New ways to foot the hefty bill for making old ships less polluting

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21718519-new-ways-foot-hefty-bill-making-old-ships-less-polluting-green-finance?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/

by ghosh • 9 years ago

380 218 9 years ago

economist.com

marcusarmstrong• 9 years ago

IMO, the title should note that "oxides" does not include "Carbon Dioxide".

JamilD• 9 years ago

It's also worth noting - for those that will inevitably use this to defend driving - that the environmental effects of cars extend way past dioxide emissions.

mikeash15• 9 years ago

That would run counter to the goal of these articles, which is to trivialize the importance of pollution from cars and make environmental activists look like fools.

mortehu• 9 years ago

The original title is "Green finance for dirty ships", and the article uses the phrase "oxides of nitrogen and sulphur", rather than just "oxides".

If anyone still doesn't know that CO2 is the biggest total contributor to global warming in recent times, I wouldn't put the blame squarely on this article.

Angostura• 9 years ago

As something of environmental activist. No. These kinds of articles are useful because they highlight areas for campaigning that otherwise can be overlooked.

ascorbic2• 9 years ago

And why would they want to do that?

TheAdamAndChe• 9 years ago

Why? I thought Carbon Dioxide was one of the most innocuous oxides released by engines, both in environmental and health effects.

aardvark2912• 9 years ago

That's true. As a pollutant, carbon dioxide is almost entirely innocuous, except for its behavior as a greenhouse gas. In that role, carbon dioxide is the most significant driver of global warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Natural_and_ant...

CydeWeys4• 9 years ago

The total volume of emitted carbon dioxide, of which land vehicles are a major contributor, is a significant factor in global climate change. An insufficiently specific headline that can be read to imply otherwise is thus misleading.

usrusr3• 9 years ago

Gram for gram or tonne for tonne, most other stuff is much worse. But mile for mile and kWh for kWh, the relative quantity of CO2 more than makes up for its relative harmlessness.

(Except maybe in dirty ships where there is much more of the nasty stuff per tonne of CO2 than in the exhaust gases of any other mode of transportation - they are basically using the skies over international waters to dispose of refinery waste that would be impossible to legally burn anywhere else)

anonu• 9 years ago

A bit of clarification on which oxides, from the article: By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide—than all the world’s cars put together

mikeash15• 9 years ago

"gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide"

Do you have a source on that? My understanding was that they are short lived and block heat rather than retain it.

djsumdog2• 9 years ago

Well he was quoting the article, so you're really asking if the Economist has a source for that.

quickben• 9 years ago

Molecules don't block vs retain heat. They vibrate at a given frequency given the energy flow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas

pas3• 9 years ago

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-1...

SO2 has a cooling effect usually: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1o34mn/why_does... but it can form dark aerosols that absorb heat (thus decreasing Earth's albedo)

WhatIsDukkha4• 9 years ago

https://www.epa.gov/so2-pollution/sulfur-dioxide-basics#effe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide#As_an_air_pollu...

"""Sulfur dioxide is a major air pollutant and has significant impacts upon human health.[34] In addition, the concentration of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere can influence the habitat suitability for plant communities, as well as animal life.[35] Sulfur dioxide emissions are a precursor to acid rain and atmospheric particulates."""

So acid rain etc isn't really significant to you?

holydude2• 9 years ago

Which makes danes one of the biggest hypocrites on planet earth.

tajen• 9 years ago

We won't solve global warming by finding the hypocrites. We'll solve it by knowing the problems and resolving them (or, if we don't want to work 1 problem after 1 problem, imposing taxes on petroleum usage or gas emissions, but history shows that such laws never get through).

woof• 9 years ago

You'd find the biggest hypocrites among all the consumers buying goods shipped around the world on those ships.

flexie• 9 years ago

Danes are not 'one' but 5.6 million, they don't all share the same opinion on the environment, on shipping, or on Maersk. But I agree that Danish governments have succeeded in making Denmark appear much more environmentally progressive than is generally the case and that is a form of hypocrisy.

holydude2• 9 years ago

Not only that but look at their taxes and tariffs for cars. That is hilarious!

macmac3• 9 years ago

Only until you compare the environmental impact of shipping / ton / km to other transport modes - at which point you realise that modern container vessels is by far the most environment friendly transport mode.

djsumdog2• 9 years ago

Such schemes used to be thwarted by the difficulty of measuring exact fuel consumption on ships. New technologies allow more accurate readings.

Why is it so difficult to measure fuel consumption on ships?

digler999• 9 years ago

you bet whoever's paying for it knows exactly how much fuel each ship consumes.

jhlgkhkhil• 9 years ago

Ships can burn a wide range of fuels. The cost per litre can vary enormously. The amount they burn per unit distance depends upon their speed. This means that whilst whomever is paying will have good control upon overall fuel price this may not map to fuel volume in as simple a way as the cost of fuel for a diesel truck would.

dredmorbius8• 9 years ago

Transnational jurisdictions.

Casseres3• 9 years ago

Former ship engineer here.

I only worked with Diesel, not HFOs.

Due to the rocking of the ship, it's hard to get an accurate reading of the fuel in the tanks. Fuel is transferred from storage tanks to a day tank, and a fuel meter can be used for that, but that only tells you how much you transferred, not how much you consumed. Unless you always fill the day tank to the exact same level (remember, hard to measure at sea) and at the same time each day, you won't know exactly how much was burned in a 24 hour period. And of course fuel consumption changes based on the ships speed.

This is a good, short explanation on how we measure tanks on ships: http://benvalle.com/Level.html

Edit: there is probably a lot of money to be made if someone can come up with a very accurate tank measuring method. I've seen some tanks use ultrasound to detect the level in a sounding tube, but sometimes those can be distorted if the "liquid" sticks to the sensor. Maybe some kind of 3d mapping? However not all tanks have an unabstructed free surface in order to prevent the free surface effect from capsizing the ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_surface_effect

2nd edit: Maybe not, since measuring at sea isn't as important as measuring in port when the ship is not rocking and the products are being transferred to/from ship. I'll leave the first edit since it might be interesting to people.

mtanski• 9 years ago

Due to the rocking of the ship, it's hard to get an accurate reading of the fuel in the tanks.

Would it not be possible to install a flow rate monitor between the engine and the day tank? If so it would be possible to estimate with okay precision flue usage for any given time period.

I Apologize for the naive question, because I imagine there's a reason it isn't done already.

ced• 9 years ago

Given that we can record how much fuel was put in, and how fast the motor was spinning at each point in time, why can't you model how much fuel is left in the tank? Is fuel consumption-to-motor-use very variable?

PeterisP2• 9 years ago

Why would we need to know how much was burned in a 24 hour period?

For the purposes of this article, it would be sufficient to measure how much fuel you transferred during a calendar year, and that's about as much as you consumed. The particular level of the day tank can be ignored as it won't even make a 1% difference to the total amount

PeterisP2• 9 years ago

It's difficult to measure for outside entities.

For car fuel consumption, most countries can simply count the sales of gasoline and diesel, which are regulated and taxed so they know the total amount sold, and report reasonably accurate official statistics of total countrywide fuel consumption.

Ships move around jurisdictions, refuel whenever and wherever convenient, and it's hard to get the whole picture unless each ship reports to you what it consumed - and noone can unilaterally require that, as ships are under different jurisdictions; unless a requirement is included in one of the large international agreements, most ships can ignore it most of the time.

igravious• 9 years ago

15 Biggest Ships Create More Pollution Than All Cars in the World (2013)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716102

128 points by danboarder 457 days ago | 65 comments

Broken_Hippo• 9 years ago

I've hit my limit for the economist this month, so I went and looked up the article. It seems these articles have been coming out since at least 2009, and the gist is that because these (older) ships burn heavy fuel, which isn't refined like gasoline.

And it seems the fix is to urge the companies to update their ships by not allowing them in ports, but considering how long these articles have been coming out, it looks like progress is slow on that front - and if it has changed. Shipping companies have been selling off some of their stock, and it would seem that at least a few of the older ships should have been included.

CydeWeys4• 9 years ago

It's more so that they have no scrubbers on them at all than the specific kind of fuel they burn. A random ten-year-old diesel truck has a way better pollution control system on it (by virtue of it even existing) than the largest cargo ships in the world, despite burning way, way less fuel. It just comes down to cost and lack of pollution emission regulation at a global level, which should absolutely be addressed.

tootie2• 9 years ago

Is retrofit possible?

D_Alex2• 9 years ago

It is in fact largely the specific fuel that they burn. "Heavy fuel oil" is where the refineries direct almost all the sulfur and heavy metals originally present in the crude. The sulfur content of HFO can be, and often is, up to 3%.... cf auto diesel in the example 10 yo truck where a maximum of 10 ppm is permitted.

Incidentally, the kind of pollution control measures that are used on truck engines, eg cat converters, are unable to cope with the contaminants present in HFO. The catalyst becomes rapidly poisoned and ineffective. So a retrofit to conform with automotive standards is unfortunately not possible.

pvg• 9 years ago

I had a job years ago that involved software and (small) vendor-provided gear for ships and getting this stuff out deployed to vessels was a slow and painful logistical nightmare. 'Update your ships' sounds about a million times worse so we'll probably be reading more of these articles for a while.

_0w8t• 9 years ago

For at least 15 years in Norway I have read articles urging local ship companies to switch to greaner engines running on liquid gas or even electricity. The progress has been made as occasionally I board an electrical ferry without unpleasant smell coming from the pipes. But it is very slow.

And this is not surprising as ships are designed to run for 50 years or more and engine upgrades are very costly.

antubbs2• 9 years ago

Newer ships aren't necessarily much better. Mærsk's E class container ships still burn bunker fuel. The Triple E Class made improvements in efficiency and emissions, but are still burning bunker fuel at about 50% of the emissions per container than the previous class.

Tharkun2• 9 years ago

From what I understand, these ships are huge and cover very large distances. This requires a lot of fuel. Bunker is the cheapest fuel for this use-case (it, -- sort of literally -- being a bottom of the barrel sort of thing).

Not sure what the global impact would be of banning bunker, or (trying to) refine it. Economic or environmental.

kogepathic2• 9 years ago

That also imperils banks across the world, which have lent $400bn secured on smoke-spewing ships.

So, why should we care? Presumably the banks have paid analysts to determine that was a sound investment.

If governments are doing their jobs, banks should be able to eat this kind of loss without becoming insolvent. Otherwise why bother having regulations at all, if every minor hiccup means taxpayers have to bail out the banks?

Why do I care if shipping companies go out of business because of over capacity? Isn't that what market forces are all about?

So we should keep dangerously polluting ships running, because the banks that loan the shippers money will lose their shirts for several quarters if the shipping company goes bust?

sambe• 9 years ago

Who on earth are you arguing with? The article doesn't say you should care or that the banks should be bailed out. In fact, it's a neutral analysis of the status quo with a positive slant towards a green solution.

hyperliner• 9 years ago

Why do you care that these companies go out of business?

The answer is that you care because you need all the stuff you consume that comes from across the oceans.

You care because you complain if the stuff you buy is more expensive, penalizing companies that use cleaner shipping nethods.

You care because (I think) you are not the one committing your money to create a less contaminating medium of transportation.

At the end of the day, you care that these ships are operational because it's better for you and you don't care about the damage for the future of others.

you above is not just you but all of us.

vesinisa2• 9 years ago

I don't quite understand the sentiment. There is no word proposing bailing out banks or shipping companies in the article. Instead, an arrangement is proposed where multiple charterers would share the cost of upgrading the ship over more than one contract period. Such arrangement would logically seem preferable over the insolvency of any party, which causes wider mayhem.

sandstrom• 9 years ago

The underlying message in that sentence "banks [...] which have lent $400bn" is that we cannot enforce stricter regulation on ships, because it would hurt banks that lent the money.

It is also true that banks have so little equity that they easily get insolvent. In the beginning of the nineteenth century banks were around ~30% equity. Nowadays ~1-2%.

TheGirondin• 9 years ago

This is sarcasm, right?

necessity• 9 years ago

Government's sole purpose is to protect big banks and companies and fool the people it's for their own good.

pas3• 9 years ago

That's the kind of claptrap nonsense that got us here.

Government is - at best - an emergent agent with a lot of internal incentives to keep itself going. It does what the people in it want to do. It does what legislation tells it to do modulated by the people interpreting and implementing those statues.

Big Banks and certain Companies and industry advocacy groups spend a lot of money on putting people friendly to them into Government, and that introduced a bias in the collective decision-making process. It should be (and will be eventually) counteracted.

Sure, there are different ways to do something about this, the extreme is of course to abolish the Government, but if you were to think a bit about the consequences and requirements of such a change, you'll see that it's not really the best option.

mkagenius• 9 years ago

which have lent $400bn secured on smoke-spewing

Shipping bubble?

eru7• 9 years ago

Funny enough, governments should do less of that job. Canada had a famously sound and famously stable banking industry without much regulation in the 19th century. (In comparison to frequent failures in their more regulated southern neighbour.)

The same goes for the free banking episodes in Scotland, Australia and France.

xordon• 9 years ago

If you think that the US banks are/were more regulated than Canadian banks you would be incorrect.

CalChris5• 9 years ago

So, why should we care?

Unprofitable ships are scuttled intentionally. Insurance companies then have to pay off the loss and the seas have to eat the pollution. I'm not sure how those very real externalities fit in with your free market trivialization.

samstave4• 9 years ago

Any links to that statement that I can read?

joe_the_user• 9 years ago

I think the GP is making an appeal to how regulation should work.

Ideally, regulation should make it so bank stock holders eat the losses for poorly thought-out loans and should prevent all the various sleazy ways international shippers escape responsibility for their decisions.

What happens, though, is because regulators can't do that, they wind-up paying shippers and other polluters to change the bad decisions they already profited from (providing extra credit to upgrade ships, for example).

It is a shame but what can you do?

jerkstate2• 9 years ago

you know what's even more interesting, it seems like shipping fuel is heavily subsidized. The international price for bunker fuel is about $330 per ton. Oil is $50 per barrel, a barrel is about 300 lbs, so 7.5 barrels make a ton. That's $375. Why is the refined product cheaper than the raw product?

edit: many have responded calling residual fuel a "waste product" - it is useful and being used so calling a waste product strikes me as semantically incorrect. If it were being sold opportunistically, like a large proportion of it was going to waste but some was being sold, I would agree with that, but it seems like it's all being sold, right?

rjsw• 9 years ago

My guess would be that the other distillate fractions from each barrel have been sold for a lot more.

mschuster913• 9 years ago

Why is the refined product cheaper than the raw product?

Because bunker fuel is the absolute waste that remains after the refinery distills all the valuable lighter fuel components (from pretty heavy kerosene all up the way to gasoline and even lighter).

The stuff basically has no other use except as fuel for tankers... what refineries are doing here is, basically, selling waste they'd otherwise have to spend money to get rid of it. (On a sidenote, I can't imagine how one could get rid of bunker fuel except pumping it back where it came from)

dredmorbius8• 9 years ago

Well, there's also petroleum coke, though you're broadly correct.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_coke

jerkstate2• 9 years ago

Come to think of it, the same is true for gasoline. No other use for it than to run combustion engines. Turns out we are all doing those oil companies a pretty big favor, unless we used their product, they would have to pump all of those distillates back into the ground.

mikeash15• 9 years ago

I think it's basically a waste product from refining which happens to find some use. It's like how slag is cheaper per ton than the ore it comes from.

stordoff• 9 years ago

Is that because bunker fuel is (more or less) the remainder after the lighter components have been distilled out?

nickjarboe• 9 years ago

It is because oil in a barrel contains many different parts. Refining is mostly just distillation. Chemically changing the product is sometimes done but is much more complicated and expensive. With just distillation, one will get everything from butane to kerosene to fuel oil [1]. The light parts (lower boiling point) are generally more valuable, with fuel oil as the gunk left over (also used for asphalt). This is also why "light" crudes are more valuable than "heavy" crudes.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=6970

vpribish• 9 years ago

crude oil is $50/bbl it has not been refined yet - the heavy fuel oil that ships use is a relatively undesirable leftover from refining crude into gasoline, diesel, and kerosene. oh, fun fact: you get more than 1bbl of refined products out of 1bbl of crude.

snovv_crash• 9 years ago

If I made a blend of gravel and gold, and sold it by the barrel at cost price, once you pick out the gold the price of the remaining gravel per barrel will be a lot less than the price of the blend per barrel.

pfarnsworth2• 9 years ago

What would be the economic repercussions if these ships were immediately shut down?

dredmorbius8• 9 years ago

90% of everything.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/inside-shipping-the-invisible...

userbinator• 9 years ago

It is interesting to note that the types of engines used in these large ships are among the most efficient:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_specific_fuel_consumptio...

The pollution has more to do with the type of fuel used.

dredmorbius8• 9 years ago

And lack of pollution controls.

mc324• 9 years ago

Since no country can regulate the seas, perhaps regulate your costal waters and heavily disincentivize these heavy polluters from docking in your ports -enough countries get on board and it becomes the rule, the tyranny of the minority as it were, because it's not as though other less regulating countries would regulate against less polluting ships.

samstave4• 9 years ago

What fuel-type does the Space-X drone ship use? (just curious)

wolf550e• 9 years ago

The ASDS (drone ships) use diesel[1] for stationkeeping but they use tugs[2] to get from the port to the landing site & back.

I can't get engine details on the tugs[3], but wikipedia says[4] tugs often have locomotive diesel engines.

1 - https://www.thrustmaster.net/out-drive-propulsion-unit/porta...

2 - https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/asds#wiki_ships

3 - https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:43...

4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tugboat#Tugboat_propulsion

deepGem• 9 years ago

Isn't it feasible for container ships to go electric ? They have such massive surface areas for batteries. I thought of solar but then the container loading/unloading aspects will become quite cumbersome, unless you could somehow put solar panels on individual container roofs and load those on the top. A logistical nightmare nonetheless.

A crude search yields this about Emma Maersk, one of the largest container ships.

She is powered by a Wärtsilä-Sulzer 14RTFLEX96-C engine, the world's largest single diesel unit, weighing 2,300 tonnes and capable of 81 MW (109,000 hp) when burning 14,000 litres (3,600 US gal)[31] of heavy fuel oil per hour. At economical speed, fuel consumption is 0.260 bs/hp·hour (1,660 gal/hour).[32] She has features to lower environmental damage, including exhaust heat recovery and cogeneration.[33] Some of the exhaust gases are returned to the engine to improve economy and lower emissions,[34] and some are passed through a steam generator which then powers a Peter Brotherhood steam turbine and electrical generators. This creates an electrical output of 8.5 MW,[35] equivalent to about 12% of the main engine power output. Some of this steam is used directly as shipboard heat.[36] Five diesel generators together produce 20.8 MW,[35] giving a total electric output of 29 MW.[26] Two 9 MW electric motors augment the power on the main propeller shaft

So you need about 285 Tesla Models P100D motors to power a ship of this size. Doable I guess. Again, I'm no expert on shipping.

ForHackernews• 9 years ago

One of the more interesting retro-futuristic ideas is to use wind power and large, high-altitude kites to help propel big oceangoing cargo ships: http://newatlas.com/cargill-ship-will-be-largest-ever-to-uti...

Retric• 9 years ago

These ships are a very poor place for battery's vs cars because of how infrequently they recharge and how efficient their engines are. They extract ~2.5x as much energy from their fuel so the real solution is changing fuels and adding a catalytic converter not battery's.

PS: Remember, this pollution has a short half life, so it's simply not around that long.

dredmorbius8• 9 years ago

No.

The combined power and capacity constraints make solar a nonstarter.

Specialised, high-efficience, very light, all-electric boats have been built. They top out at about six knots, roughly 1/4 the speed of most shipping of the 1980s and 1990s (more recent ships have slowed somewhat to about 18-20 kt for efficiency, called slow steaming).

We had a technology for low-fuel shipping, it's called sails, and achieved net speeds of 12-20 kt with cargoes. Commercial sail vessels actually operated through the 1940s, in rare cases, as fuel costs and limitations were still concerns. These ships could and did out-pace coal-fired boats.

They are, however, dwarfed by modern monsters such as the Emma.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Erikson

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windjammer

usrusr3• 9 years ago

Thank you for the Wikipedia ride, now I'm kind of waiting for Larry Ellison to enter grain shipping with ocean skimming carbon composite monstrosities ;)

(Or at least for a Neil Stephenson novel about that happening)

jdblair3• 9 years ago

You're using power (MWh) to make your point, but the crucial practical issue is energy storage (MWh). According to this chart[1], bunker fuel has about 80 times the energy density of lithium batteries. Something has to charge those batteries, too, so there will be another fuel source required generate the electricity.

Container ships do have large surface area, and its conceivable - it might be practical to build a hybrid solar/diesel ship. I can imagine most of the system being packaged in containers with solar cells on the top, and batteries and inverters inside. They would then be loaded last, on top of of the load and connected to a ship-board motors.

1: https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/energy...

Pxtl• 9 years ago

The challenge is that container ships don't have a roof over the containers. You'd have to have shipping container sized solar banks placed on top of each container, then wire them into the ship's power system. Every load and unload would add extra time spent unhooking, unloading, reloading, and reconnecting the solar roofs.

jdblair3• 9 years ago

I see I made a typo - meant to write "MW" for power, obviously.

planteen• 9 years ago

The issue is energy density, not motors. The ship burns 1,660 gal/hr = 6000 L/hr when at "economical speed". The energy density of fuel oil is about 10 kWhr/L. Googling tells me that a journey between China and California by ship takes 2-4 weeks. So for three weeks of economical speed, that is 30 MWhr of energy. That is the size of the largest battery installation in North America, the Tehachapi Energy Storage Project. The batteries will weigh about 25 times more than the diesel fuel would weight (assuming fuel oil at 13,000 Wh/kg and 500 Wh/kg for batteries).

knodi1232• 9 years ago

That calculation is for a purely battery powered vessel. I think the person you replied to was suggesting much lower battery capacity, and running primarily while the sun shines, using non-stored electricity.

Still isn't enough, but it's a different calculation.

Dylan168075• 9 years ago

You lost a factor of a thousand in there somewhere. 6000l/h * 10kWh/l is 60MW. So 30GWh total. Also lithium ion batteries are nowhere near 500Wh/kg.

So we might need about 150 tons of battery to match the energy, and that's the entire capacity of the ship gone. But batteries are more efficient, so let's say 50 tons.

It's possible, I guess, but not practical. Maybe if lithium air batteries live up to their promise it could be done.

bluedino• 9 years ago

1 Westinghouse nuclear powerplant like used in an aircraft carrier will make 100MW.

macmac3• 9 years ago

There have been nuclear merchant vessels in the past and there are still nuclear ice-breakers around. The nuclear merchant vessels were never a success, due to various challenges, some of the outlined in this article: https://www.flexport.com/blog/nuclear-powered-cargo-ships/

hectorr2• 9 years ago

I love nuclear power, but there is a huge gap between how the Navy runs their nuke fleet and how the civilian maritime world operates. Navy nukes are some of the most insanely anal and uptight professionals you will ever meet. It's a zero-defect culture, because it has to be.

The job of civil maritime is to provide commodity supply - the only way to make money over the long term is to be a low cost operator. The best (usually Greek) shipowners will milk every last dollar out of an asset, which down in the bilges means fixing boilers with duct tape and bailing wire. That's not how you want to run a nuclear plant.

wcoenen• 9 years ago

The article seems to imply in its first paragraph that sulfer dioxide is a greenhouse gas. But doesn't SO2 have a cooling effect on the climate?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols...

Bud• 9 years ago

This comment thread illustrates why HN posters shouldn't presume to write their own headlines for an article unless they really know what they are doing.

ajarmst4• 9 years ago

The lede is false and misleading on its face. Excluding "carbon dioxide" from your list of "oxides" when discussing (and comparing with) automobile greenhouse gas emissions is absurd. The misleading claim is also clearly intentional, so none of the other claims can be accepted at face value. (No, shutting down 15 ships would not do more to address greenhouse oxide emissions than banning automobiles world-wide.) More than disappointing, and never should have been published.

rayiner3• 9 years ago

This is why I don't consume news anymore except in connection with HN, Reddit, or Twitter.

I'm convinced that one of the reasons journalists do such a crappy job of reporting on science is that they don't even realize that describing methodology and assumptions is more important than the punch line.

dmoy2• 9 years ago

Important is a relative thing though. The headline is more important... for attracting readers and getting ad dollars. Which is sadly the priority.

massysett• 9 years ago

I'd understand if you said you replaced the popular press with academic journals or books by scientists. But Reddit and Twitter? That's an improvement??

mockery• 9 years ago

The article is titled "Green finance for dirty ships" - the misleading HN title (which doesn't show up anywhere in the article) _is_ the problem in this case, IMO.

trentnix• 9 years ago

Readers are pretty crappy at reading the news too. One would be wise to apply the same skepticism you have for science reporting on all reporting.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

― Michael Crichton

emn134• 9 years ago

It's somewhat ironic that the article is perfectly clear and reasonable, and only the HN title which is misleading.

Perhaps you should simply not read too much into HN titles?

thomasahle• 9 years ago

Ocean-going vessels produce just 3% of its greenhouse-gas emissions. But the industry is dirtier than that makes it sound. By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide—than all the world’s cars put together.

It starts out with the pretty clear statement, that in terms of green house emissions they are small, but that doesn't make them not a problem. Isn't that a fair thing to point out? Shipping should absolutely do more towards stopping pollution.

Maersk is an example of a company that at least keeps this in mind - http://www.maerskline.com/en-bs/expert-blogs/guest-blogger/b...

russell_h• 9 years ago

The headline is:

Green finance for dirty ships

Regarding "oxides" it says:

By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide—than all the world’s cars put together.

The HN headline is definitely misleading, but I'm struggling to see what you find so objectionable about the article. That sentence, which you haven't even attempted to refute, is simple and specific, and merely sets the stage for an article about finance.

The article certainly never claims that "shutting down 15 ships would not do more to address greenhouse oxide emissions than banning automobiles world-wide". It's only mention of oxides or automobiles is in the sentence above.

ajarmst4• 9 years ago

Because they speciously choose to compare ship emissions to cars, which emit almost no oxides in the limited classes they select (because almost all their emissions are in the excluded category). This is an bald attempt to make the problem sound extreme. If they are compared to other sources of oxide emissions, it doesn't sound quite so bad. For example, for nitrous oxide, sewage accounts for fully a third as much as fossil fuels. Burning of biomass accounts for just as much. Agriculture emits SEVEN TIMES as much as fossil fuel combustion. Of course, I only chose Nitrous oxides, which allows me to make this bold statement about how terrible agriculture is. They are cherry-picking misleading data to advance a thesis. That's not acceptable.

emn134• 9 years ago

The problem is in the hackernews title, not the article.

Perhaps a better hacker-news onliner would have been "Just 15 of the biggest ships emit more sulphur- and nitrogen-oxides than all the world's cars"

dang• 9 years ago

We changed the title from "Just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides than all of the world's cars". I'm not sure how it ended up there—maybe the Economist originally had it?—but if the submitter wrote it, that's bad and violates the HN guideline about titles.

DanBC• 9 years ago

A similar story with that title was posted a while ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716102

And the industrytap link has been posted to HN a few times: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=industrytap.com%20ships&sort=b...

goodcanadian2• 9 years ago

It seems to me that many comments here are missing the point. To be fair, the article also seems to get it wrong. The problem with sulphur and nitrogen oxides isn't just global warming (though apparently N2O is a real problem, there). To my mind, the real problem is good old fashioned pollution as we talked about in the 80s. Acid rain, anyone?

mikeash15• 9 years ago

I would argue that you are missing the point, although probably only by not being sufficiently cynical. Articles about how a handful of large ships pollute more than all the cars on the planet have been going around for years. They're almost always written to be highly misleading, to trick the reader into thinking that ships are far more important polluters than cars and that all the effort by environmentalists to clean up cars is either wasted or a scam.

Note that the title (both on HN and on economist.com) has changed to something much more reasonable. It used to say something like: just 15 ships emit more pollution than all the cars in the world combined.

goodcanadian2• 9 years ago

To me it is almost self evident that the cars are a far more serious issue as far as global warming goes though I grant that might not be clear to all readers of the article. That is why I said that the article sort of misses the point.

That does not mean that the pollution from these ships is not just as serious; it is just serious for other reasons, and yes, it really is a big deal.

For my part, I don't think the article is trying to mislead or distract. The author is simply falling victim to the current bias of talking about every environmental problem in terms of global warming whether appropriate or not.

tener• 9 years ago

Why not just tax them for the excessive pollution?

malchow2• 9 years ago

Would anyone care to link to evidence that carbon dioxide causes an increase in temperatures? I'd be curious to read some of this literature.

malchow2• 9 years ago

Downvoted twice already –– I'm just asking for some simple links to the literature.

upofadown2• 9 years ago

The downvoting is probably because your comment has nothing to do with the content of the article and is an obvious attempt to distract from the actual issue with an irrelevant discussion.

doughj3• 9 years ago

These may be a good start: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas

CalChris5• 9 years ago

Slow steaming is an improvement and it saves quite a bit of bunker. But while bunker is cheap, it's really noxious; the Cosco Busan spilled bunker when it hit the Delta tower of the Bay Bridge.

Boats are supposed to switch over to a cleaner fuel when they enter port. For example, Port of Oakland is upwind of residential housing in Oakland. So this is a public health issue. Even the terminal tractors (port trucks) idling are an issue. Hopefully they'll switch over to EVs:

https://orangeev.com/

Boats are designed for a critical hull speed. Emma Maersk cruises at 31 mi/h on the open ocean.

http://www.emma-maersk.com/specification/

That bulbous nose on container ships sets up a counter bow wave to lower drag but only at a certain cruising speed. However, shippers weren't paying a premium for that higher speed and although it's more efficient for that hull it was still costly.

So new boats are tuned to a more efficient lower speed (slow steaming) with less powerful engines and even older boats are getting hauled into dry dock and re-nosed for a lower speed. Overall shipping speeds are down and shipping costs are also down.

http://www.seatrade-maritime.com/news/americas/the-economics...

While the new Panama Canal extension could be a fiasco in its own right (100 years later and not nearly as well built; it leaks) new canals could improve things. The Thai Canal could make the Suez route more competitive than the Panama route for Asia to Europe.

Lastly, like airlines, it's really hard to make money in shipping. Witness the Hanjin bankruptcy:

http://gcaptain.com/south-korea-court-hanjin-to-declare-bank...

The City of Oakland owns the Port of Oakland and we don't make much money off of it either. $16M/yr for both the airport and the port, last time I checked.

eru7• 9 years ago

Though the low profit margins can be seen as a good thing and competition working. (That is if all the actual benefit goes to customer surplus.)

CamelCaseName• 9 years ago

That's exactly how it is. Unfortunately the negative externality of pollution means there is an inefficiency. One way to fix this by applying a tax, or minimum environmental standards, but on an international scale it's not so simple.

m-j-fox• 9 years ago

$16M/yr for both the airport and the port

Oakland should just sell them both to condo developers. They could probably get a few billion dollars for the nice waterfront property.

joosters• 9 years ago

That's also an idea proposed for London City airport. It's prime real estate in a city desperate for more housing, it handles relatively few passengers, causes large amounts of pollution and noise problems, and its USP of being so central will be diluted when the faster trains to Heathrow are completed. On top of that, the airport doesn't actually make much money (in terms of £/area).

I wonder if it would make sense for an investor to buy the airport, shut it down and sell the land for housing, surely the land is worth £billions for property developers?

samstave4• 9 years ago

You might really like this book [0] -- while its talking about richmond, on NPR the other day they were talking to the author and he talks about how the port of oakland brings in 2 trillion dollars (or maybe it was all west coast ports) in economic GDP spending so its many billions of dollars of merchandise (10 billion tons per year) that flow through the port.

No way EVER that oakland would do anything to the port. The port was setup initially to export the war machine to Vietnam when we were fighting them - the logistics, experience and connections to Asia are more strong with Oakland than any other port...

One of our largest exports from there is arga and wine, heading to asia's REALLY large middle class, obv our inports in computers/electronics are gigantic.

Yeah, oakland should do a better job "profiting" from these exports and provide better services to their residents, but that is one of the most important ports we have.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Refinery-Town-Money-Remaking-American...

mmagin• 9 years ago

Uh, Oakland is way down the list from Long Beach and Los Angeles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ports_in_the_United_St...

hectorr2• 9 years ago

Ships. They're ships. Ships lean away from their turns. Boats lean into their turns. Also ships can carry boats.

Source: (Former) ship driver.

CalChris5• 9 years ago

Submarines are boats and they lean away from their turns.

rs999gti• 9 years ago

Maybe it's time to re-examine using nuclear reactors on cargo ships?

https://www.flexport.com/blog/nuclear-powered-cargo-ships/

Tharkun2• 9 years ago

Unless you can design a nuclear cargo ship that's safe from being commandeered by pirates|terrorists|nutjobs, this will never happen.

hellbanner• 9 years ago

Flagged, use the given title from the page.

Radle• 9 years ago

"Carrying more than 90% of the world’s trade, ocean-going vessels produce just 3% of its greenhouse-gas emissions." The article says itself, shipping is super efficient.

caseysoftware• 9 years ago

So combine that with the next sentence:

By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide—than all the world’s cars put together.

So all of the world's cars produce less than 3% of greenhouse gas emissions?

Sounds like we should work at optimizing other parts of the system.

(Eg. When you're trying to improve speed/throughput of a system, you focus on the bigger chunks first, not where < 3% of the work is done.)

vickychijwani• 9 years ago

You're ignoring the possibility that cars may emit only tiny amounts of sulphur and nitrogen oxides, compared to ships whose emissions are largely made up of those gases. That would be consistent with both sentences, although I don't know if it's true. EDIT: Looks like that is indeed true, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716251

seizethecheese• 9 years ago

Warning: I'm totally ignorant on the subject.

It seems like oil gets refined with gasoline going to cars and heavier fuels going to ships. Can we really say that cars are so much cleaner? Their fuel is surely subsidized by a market for the heavier fuels.

macmac3• 9 years ago

You are not crazy and this is exactly the right way to view the problem.

maxerickson• 9 years ago

A lot of the heavier fraction is cracked into gasoline.

Refineries play both sides of the market, specializing to take certain types of oil as input and then working their process and the various destination markets to maximize their return.

Here's one entry point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_(chemistry)

upofadown2• 9 years ago

just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur—gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide...

Oxides of sulphur are not greenhouse gasses. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas but it doesn't come from burning fuel.

These links go into the actual reasons these sorts of pollutants are bad:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx#Environmental_effects

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide#As_an_air_pollu...

Interestingly enough, there is some thought that nitrogen oxide emissions from ships actually cause global cooling.

ianai2• 9 years ago

These ships could be nuclear powered - like subs/other vessels are already. That ought to make a huge impact on carbon footprint.

brianwawok2• 9 years ago

Oh that is good, right through pirate infested waters with no armed crew?

kevincox• 9 years ago

You can make non-weaponizable nuclear power.

WalterBright• 9 years ago

I read 30 years ago that some cargo ships were being equipped with computer operated sails, which would substantially reduce fuel use. I wonder what happened to that.

lsseckman2• 9 years ago

Seems sails for ships this size would either be unwieldy in port, too little volume for much impact in locomotion, or too costly to maintain.

richdougherty• 9 years ago

"The problem, he adds, is one of incentives. Ship owners, who would normally borrow for such upgrades, do not benefit from lower fuel bills. It is the firms chartering the vessels that enjoy the savings. But their contracts are not long enough to make it worthwhile to invest in green upgrades. The average retrofit has a payback time of three years, whereas 80% of ship charters are for two years or less."

"Hence the interest in new green-lending structures. ... The idea is to share the fuel savings between the shipowner and the charterer over a longer contract, giving both an incentive to make the upgrades. Such schemes used to be thwarted by the difficulty of measuring exact fuel consumption on ships. New technologies allow more accurate readings."

This is the exact same problem that arises in landlord/tenant relationships when it comes to things like insulating a property. Insulation might be relatively cheap and pay itself back in a few years. But the landlord doesn't have an incentive to insulate because the benefit goes to the tenant. The current tenant also won't insulate because they'll probably leave before they can realise all the benefit of their investment.

In theory, landlords or shipowners should have an incentive to invest, since it should improve their property and therefore allow them to increase their rents or charter fees, but for some reason this doesn't happen. Possibly consumers can't accurately assess the value of improvements so they are reluctant to pay more.

The measurement devices mentioned should allow both parties to have a more accurate way to share in the benefits.

It's a complicated dance of incentives and information...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

lsseckman2• 9 years ago

Wish they had gone into more detail on this. It seems like a solid competitive advantage for the owners to offer lower fuel consumption & therefore a cheaper charter. Easy.

Anyone know if there are similar upgrades that can be applied to smaller ships?

hendler• 9 years ago

Checkout "Freightened" - https://vimeo.com/202104276

reacweb• 9 years ago

Increase the price of petrol. Many conflicts in the world are related to petrol. A significant part of military budget can be seen as a subsidize to petrol. There should be enough taxes to compensate all these hidden costs.

alphapapa• 9 years ago

Wouldn't increasing the price increase scarcity, making it an even more contentious resource, thereby increasing conflict? On the other hand, a widely available, cheap resource is not worth fighting over.

New ways to foot the hefty bill for making old ships less polluting

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