California Lawmakers Are Ready to Decarbonize the Shipping Industry. The Technology Isn’t There Yet.

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August 16, 2022

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by Joseph Winters (Grist) … Many companies have plans to launch or have already launched ships powered by biofuels — fuels produced from plant crops, algae, or animal fats — but experts expect them to play a limited role in the future of decarbonized shipping due to scalability constraints and high demand from other sectors. The nonprofit Pacific Environment has criticized biofuel as a “dead end” fuel that is only in some instances carbon neutral.

Only two kinds of alternative fuels are widely considered to be viable candidates for decarbonized shipping: green hydrogen and green ammonia. Both can be produced with clean electricity and burned in an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell — a versatile technology that converts chemical energy into electricity — where they produce no greenhouse gas emissions.

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However, these fuels aren’t quite ready for prime time, in part because their supply is so limited. Green hydrogen, produced by splitting a water molecule using renewable energy, is still too expensive to be made in the kinds of quantities that could power a global shipping fleet. The supply chain for ammonia — which is produced by combining hydrogen with nitrogen that’s extracted from the air — is more established, since ammonia is widely used as an agricultural fertilizer. But to make ammonia green, the hydrogen input has to be green hydrogen. This, along with costly storage requirements, makes green ammonia about as expensive as green hydrogen.

“There are definitely going to be some challenges along the road” to scaling green hydrogen and ammonia up, said Dan Hubbell, shipping emissions campaign manager for the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy.

Ships also need to be configured differently to run on greener fuels. Although some pilot projects have developed small hydrogen-powered vessels, it’s another question to expand hydrogen and ammonia compatibility to all ships globally. According to Sun, at the University of Michigan, researchers are still grappling with many design and safety questions, like how best to fit alternative fuels — which are less energy-dense than oil and gas — onto a ship, or how to safely contain ammonia, which can release hazardous nitrogen oxide or unspent fuel when combusted.

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The IMO (International Maritime Organization)’s current target is nonbinding: to achieve only a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2050, relative to a 2008 baseline. Hubbell called the goal “abysmal.”

Still, the IMO isn’t the only government body capable of pushing the shipping industry. Madeline Rose, climate campaign director for Pacific Environment, noted that regulators like the California Air Resources Board or the federal Environmental Protection Agency could mandate emissions standards for all ships entering California ports, or all U.S.-owned ships, respectively. READ MORE

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