher density
batteries get double that end up with two

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hundred and forty nautical miles arrange.
And then you get silicon which is coming

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along, you can get up to
twelve hundred nautical miles arrange. And as

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I ask the sten of people,
they run a lot of scheduled routes in

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Northern Europe in their row packs and
row row and ferry system, and none

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of their scheduled lines crossing the North
Sea, crossing the channel, any of

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that stuff are that long. Okay, So now let's move to the ocean.

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We hear multi fuel. Can you
explain a bit and you've been working

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with MERSK what are those multifuel ships? Basically they are trying to figure out

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what they're going to burn in the
ship, and so they have. The

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big winner last year was methanol,
and methanol is just wood alcohol, the

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alcohol that if you drink it you
go blind and die. And so methanol

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burns cleanly, it's got a no
sulfur, it's got money if you're particulous.

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It's an alcohol like that, and
it doesn't emit as much carbon as

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diesel. CO two is diesel because
it only has it's like the same amount

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of carbon as methane. So that's
all advantages if you're going tank to wake,

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But if you're going well to wake, it turns out that methanol made

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today is actually much worse. It's
about three times worse in terms of emissions

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than just burning diesel. They've been
claiming they're going to clean up the back

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end of it and it's going to
be cheap, but in reality, I've

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gone through all the math and I've
done best case scenario. Methanol will be

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four to six times as expensive as
current maritime diesel very low sulf or fuel

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oil for the same distance traveled,
which in the industry is only starting to

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wake up to this. Last year, in February, head of Ocean Network

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Express, which is one of the
big container shipping companies, set up in

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February and said, yeah, these
replacement fuels are going to be two to

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three times more expensive, No,
four to six times more expensive biofuels,

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which are we're currently bunkering a lot
of Like there's nine hundred and thirty thousand

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tons of blended biofuels, thirty percent
biofuels, seventy percent diesel were bunkerd in

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Rotterdam and Singapore alone in twenty twenty
two. We're already bunkering probably a million

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tons of biodiesel from marine shipping,
and it's only two to two and a

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half times is expensive, so you
kind of like look at that and go

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four to six times. And by
the way, ammonia is another big one,

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which is just bizarre because ammonia kills
people, So sailors will die,

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port staff will die, and people
living near ports will die. If fomonia

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it becomes the shipping fuel of the
future, yeah, yeah, but even

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beyond that, you will need a
special bunkering infrastucture that does not exist.

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Whereas bio fuels it's a drop in
fuel. You use the existing boats.

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I mean, you use the existing
tanks very easy. Exactly right now,

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Marisk is buying small ships. They're
like nine thousand containers. If they're not

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the twenty four thousand container megaships that
are powering across specific they're more of the

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shorter route one. So nine thousand
container ships big but not the biggest.

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Their dual fuel ships are costing them
an extra fifteen million dollars per ship.

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Normally one hundred million dollars for a
ship of that scale, they're paying one

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hundred and fifteen million. And that's
simply to hedge their bets about methanol versus

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biodiesel. I suspect that Marisk and
the other organizations that are buying methanol dual

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fuel ships are just going to bunker
a lot more biodiesel over their lifetimes.

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Okay, so that's your generalic conclusion, and I hear you because you've been

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working much more than me on the
subject. Is shorthouse electric long routes is

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going to be biodiesel. And that's
it. In less than fifteen minutes,

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we have solved the problem, are
we Well, it's slightlyly more nuanced.

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I think even the transoceanic ones are
going to be hybrid with batteries because you've

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still got particulate matter and air pollution
and noise pollution that are concerns around port

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areas. And if a lot of
them situt there and run on auxiliary power,

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which are generators burning resid and bunker
fuel to provide electricity on board,

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so you just put batteries on those
things instead. They cross the International waters

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Line, they switch over to batteries, They cruise silently into port, they

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stay on battery power. You know, they get containers of batteries or a

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big cable plucked into them from an
electron bunkering barge and no pollution or noise

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imports. So that's it. It's
done. It's just a question of cost

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yep and the operational cost of biofuels
is going to be much better than the

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operational cost of green ammonia or methanol, So that's just going to win.

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It's just going to win in the
market and batteries. Anything you can electrify

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with batteries always wins. It's on
these great worlds of wisdom that we close

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this chapter. Thank you so much, Michael, marriedtime dec organization case closed.

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Have a great day, Laurel.
It's a pleasure chatting with you.

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As always, thank you for listening
to Redefining Energy. Don't forget to rate

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