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| ▲ | conk 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | My guess is not every port can supply bunker fuel. It prob makes sense to load up when the ship is near a refinery and then make several trips before refueling. | | |
| ▲ | closewith 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > My guess is not every port can supply bunker fuel. You can bunker anywhere, even at sea if you're willing to pay. Ships have large tanks to allow for economically advantageous bunkering at cheap and low-tax ports. |
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| ▲ | beAbU 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ah, so what you are saying is we are not going to need to make significant compromises to the ship's cargo capacity, but we are impacting the total max range significantly? Is a fully fuelled ship capable of much more than 5k km? | |
| ▲ | acchow 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | But 5000km is shorter than many major routes, right? Shanghai to Los Angeles is more than double that | | |
| ▲ | Qwertious 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The route length isn't important, only the longest distance between ports that you can recharge at. Cargo ships regularly slow steam (I.e. run the engine slow to improve fuel-efficiency) and stopping to recharge batteries at multiple ports to reduce the batteries needed is the exact same concept - sacrificing speed to improve fuel costs. Shanghai to LA is probably the worst example (since the pacific ocean is basically the emptiest spot on the planet, as land/port frequency goes), but Hawaii still exists and they could recharge there. | | |
| ▲ | stavros 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | How does Hawaii produce its power? I can't imagine they have tons of capacity. EDIT: Seems like they mostly use imported oil, so saying "bring us a bunch of oil and we'll charge your batteries with it" seems like the ship is just burning oil with extra steps. | | |
| ▲ | guttural 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I bet these batteries would be standard container sized and they could be shipped as normal containers would be wherever cheap power is available from nuclear or solar or maybe water. Australia could be huge here, back in 2024 there were news of a six gigawatt solar farm in remote Northern Australia. Based on my very vague knowledge of the geography I presume there's plenty more desert to build solar there. Charge the battery-containers, ship them to China. | | |
| ▲ | stavros 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Whatever they are, you can't say "how does the ship refuel when it's empty? I know, it'll carry its own extra fuel". | | |
| ▲ | guttural 3 days ago | parent [-] | | No, no you misunderstand, the ports will provide fuel in the form of charged battery containers and there will be runs solely to carry these charged batteries from wherever they can be charged cheap to ports where charging is expensive/unavailable. Los Angeles port already tries to achieve zero-emissions operations by 2030 I presume more solar could be added. And I guess some/many ports and Los Angeles specifically could use wave energy. But, again, I could very well imagine Northern Australia supply ports in Eastern Asia. |
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| ▲ | rgmerk 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don’t understand why Hawaii doesn’t have more solar. Gotta be a lot cheaper than imported oil, even with the the US solar premium. |
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| ▲ | rgmerk 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | In any case, the near-term use case isn’t across the Pacific, it’s to other Asian ports, of which there are numerous very large ones in reasonably close proximity. Think Singapore, Japan, Korea, and so on, all of which are well within 5000km of Chinese ports. |
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