Glen Sannox: 'Green' ferry has higher emissions than diesel ship - BBC News
One transport expert tells the BBC it might be better to run the new CalMac ferry on diesel.
cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/20648679
Were electric ferries not a viable option?
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If a biogas facility were to be developed, one option would be to repurpose the Grangemouth oil refinery where hundreds of jobs are currently under threat.
This seems like a great way to kill two birds with one stone.
Fossil fuels are essentially a massive hack: They allow us to use energy stored by plants over millions of years. Biogas/biomass are reverting that hack: They only allow burning energy from plants/animals that lived quite recently.
Hence, biogas/biomass is a nice addition but there's never going to be enough of it to power even a significant subset of our fossil-powered world.
The much better idea is to be more clever about energy usage. Hence electric motors, which convert significantly more energy into motion rather than heat. Hence the catamaran build style that reduces energy usage, etc.
We don't need it to power a particularly significant subset though, just the stuff that's least practical to take off of hydrocarbon power. The ferry is already built and the islanders need the ferry service. There are going to be edge cases like that in which a carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel will be useful for a while.
The ferry is already built
"It's already built" is a terrible argument for keeping anything that produces several times its production emissions during its useful lifetime.
There are a couple billion cars and trucks and heatings that are already built. Somehow, suddenly you're at a very significant subset of fossil fuel consumption.
Well it only produces that scale of emissions if running on LNG or diesel, right? If it's running on biogas, that's another matter. So is it more costly (both in terms of money and resources used) to replace the ferry or to set up biogas infrastructure?
Biogas can be largely emissions-neutral — but only if you don't scale it up. E.g. collecting biogas from municipal organic waste is a good thing. But collecting it from farm animals directly or indirectly from feed production is worse, because you might just be helping factory farms greenwash their ops.
