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350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

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Re: 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

#121

Post by reliablereason »

evomassiny wrote: post #116
reliablereason wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just cause it is a sailing vessel does not mean it does not have an engine. It probably uses a couple of 100 liters of disel to get in and out of port, driving generators and heating the boat. On top of that the sails will degrade with time and the ship will need to be repaired and there is allot more crew and manpower needed per unit of cargo. Everything has environmental cost in CO2 emissions, and the amount of use…

According to [0], a typical container ship generate 12.5 g of CO2 per ton per km, which means that one trip from France to NY with 350T of cargo would release about 35T of CO2 in the atmosphere. I'm convinced that this sail boat generates an order of magnitude less of that (I can't find any estimate of it) Whatever the initial CO2 cost of the construction of this boat is, I'm sure that it's a net benefits if it's use…

Modern container ships are more like 3g per ton (page 5):

https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/158911010...

6000km from France to NY

3g * 6000km * 350tones / 1000 / 1000 = 6.3 metric tones of CO2.

I don't know how much disel the sail ship might use, but 6.4 tones of C02 is equivalent of 1974L of disel.

According to their own website https://graindesail-logistics.com/en/ they aim for 1.8 g off CO2 per km per ton.

1.8 is lower than 3g. If those aims are reached I guess they are "more green" than I thought. But the gain is quite small, if you truck that cargo for 160km all the CO2 savings are gone. A modern truck emits 45g of CO2 per km.

Re: 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

#122

Post by hagbard_c »

crote wrote: post #92
hagbard_c wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll be emitting nitrous oxides when burning that methane. Use wind to produce hydrogen, use that in fuel cells. Electric propulsion units are already in use, what remains to be solved is the megawatt-sized fuel cells needed for this application at a price which makes the whole scheme feasible.

How are you going to store all that hydrogen? You need extremely large and heavy high-pressure tanks, capable of holding 350–700 bar. Methane can be liquefied and stored at only 10 bar. Hydrogen just doesn't have the density required here. Even if you want to use hydrogen-powered fuel cells, it might make more sense to convert it to ammonia for transport and storage.

There's many ways to store hydrogen ranging from 'cryogenic' to 'dissolved in ... (acetone is a good candidate)' to 'converted to ... (ammonia et al)' to 'compressed'. Ships (can) have a lot of space so that is not much of a problem. Cryogenic is probably not feasible, compressed is probably also out but in between there are many options.

Re: 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

#123

Post by hagbard_c »

Gare wrote: post #50
hagbard_c wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll be emitting nitrous oxides when burning that methane. Use wind to produce hydrogen, use that in fuel cells. Electric propulsion units are already in use, what remains to be solved is the megawatt-sized fuel cells needed for this application at a price which makes the whole scheme feasible.

Long term, I agree. But we already have methane and methanol powered huge container ships. Much better than burning bunker fuel.

It may be the easier option for electrically propelled ships, several of which are already in service. Mind I'm not talking about battery-electric ships but diesel-electric (hybrid, [1]) which have the range and load capacity needed for 'serious' applications. If - and that is a big if - the requisite fuel cells can be developed they could directly drive the existing electric propulsion units in those ships, replacing the diesel generators currently in use.

[1] https://www.wartsila.com/marine/products/ship-electrificatio...

Re: 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

#124

Post by hagbard_c »

fragmede wrote: post #111
crote wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you going to store all that hydrogen? You need extremely large and heavy high-pressure tanks, capable of holding 350–700 bar. Methane can be liquefied and stored at only 10 bar. Hydrogen just doesn't have the density required here. Even if you want to use hydrogen-powered fuel cells, it might make more sense to convert it to ammonia for transport and storage.

how much hydrogen do you need to store though? it doesn't make sense in cars to me, but water-based vehicles seem like they wouldn't need to store problematic amounts given that they have access to h2o

That would imply the ship has the requisite power generation on board to produce hydrogen from water, in which case it would be more efficient to use that power to propel the ship.

So, yes, the ship would have to take all the hydrogen it needs with it.

Re: 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

#125

Post by prmoustache »

danielharan wrote: post #86
prmoustache wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still less energy than shipping left and right 3 times

It's not clear that shipping the sugar to where the cacao is, then shipping refrigerated chocolate is any better than shipping unrefrigerated cacao mass to the North where it's milled with sugar. Especially if you look at grid emissions in all those countries. Transport uses energy, but so do milling, tempering and packaging.

Looks to me like the same countries could provide sugar and cacao.

The end result will always have to be shipped refrigerated anyway and is consumed pretty much worldwide so it doesn't look like a decisive factor, especially as it isn't a product that needs to be aged like say, a wine or a cheese. Once it is produced it is ready to ship, no long term storage needed.

Re: 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

#126

Post by shepherdjerred »

OJFord wrote: post #95

I can't believe the answer to environmentally friendly wine and chocolate in New York, at least for the size of the market, is really to innovate on how to ship it from France ..?! The coffee and cacao is presumably making its second Atlantic crossing too. And wait, coffee? What are they doing, just roasting it in France? And then it's at minimum 18 days stale by the time you buy it? That's not a premium good at all,…

> And then it's at minimum 18 days stale by the time you buy it?

You generally don't want to use freshly roasted coffee anyway. It ideally gets some time to de-gas.

18 days, though, is towards the tail end of what you'd want.

https://fellowproducts.com/blogs/learn/understanding-degassi...

Re: 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

#127

Post by arwineap »

npongratz wrote: post #107
OJFord wrote: post #95

I can't believe the answer to environmentally friendly wine and chocolate in New York, at least for the size of the market, is really to innovate on how to ship it from France ..?! The coffee and cacao is presumably making its second Atlantic crossing too. And wait, coffee? What are they doing, just roasting it in France? And then it's at minimum 18 days stale by the time you buy it? That's not a premium good at all,…

Confirmed in TFA: > The sailboat will also restock its coffee and cacao supply on its journey through the Caribbean. That supply is then brought back across the sea to France, where the coffee is roasted, and fine chocolates are produced. So, the commodities are taken from the Caribbean region, to France, and back across the Atlantic to NYC.

Just to be clear, this is a typical sail cargo route because of the prevailing / trade winds

Re: 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

#128

Post by OJFord »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #126
OJFord wrote: post #95

I can't believe the answer to environmentally friendly wine and chocolate in New York, at least for the size of the market, is really to innovate on how to ship it from France ..?! The coffee and cacao is presumably making its second Atlantic crossing too. And wait, coffee? What are they doing, just roasting it in France? And then it's at minimum 18 days stale by the time you buy it? That's not a premium good at all,…

> And then it's at minimum 18 days stale by the time you buy it? You generally don't want to use freshly roasted coffee anyway. It ideally gets some time to de-gas. 18 days, though, is towards the tail end of what you'd want. https://fellowproducts.com/blogs/learn/understanding-degassi...

Sure, but something like mail order 'freshly roasted' within your local country accounts for that and you're good to go; if I come back to a bag that's 18d post-roast from holiday or something I'll definitely taste the difference from the 2-3d at which I'd typically receive it. (Not in a good way.) Paying the surely enormous premium for roasted-in-France and zero-emission-sailboat-delivered coffee in NYC just doesn't make any sense to me.

Re: 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

#129

Post by thejohnconway »

krisoft wrote: post #96
thejohnconway wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale and throughput. Ships used to have cranes on deck and unload this way (look at pretty much any ocean liner, they had cranes on the forded for cargo). Containerisation improved throughput considerably, but added to latency. There is no way this is cheaper. Way more crew per tonne, the ship itself is almost certainly way more expensive for it capacity, and so on. Not that I don’t think sailing is a bad way to mov…

> Containerisation improved throughput considerably, but added to latency. I doubt the “added latency” part. How long do you think it takes to unload 11,000 twenty-foot container from a ship? Do you think anyone would move the contained stuff faster if it were just in a loose pile?

That used crates, but yes I think it way quicker per ship, because ocean liners in particular wanted fast turnaround times. A lot more labour was involved, obviously.

Re: 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

#130

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

rmah wrote: post #78
agentultra wrote: post #45

Everyone is always concerned about scale. But I sometimes wonder if we need to scale down. Are cargo ships full of essential goods or disposable items that will more likely than not enter a landfill without seeing any use at all? We’re really good at over producing items and goods that we don’t need or use. It’s interesting to see businesses try things like this. It might not be efficient or affordable now. But someo…

At end of life, cargo ships are cut up into scrap steel. That scrap is then melted down and re-used to make new steel. I strongly suspect that, if you take into account the energy used to manufacture the ship, sailboats will turn out to have a far higher carbon footprint per ton-mile of shipping than normal cargo ships. Cargo ships, as dirty as they seem on a per-ship basis, are crazy efficient on a per ton-mile basi…

"Cargo ships, as dirty as they seem on a per-ship basis, are crazy efficient on a per ton-mile basis."

As I understand it, this reinforces the parent's comment about scaling down. Efficiency facilitates scaling up, increased demand, supply and consumption, and inevitably, increased carbon footprint and other environmental issues. The comment is not only directed at the footprint of "normal" cargo ships, it's directed at the footprint of the consumption that they enable.

When it is cheap and efficient to ship goods, then more goods will be produced, shipped and consumed; this has an enviromental impact. If it becomes more expensive and less efficient, then perhaps less goods would be produced, shipped and consumed, with reduced environmental impact.

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