All about technology and forces shaping the energy transition in shippingAll about technology and forces shaping the energy transition in shipping
Decarbonisation is shipping’s white swan (I refer to the kind made popular by Nassim Nicholas Taleb), or rather, a bevy of little white swans if you will. Complete decarbonisation is inevitable; the only question now is when, not if. It is necessary for the industry to survive, and thrive in the world we will be living in. Vessels built in 2050 will be very different from the ones we build today. But given the longevity of vessels, those that we build today can co-exist with the ones built in 2050; only if we make them and the ecosystem they operate in sufficiently resilient.
Commercial shipping is a low margin business and only the very forward-thinking cargo owners are willing to pay a premium to ship goods sustainably. We don’t yet know what the technology, fuel or regulatory landscape will look like in a few years. Yes, we have a ton of limitations. And this forces us to innovate from the point of view of scarcity, with a focus on optimisation and incremental change. But the scale of the problem ahead of us requires fundamental change, delivered rapidly. Instead, if we think about this from the point of view of abundance, where we don’t have to make the business case for each single vessel work right now, would we come up with different solutions? And could we bring those solutions to scale, in turn making the economics work? When I thought about this — giving priority to resource efficiency and rapid deployment — here’s what I came up with.
(As I do not want this to be a which-is-our-future-fuel debate, my fuels and technologies are called Q,W,E,R,T and Y. If you have spent too much of your lockdown watching detective series like me, and are trying to figure out if there is a subliminal link between an alphabet and a particular fuel or technology, don’t. It’s completely random, my keyboard just threw the alphabets at me in that order.)
We are already working on flexible and modular solutions and are developing concepts where fuel storage, and energy systems are containerised and swappable. But is there a way in which we can push this concept further, to increase our preparedness, and consequently resilience, in the face of uncertainty on multiple dimensions?
Let’s start with the vessel as a whole. We are preparing ships to operate on fuelQ, W or E in anticipation of future developments. But what would it take to make a vessel all-currently-possible-future-fuels-ready? Let’s assume that fuel Q has the most challenging ventilation requirements, W has the highest flammability risk and E is highly corrosive. What’s keeping us from taking all of the worst-case boundary conditions of Q, W and E, and designing vessels keeping those in mind? Isn’t a multi-future-fuel-ready vessel a far more attractive investment than a vessel betting on a single fuel?
Similarly for fuel storage, different fuels require different kinds of tanks. We are thinking of making them modular and easy to put them on and remove from a vessel. But there is then still a risk that I invest in a tank for fuel R for my vessel and 3 years later, I need to retrofit her again to be able to operate on T (because T is now way cheaper, or more widely available) or vice versa. In this situation, I would prefer a tank that can be used for both R and T.
Let’s assume R, T and Y are all liquid/cryogenic fuels. T has to be stored at the lowest temperature of all of these. At first glance, it might not make sense to store Y in a tank meant for much colder T. But what exactly is the difference, and how much of it has to do with certification/regulation than the actual design, materials or parts used?
What if we picked the more difficult of the fuels, let’s say T, and tested and certified the tank for all similar fuels (i.e., R and Y as well)? I realise this might double, triple or quadruple the cost. But if this flex-fuel tank were available, would several more vessel owners be more willing to dip their toe in the decarbonisation ocean? Probably.
Would this mitigate a certain amount of risk, and enable easier access to capital? Quite possibly.
And if the manufacturer sold twice or thrice the number of tanks, would they be able to recover the costs of the extra investment? That could easily be calculated, right? Would this accelerate deployment and give shipping a collective competitive advantage? I believe it would.
These are just some examples, I’m sure there are a lot of other possibilities. Unless we get new technologies into the water, we are not going to find out whether or not they will be effective and efficient. We tend to keep waiting for someone else to figure this out in order to deploy them, firmly planting ourselves in the midst of a classic chicken-or-egg conundrum. Accelerated deployment will break this un-virtuous cycle, and we must do all we can to move things along.
We have the opportunity to leverage fuel, cost and regulatory uncertainty to innovate and prepare ourselves for the most technically challenging scenario, and for a complete lack of consensus. While this is not what comes to mind at the first instance, the advantage of this approach is that it will make us highly flexible and it can radically speed up deployment (which is our biggest bottleneck at the moment). This would, in turn, set us in good stead to deal with white, grey or black swans that the next couple of decades might throw at us.
I’d like to believe that an apple did hit Newton on the head, and that led him to discovering gravity. The story is just more fun that way. But whether or not the apple actually fell on his head, according to the manuscript in the archives of the Royal Society, an apple definitely seems to have been involved. Newton’s Principia, explaining the phenomenon of gravity was first published in Latin in 1687. And it created quite a ruckus.
Now, over 300 years later, climate change is hitting us on the head in no uncertain terms, and gravity seems to be making a comeback. As we rapidly transition towards producing more and more energy from intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar, we must find efficient and effective ways to store this energy at scale, and reuse it when needed. I’ve been curious about sustainable ways to store energy over long periods of time, so I started looking into what’s out there. This post is focused on exciting gravity-based solutions and the companies working on them.
The underlying ‘gravity’ concept is similar to that of traditional pumped hydropower. To put it very simply, energy is used to pump water up to a height. When the water is released, and it passes through a turbine, it releases this energy. The challenge with pumped hydro, however, is that it requires a suitable location with water and appropriate surrounding topography (hills for reservoirs at different heights for example) for us to be able to harness it.
Novel solutions, using this concept, but replacing water with other materials (like bricks and weights)b, or creating the possibility to tap into hydropower in more widely available locations are being developed.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list –
Energy Vault (Switzerland, founded 2017):
Energy Vault’s solution replaces the water in pumped hydro with custom made 35-ton composite blocks made from low-cost materials. The concept video reminds me of playing Tetris, but with real-life bricks going in two directions — ‘recharging’ when the bricks are taken up and placed on top of the tower and ‘discharging’ when they are brought back down. Energy Vault estimates the round-trip energy efficiency to be between 80–90%. The plants are designed for ranges of 20–35–80 MWh storage capacity and a 4–8MW of continuous power discharge for 8–16 hours. They are also developing solutions to offer full scalability from 1 MWh modules up to multi-GWh of storage capacity. Their first demo site is in Tinicio, Switzerland.
Gravitricity (UK, founded 2011):
Gravitricity’s system suspends weights with the help of cables in a deep shaft. Each cable is engaged with a winch capable of lifting its share of the weight. Electrical power is consumed when raising the weight and generated by lowering it. The system is estimated to have an 80–90% efficiency, can utilize decommissioned mine shafts (> 300m depth) and has a design life of up to 50 years, enabling a low cost of storage per kWh. Their first 250 kW demo in Edinburgh recently generated (shore-)power for the first time, and a full-scale, 4 MW plant is planned to start later this year. Gravitricity recently announced plans to add compressed hydrogen and thermal storage to their installations.
A study (in 2019) by Imperial College London estimated that Gravitricity’s technology could store energy at half the cost of Lithium-ion batteries. Even considering the drop in battery prices over the last year, this is a significant advantage.
Advanced Rail Energy Storage (USA, founded 2010):
Sheldon Cooper (or any ‘trainiac’) would absolutely love this one!
ARES’ fixed motor, chain-drive system uses electricity to drive mass cars uphill on fixed rail tracks, converting electricity into potential energy. When power is required, this process is reversed and the mass cars go downhill; the electric motors operate as generators, converting the potential energy back into electricity. The amount of energy stored depends on the number of mass cars and the (perpendicular) height of the slope. Storage capacity can be increased by adding more tracks, and duration by increasing track length. Each mass car is 25% longer and about twice as wide as a standard twenty-foot container (TEU) and weighs approx. 320 tons. A 50 MW GravityLine with 10 multi-rail tracks and 210 mass cars is being built in Nevada.
Gravity Power (USA):
The GPM (Gravity Power Module) uses a very large piston suspended in a deep, water-filled shaft, with sliding seals to prevent leakage around the piston and a return pipe connecting to a pump-turbine at ground level. The piston is made up of reinforced rock (or low-cost concrete). The dropping piston forces water down the storage shaft, up the return pipe and through the turbine, producing electricity. To store energy, electricity drives the generator in reverse, spinning the pump to force water down the return pipe and into the shaft, lifting the piston. Each shaft can be used to store several MWh of energy. Water needs to be filled into the shaft once at the start of operations; it can then be reused.
New Energy Let’s Go (Germany):
Their concept, originally developed by Heindl Energy GmbH, involves creating a cylindrical well (in bedrock) in which a large rock mass is pushed up and down with the help of hydraulic pumps. Excess renewable electricity can be used to push water under a movable rock piston, and when electricity is needed, the rock mass is lowered, pushing the water under it through a turbine to generate power. Estimated diameter of a 1 GWh plant is 150m and that of an 8 GWh plant is 250m. New Energy Let’s Go is an interim investor who has acquired the patents and is seeking a strategic investor to continue development.
RheEnergise (UK, founded 2019):
The company is developing ‘HD Hydro’ or high-density hydropower technology that makes it possible to reach the same power output on hills that are 60% lower than in projects using water. This is achieved by using an environmentally benign high-tech fluid (R-19 TM) with a density 2.5x that of water that has been engineered to be non-reactive and non-corrosive. This unlocks several new potential sites, reduces plant construction costs and has the potential to significantly speed up deployment.
Easy Hydro (UK, founded 2019):
Easy Hydro, a spin-out of Trinity College Dublin, makes small-scale (1–200 kW) modular hydropower generating sets suitable for harnessing energy from man-made water networks (e.g. drinking water or irrigation networks) as well as natural ones (rivers, lakes). The installation requires a 10m water column (or 1 bar pressure) and a flow rate of 4 litres/sec. The magnitude of the power output is based on the pressure and flow rates. Easy Hydro uses off-the-shelf water pumps with a reversed flow direction, instead of custom hardware. This enables them to keep costs low, and makes installations easy to repair.
Energy storage solutions can be compared on two aspects. Energy capacity measures the total amount of energy that can be stored in a system (units – kWh, MWh, GWh, etc.) And power capacity measures the maximum amount of power that can be delivered by a system (units – kW, MW, GW, etc.)
For instance, an energy storage installation with an 8 MW, 80 MWh configuration can provide a maximum continuous power of 8 MW for 10 hours, or it can provide a lower, 4 MW power for 20 hours. This design however, cannot provide power higher than 8 MW.
From the examples above, ‘energy towers’ could be made taller or ‘gravity lines’ could be made to go to higher altitudes to increase the energy capacity. The power capacity of the installations could be manipulated by changing the speed at which the bricks / water / mass cars are displaced.
And this is how the energy capacity of individual installations from the above companies (approximately) compares:
In conclusion, for any energy storage solution to be successful, it has to be easily deployable, scalable and low-cost. At sufficient scale, gravitational storage solutions could (theoretically for now) easily compete with batteries on cost, and offer a more environmentally sustainable solution when we compare the entire lifecycle of the technology. This is worth accelerating the work on gravity-based solutions, don’t you think?
