FEATURE: Workboats first in line for hydrogen propulsion?
Could hydrogen as a marine fuel be launched in workboats? That’s the belief of a consortium of companies that met in London during International Shipping Week.
With the maritime industry under pressure from many directions, the challenge over looming regulations on emissions targets is being taken on by developers across the fuel mosaic, and this consortium believes it should be starting with the smaller vessels rather than the other way round.
Prominent among the HyZEM (Hydrogen Zero Emission Maritime) consortium is RUX Energy, an Australian start-up founded by a Material Sciences PhD Jehan Kanga in December 2018.
RUX Energy has come up with a nanoporous solution to power vessels with hydrogen that reduces the space needed to store it.
Essentially it is a ‘nano sponge’, says Kanga, which can be cooled or compressed to achieve a very high density and can be stored on vessels like workboats, especially Crew Transfer Vessels. The nanomaterial, which is called MOF, is placed inside a metal or carbon fibre tank.
“Our technology is a metal organic framework, but effectively this is a nano sponge,” he told Maritime Journal in an interview before the LISW event. “Hydrogen is very, very small and doesn’t like to be compressed or liquefied. The molecules actually sort of push against each other, and what we do is give it a surface to interact with. It’s very lightly constructed, an atomic sponge. And in creating that environment, it can then be compressed or cooled and you get a very high density as a result.
“Storage is a big part of the cost of hydrogen, and this brings those costs down.”
So far the so-called ‘future fuels’ including ammonia, methanol and biofuels, as well as hydrogen, have been earmarked for the big vessels – but the HyZEM consortium is starting small.
“We should start with small vessels because it makes it easier to do a small vessel than it is to do a giant ship,” says Kanga. “And actually that de-risks not just the technology, but it also de-risks the supply chain. It de-risks learning the safety and hazards approach, the protocols that we cover up, the training, the safety training.
“We’re developing safety training protocols now with Freeport East (a green hydrogen project that has received about €3 million from the UK and Australia and aims to support deployment in ports for tugs, workboats and offshore wind vessels), yet there are these big shipping companies that haven’t even started thinking about it.
“We are taking it step by step and scaling it as it works, and once it works you can increase it by 10 times, until eventually you can use it on a big ship.”
HyZEM members
Other members of HyZEM include Steamology, which broke the world record for land speed in a steam-powered car (139.843mph, breaking the former 127mph record that had lasted for 103 years) in California in 2009, and which is leading the consortium.
“At the heart of this is transforming water into power with the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen,” said mechanical engineer Hector Complin, who is working with Chartwell Marine on retrofitting a Brevity-Class CTV with integrated hydrogen power.
“We did a comparison with hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells and batteries,” he told the event. “There were three benefits when compared with a hydrogen fuel cell: superior energy density; cost effectiveness; and longer life span.”
Another member of the consortium is Carnot, a tech start-up that focuses on sustainable powertrains and insulating engine components, saving the energy and recovering exhaust waste heat, said Carnot technologist Jeremy Howard-Knight.
He claimed that a 60-day trip powered by batteries would require 240,000 tonnes of them, using up all available cargo space.
To run on hydrogen fuel cells, it would need a third of that weight, or 70 tonnes, and about a third of the space.
A high-efficiency hydrogen combustion engine, he said, would need 35 tonnes of hydrogen.
One member of the event spoke up for an alternative to hydrogen.
“I think it’s clear that the LNG, legacy fossil fuels are not the long-term route,” said David Cooper, Catapult ORE Partnership manager. ”Biofuels won’t scale to the whole of the maritime sector. Nuclear is not applicable to the offshore sector. That leaves batteries, hydrogen, ammonia, methanol. It’s got to be close to the electricity you use.
“With energy density, methanol is an easy choice, it’s a drop-in fuel. We want to support projects that bring us closer to the best fuel of the future. Simply replacing diesel won’t work. We can replace diesel when it comes to power but we have the range limitations and we have to look at everything on the vessel, for example improving hull efficiency. Methanol comes the closest to the energy density.”
