Will the end of new petrol/diesel cars in 2030, affect boat propulsion?

To have a viable alternative to diesel for a cruising boat, which for me includes being able to do a significant passage under power and not being tied to marinas really means rethinking boat design from top to bottom e.g a keel shaped lithium battery which actually replaces normal ballast and what about a rigid junk style sail that is actually a giant solar panel?

Also what about replacement engines on boats built before any such ICE ban came into force?
 
eddystone said:
To have a viable alternative to diesel for a cruising boat, which for me includes being able to do a significant passage under power and not being tied to marinas really means rethinking boat design from top to bottom e.g a keel shaped lithium battery which actually replaces normal ballast and what about a rigid junk style sail that is actually a giant solar panel?

Also what about replacement engines on boats built before any such ICE ban came into force?
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It's a good question, what would a modern cruising boat designed from the start to be fossil fuel free look like. I tried to ask it before on the other thread, but we just ended up going round in circles with most posters denying that anyone was going to take our diesel engine away...

The reality is you have to imagine standing up in public in 2031 when ICE cars are no longer on sale for solid environmental and air pollution reasons and justify fitting a diesel engine to the boat you're ordering purely for fun. Or worse, a pair of stonking great diesel engines in a big Mobo. You're not going to find a lot of politicians prepared to back that I would suggest...

Using the keel as a battery is a good start.

This will all be in the timing though, if the timescale is the same as for cars then it seems inevitable that for some time after ICE are banned from sale cruising boats will be very range limited.
 
An alternative to battery in keel, which makes sense, is to move towards multihulls which reduce drag. We can't be limited to what things look like now when imagining what things will look like in the future. A quick glance at the current racing fleets of the world would suggest there are changes that can be made. Foiling boats for instance would help with antifoul polution as well as getting places in lighter winds where motors may be used. Carbon hulls could reduce weight, added to the weight savings of removing the keel and diesel engine and you may go from an hour or so of motoring to several hours with current battery technology, and then we're where Tesla were 10 years ago - a solution that's only slightly inconvenient rather than unworkable.
 
lustyd said:
An alternative to battery in keel, which makes sense, is to move towards multihulls which reduce drag. We can't be limited to what things look like now when imagining what things will look like in the future. A quick glance at the current racing fleets of the world would suggest there are changes that can be made. Foiling boats for instance would help with antifoul polution as well as getting places in lighter winds where motors may be used. Carbon hulls could reduce weight, added to the weight savings of removing the keel and diesel engine and you may go from an hour or so of motoring to several hours with current battery technology, and then we're where Tesla were 10 years ago - a solution that's only slightly inconvenient rather than unworkable.
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... and a 10m boat would cost half a million quid and be comfortable for two. You can get a 32' Dragonfly trimaran now, but it costs a third of a million, and that's without a fancy electric propulsion system, lithium batteries, foils, and being made from CFRP.
 
AngusMcDoon said:
... and a 10m boat would cost half a million quid and be comfortable for two. You can get a 32' Dragonfly trimaran now, but it costs a third of a million, and that's without a fancy electric propulsion system, lithium batteries, foils, and being made from CFRP.
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Same problem the world over though. Cheap in money is often expensive for the planet.

I do see it as an exciting time though. Bound to be a lot of interesting design solutions coming up.
 
AngusMcDoon said:
...as well as the specific heat capacity of hydrogen being approximately 7 times that of LPG. Flippin' physics, just keeps getting in the way of a good idea!
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One of the good things about LH2 is that it has a high latent heat of vaporisation. In the days when LHe was very hard to get old off, LH2 at 20K was often used as an intermediate coolant between LN2 at 77K and LHe at 4.2K. However, it's tendency to explode put people off it, and as LHe became more easily available LH2 was happily abandoned.
 
I suspect the 2030 deadline will drift significantly. When you think of the infrastructure that has to be put in, charging points for every house, including high rise flats. I don't think it's doable.
 
JumbleDuck said:
How are you proposing to store it?



On the contrary, when working with renewable supplies it matters even more. We simply cannot afford to throw half the electricity we generate away. Electrolysis is not done when the grid has too much energy because - with the exception of Orkney, as listed above - the grid never has too much energy


There are attractions, in some circumstances, to hydrogen as a fuel, though I am not sure I would include "saves me plugging in a charger for 30 minutes by letting me do a 20 mile trip instead." It's getting the stuff that's the issue.
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Hydrogen Storage | Hydrogen

Pick one. Most tend to favor compression tanks. Unlike electricity (or rather... batteries) they don't lose power over time. Once in there its in there.

The grid never has too much energy... because we don't turn half the stuff on. This is to avoid wasting energy.

The 30 minute super charge is limited to Teslas. So if you don't have a tesla... you're a bit stuck. I'm sure others will catch up. I do appreciate your enthusiasm for electric based vehicles but I don't think they're as convenient.
 
lustyd said:
You don’t often hear people shrieking in terror that power boats would be problematic if the engine dies as they have no sails, but I assure you there was a long period where the luddites of the day would have done so in the forums of the day (pub most likely!).
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I suspect you haven't talked to the coast guard, or listen much to the emergency transmissions on channel 16 as to what happens when boats lose power, even sailboats.
While some, I am sure, are looking forward to a new heroic age where all is done under sail, I seriously doubt that we have seen the end of powerful auxiliary engines, but with the currently available technology, I'm not at all sure they will be electric.
 
Luminescent said:
Hydrogen is not the complete answer I'll grant you but there are fewer obstacles that might be normally expected. Storage is not really an issue any more. The problem is infrastructure.
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The problem is physics leading to inefficiency and bonkers high cost, which is the problem. If it could be done economically there would be significant progress by now, but it can't, so there isn't.
 
AngusMcDoon said:
The problem is physics leading to inefficiency and bonkers high cost, which is the problem. If it could be done economically there would be significant progress by now, but it can't, so there isn't.
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Yes but they said that about Aeroplanes... just because something is difficult doesn't mean it's not worth doing. It's also why we're still on the hunt for fusion and that has taken the best part of 70 years so far. With advances in tech those inefficiencies can be overcome. The same with high costs and the on going costs for hydrogen are nothing compared to Nuclear.

As well as this assumption that half the energy is thrown away... 50% of 10TW thrown away is much better than 100% of 10TW thrown away and that's pretty much what happens now. Particularly when we're having to turn things off because battery storage is just not good enough. It's the same reason we use pumped storage to be fair.
 
AngusMcDoon said:
... and a 10m boat would cost half a million quid and be comfortable for two. You can get a 32' Dragonfly trimaran now, but it costs a third of a million, and that's without a fancy electric propulsion system, lithium batteries, foils, and being made from CFRP.
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That's a needlessly negative attitude. All of the things you just said can be overcome. Cost for such technologies is high due to low volumes, not due to inherent cost in the technology or design. I remember when mobile phones didn't exist, and yet here we are in an age where they are cheap enough to be disposable and powerful enough to not only stream 4k movies but to record and edit them too. Just because something is difficult or expensive today should not put us off trying. You've clearly already given up before the start line, but please stop trying to convince others there's no hope. They won't listen anyway, of course...
 
I've worked in the marine industry for a little over 26 years, both in the leisure and commercial sectors. In almost all cases where there have been developments around emissions this is driven by legislation - whether that is direct (i.e in the case of MARPOL), or indirect (i.e manufacturer X buys an automotive/industrial engine to marinize and this 'parent model' has improved emissions).
Currently the IMO MEPC council are sitting, and they are discussing the plans for reducing GHG emissions from global shipping (globally, shipping accounts for as much GHG emission annually as France & Germany, and tonnage is increasing YoY). There is a commitment from all member states to halve this by 2050, with a significant milestone by 2030
The simple fact is that, like it or not, the impact on commercial platforms will filter down to the leisure sector, and this will more than likely come from indirect influence though there will be some directly. There is simply not enough economy of scale for marine leisure engines to continue the way they are, whether or not the legislation at the time allows it.
Running concurrently with this is the future fuels emergence. Those of us who work in this sector (as as alluded to by a few here) recognize that we are 'not there yet'. But again, these are coming, and development is only increasing in this area. Fuels like electricity, gas and hydrogen are not future fuels, but they may well be transition fuels - i.e they bring us to the final outcome.
By 2030 the landscape for internal combustion will look very different, but I don't believe it will go away. The reliance on fossil fuels will still be there, but will be reduced, and marine propulsion systems will look very different in the latest and most modern vessel at the time. Beyond that - well I can't tell you without an NDA ;-)
 
Luminescent said:
Yes but they said that about Aeroplanes... just because something is difficult doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
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The limitation with aeroplanes of the past was the engineering available at the time. That changed - technology improved. The limitation with using hydrogen as a fuel for personal transport is the physics of it. That won't change.

You can never get over the problem that hydrogen has such a high specific heat capacity, low liquifaction temperature and low specific energy. Look at the figures. Hydrogen requires a temperature 100 degrees C colder to liquify and 7 times the specific heat capacity and latent heat removal of LPG to liquify. And then it has a seventh of the specific energy of diesel, so you'll need a 70 gallon very high pressure or very well insulated fuel tank in your car.

That's just the physics problems. Then there's the engineering problems. Hydrogen is difficult stuff to handle from an engineering perspective. It's hard to contain and it embrittles steel. That's not going to change any time soon either. All equipment to handle it is bonkers expensive. This leads to a huge cost which already makes it uneconomic before you look at the energy inefficiencies from producing, compressing or liquifying, transporting and getting energy back out of it.

I suspect you need to obtain a dose of engineering and physics reality. As I've said before, and to be dull I'll say again, if it was a realistic solution there would be progress by now and some of us would be driving around in hydrogen powered cars already, but we're not.
 
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lustyd said:
That's a needlessly negative attitude. All of the things you just said can be overcome. Cost for such technologies is high due to low volumes, not due to inherent cost in the technology or design.
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Maybe, but I hazard a guess that in 10 or 20 years time CFRP foiling multihulls will still be so stupidly expensive and impractical that only high end racers with a bottomless pit of money will be sailing them, and the rest of us will be chugging along in boring Bavarias and Beneteaus. I wonder who will be right?
 
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My guess is that diesel engines in yachts will be available for a while, but fuel will get expensive.
The easiest route to a fossil-fuel-free AWB is to run the diesel engine on chip fat.
I suspect diesel engines will increasingly run on higher %'s of bio fuel, where electrical power is impractical.
For leisure use, I expect it will be taxed heavily and the smaller market will push the price up anyway.

But we are talking about 10 years before IC cars are not sold new, then maybe 5-10 years before IC cars become an irrelevant minority.

Of course if the boat is to be truly free of fossil fuels, it will need to be made of wood or maybe metal? There a lot of crude oil derived resins in an AWB?
I wonder how many miles you have to motor a yacht for the fuel use to overtake the oil products used in manufacture or the embedded energy/emissions?
 
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