Racing along at speeds of up to 25 knots (just under 30mph) spins a propeller beneath the waves, which in turn drives a turbine and produces electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
On an overcast day off Brightlingsea, a two-hour test run filled a six-litre storage tank with clean, green hydrogen; the only by-product was oxygen, which was vented. The boat actually produced so much electricity that, if the tank had been bigger, it could have made 60 litres of hydrogen, sufficient to charge between 10 and 20 mobile phones.
Having proven the concept works with an 18ft (5.5m) racing boat, the company wants to replicate the process within a year on a yacht up to 130ft long, which would be capable of producing 250,000 litres or more of hydrogen per hour. Medland wants to have flotillas of unmanned energy yachts sailing the world’s oceans. “We see ourselves as delivering green hydrogen to any port anywhere in the world,” he said.
That’s idiot stupidity. Using some of the wind – thus movement in the water via a turbine – of the boat to produce some small amount of logically storable energy is fun. To the extent that filling the tank is better than filling a battery at least.
But the idea that this is a way to produce commercial quantities of H2 – idiocy.
What’s the energy cost of building a boat?
The grift is strong on this one Skywalker!
“unmanned energy yachts”!?
Which would need some sort of GPS and alarm system to tell the fool who has been conned into buying them (aka the taxpayer) when they were becalmed and had started to drift and which could end up fuck knows where when the wind started blowing again.
And this hazard to shipping would also need to tracked in real time of course.
I suspect these would be a couple of the million and one practical issues that would not be addressed in the grant for several million for a feasibility study which presumably is what this grifter is after.
Where’s redbeard rum when you need him!
They seem to have reinvented the sailing boat.
I wonder why the entire developed world gave up on it except for small pleasure craft.
Exactly the same thought here. How can I get someone to pay for that yacht I always wanted?
Sigh
Hydrogen has a density of just under 0.1 kg/m3
Water is 1000 kg/m3
A six litre tank is 0.006 m3
They are not holding much gas on board are they ?
In order to make it feasible, they are going to have to store the H2 under enormous pressure.
Also what is this catamaran going to do during a storm ?
I guess they are hoping that eventually, they’ll collect so much hydrogen that they can fly the boat home.
Why not just store the electricity in batteries?
I was assuming 60 litres of liquid hydrogen, and that that would take some time to accumulate, and charge rather more than 10 phone batteries. Assumed mere journalistic incompetence. But it is truly worse than I thought.
250,000 litres or more of hydrogen per hour will make a nice big bang when a tank starts to leak.
So increasing the size of the boat by just one order of magnitude gives a 10000-fold increase in hydrogen generation? Looks like our energy problems are solved, we just need to fit this system to half a dozen supertankers!
Seems that someone is looking to tax-deduct their sailing hobby…
The important thing for proponents of the hydrogen economy is to choose units that make things appear good. 60 liters almost sounds impressive till you think twice and realize it’s not that much. It’s also a very poor way to measure the hydrogen as the volume will change with temperature and pressure.
Assuming an ambient pressure of 1 bar and a temperature of 18C its weight would be 5 grams. In imperial units this would be an impressive one fifth of an a ounce.
In order to get those speeds they’ve had to use a foiling boat and they are crazy things.
As it happens I was manning a safety boat at an event for foiling boats a couple of weekends ago and on one day my crew was one of the sailors who didn’t fancy the conditions, so I got a good insight in to the problems of sailing them.
Foiling boats are very good at going in straight lines so the wind needs to be in the right direction if you have any restrictions. Keeping them in straight lines is difficult for good sailors, for merely competent sailors its very difficult and once they lose a bit of control they come off the foils in a quite dramatic “pitch pole”. Tacking and gybing is really difficult and again all but the best come off the foils and so lose lots of speed, even if they don’t get dumped in the water.
The event I was at was for the cheapest and slowest boats single hulled foiling boats*. The base cost was 15k for a 2.4m boat and they are that cheap because they are (badly) mass produced in China. The biggest risks are breakages because of the massive loads and collisions because they are so difficult to control. In a rib with a 80HP engine we have to just put our hands in the air if one is heading towards us and hope the helm is in control enough to miss us because its impossible to second guess which way it could suddenly turn.
A 130′ boat is bigger than the last America’s Cup boats which were 75′. To get the kind of speeds they are talking about is going to require massive investments in technologies not just to get the thing flying but then to keep it flying and flying safely. Its going to be like having an out of control surface to surface missiles flying around the oceans.
And they will need to fly to get the speeds they are talking about. There’s a rule of thumb for calculating the maximum hull speed of a boat in displacement mode: 1.34 x SQRT(length at waterline), so their 130′ boat is limited to a maximum of 15knots.
As other’s have pointed out, this guy’s looking for someone to fund his hobby.
*there’s now an industry putting foils on anything and everything, I’m referring to specifically designed single crewed racing boats.
Maybe they could just build nukes to produce the H2. And then add it to all that surplus CO2 in the air or the ocean to produce hydrocarbons.
But that wouldn’t give the bloke a yacht, would it.
So they have to generate enough electricity to desalinate the water before they can have a pop at making Hydrogen…?
The concept has merit. The linked article which I assume some commenters have not read explains the benefits.
However, the scaling does not look favourable. Offshore wind and onshore solar are benefiting from economies of scale and already cost less than coal.
Even in the hyperlocal case of energy use on a the vessel itself a lithium battery would make more sense for storage than hydrogen.
Scaled up you can produce enough hydrogen to make the boat fly! Then you can reach Colombo more quickly so that the protesters can charge their mobile phones.
BiFR: At that scale the kit to liquefy it would use far more energy than it contains and it would sink the boat with its weight, probably. Liquefying H2 isn’t straightforward because of its properties.
In other news, folks who like railways are always proposing new ways to get a pile of money to indulge their fantasies, usually with a save-the-planet pretext. Ditto for airship enthusiasts as we discussed here not long ago. Folks in Brightlingsea like yachts and sailing, and don’t see why they should be denied accesss to the money pile. After all, where will the yachts be built?
JB @ 10.08 “Offshore wind and onshore solar are benefiting from economies of scale and already cost less than coal”.
Only when the real costs are ignored: Cost of connecting to the network (£54Bn for new offshore, as pointed out here by Tim:https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/ ), cost to consumers when there is too much wind, cost to the consumer of providing backup supply for when there isn’t enough wind etc. etc are included.
As Tim quoted in the link above: “Developers have agreed to build new farms for a guaranteed electricity price of £37.35 per MWh”.
Polish coal is currently £118 per tonne = 8MW = £15 MW.
@Addollf
Indeed, essentially anything can be made “economic” by the use of such methods. The real world will have it’s say eventually however.
For the “net zero” genocide, I think the blaming of “vested interests” – big (insert hate figures of choice) – has to be done first, which I think we might already be seeing. Aren’t there plans afoot to “fine” car makers if they don’t sell a certain proportion of milk floats?
I would expect something similar for cunt pumps and any other “green” detritus the lunatics can think of (i.e. somebody can make a buck out of)
. . . clean, green hydrogen . . .
Bollocks.
Burning (oxidising) hydrogen for energy will result in an increase in atmospheric water vapour – precisely the (ultimate) problem allegedly caused by burning fossil fuels.
If water vapour is the big daddy of green house gasses they say it is, increasing levels in the atmosphere by whatever means will result in the same problem. Whether it’s extra ocean evaporation caused by fossil fuel CO2 forcing, or burning hydrogen directly electrolysed from the oceans, will make no difference. Those extra atmospheric H2O molecules will absorb and reradiate some more of the solar derived infrared back toward the surface resulting in increased surface heating.
Why not just put tide powered hydrogen generators in the ports and cut out the random yachts in the first place?
sheesh…
Swift’s sunbeams and cucumbers just keeps being recycled doesn’t it?
It’s just a bloody windmill with increased losses due to moving the hull (or foils) through water.
Of course, done right – a dirt cheap hull of very limited lifetime made of pressed wood, for example – it may have overall improved deployment agility and require less Capex. But one would need maritime law modified (I assume) so that any damage done to anything by seagoing autonomous vessels didn’t result in any claims on the builder, operator or launcher.
IF wind power and hydrogen is a Good Idea, cheaper to give everyone a free windmill for their back yard and buy the hydrogen (or, more likely, the electricity) from them. This would however necessitate a change to the grid and the home; basically, most near-home things need to become inverter-driven rather than transformer driven so intermittency (etc) aren’t a problem (no power would still be a problem, but no need to expect 110 or 220 or whatever volts at 50 or 60 Hz – just electricity ..)
Yeah, that sounds neat…
Bloke in Wales
well, 10x increase in length = 1000x increase in volume (and weight)….
But it’s still just a bloody windmill, but one with the novel ability to directly cause ocean traffic jams and crashes. Neat!
John
The sailing boat went away because oil-driven combustion-based machinery was better for the job.
But They will be fixing that; if you get executed for using oil, won’t be many oil-driven ships…
The Rainbow H₂™ was stored in COTS container towed behind the boat which isn’t shown in the article.
If the goal of the game is to cool the planet, then just go large on evaporative cooling. On sunny days spray salt water onto any surfaces that are not already wet.
It’s not the goal of course.
But if Javid or any other Kojak politician insists there’s a climate emergency then water pistolling his pate is for a good cause.
Quick napkin-fut tells me that simply covering the deck with solar panels and not having the ship move at all would yield roughly 10 times the amount of hydrogen using bog-standard electrolysys. Possibly far better if you use elcetronic/catalytic trickery…
So….errrmmm… yeah…
Next!!!
Right, right got it.
There must be plenty of redundant supertankers or bulk carriers or old aircraft carriers knocking about.
Cover one of them with solar panels, situate it at a tropics line and sail it to the other tropic when the seasons change to maximise sunlight.
Electrolysis of seawater to produce the hydrogen. When it is full of hydrogen it is nice and light and won’t need much fuel to sail it to Shitholistan where it is unloaded and no one will notice or care if it explodes.
Doddle.
Why in the hell would you just not use wind-turbines to crack water sucked in by a fixed-place installation? Think of all the wind energy lost because its being spent to push a boat hull through the water instead of running an efficient intake pump.
Then you can dedicate your boats to, you know, being transports.
Greenies are fething stupid.
Also, I’m doubting those anodes last very long, cracking salt water.
Yeah, I was right. Oh, and there’s a reason we don’t have desalination plants on the shores of every coastal city – the energy cost of removing salt is *massive*. It’ll basically eat up 90% of their produced electricity, easy. There won’t be jack shit left over for cracking water.
Desalination.
Right, this is really it this time.
Old supertanker, solar panels etc.
Sail it to one of the Poles to get 24/7 sun and use the ice. Already freshwater, see ? Plenty of it at both poles. Send out patrols to shoot the bears to keep them away from the ship.
When full of hydrogen, make a Zeppelin out of the bear hides and float it to Alaska or Russia or somewhere for unloading.
( Ok no bears in the south, but whales will do instead, lots of them down there)
Plenty of penguins in the south. The bear shooters will have plenty of time on their hands in the southern summer so they can just stitch all those penguin hides together.
Use a supertanker.
Load up with ice at the poles.
Then motor down to the tropics and let the warm air do the melting. (Bonus air cooling to help stop global warming!)
Then use solar panels to make electrolyse the water.
Unload in Africa etc, etc
We could cut out the middle-man, so to speak, and just start burning whales again. This would be about as much use to our current energy needs as the hydrogen boats.
Wow, 60 litres of hydrogen.
Hydrogen volumetric calorfic value is just 30% that of natural gas, so 1m3 of H2 is ~ 3.3kWh (at STP).
So 60 litres has an energy content of … 0.2kWh, but it took 2 hrs to produce, so it’s producing at 0.1kWh
But wait, it’s stored in a “pressurised tank”, but the puff-piece article forgets to advise at what pressure. Tut, tut. Pressurisation requires much energy. Over 10% of the energy in the H2 being stored.
Can’t wait for the upscaling.
Where will the storage cylinder plus heavy compressor be sited?
Unloading will be fun. Upwind of the primary energy source.
This is totally bonkers!!!!!!!!! If they use a propeller in the water stream to generate H2 it MUST be using power to generate the H2. The only place it can get that energy from is from the forward motion of the boat/ship. The conversion cannot be high particularly. What they are selling here is perpetual motion. OK if its a sailing ship the wind is I suppose free, but someone mentioned putting it on tankers. Bonkers totally bonkers.