This is pretty cool I thought.
Infograms and pics at link.
That Maersk site is quite fascinating.
It’s funny though that they’re hyping the ship as good for the environment when it still burns bunker fuel - the absolute dirtiest shit you can possibly burn. LOL.
Of course all ships like that burn that crap so you probably can’t really expect them to do otherwise and actually sell one, but still, it’s a little funny.
Newer marine engines have a variety of pollution control mechanisms such as exhaust scavenging and catalytic scrubbers, but to be even more basic, if the #5 or #6 fuel oil isn’t being used in ships, where would it be used? Is it better to use the fuel for a productive purpose, or to just store it somewhere?
I always thought the Double-Ds were quite attractive. This will take some getting used to.
Well, I think they mean it burns less fuel per containerload.
Holy ship!
18,000 containers. That’s 863 million cans of baked beans.
Who needs bunker fuel when you have that kind of natural gas?
I would think you might have to spend substantial amounts of money on new loading facilities; if not won’t it take a very long time to load and unload?
The Telegraph article says they can unload 30 containers per hour. That’s 25 days, non-stop. :eek:
The article also says that it’s too big for every port in the US. If this size class becomes popular, I suppose you’ll see US ports getting rebuilt, but it’ll take a lot of time/money for that to happen.
I can’t help wondering if this isn’t being built with an eye toward using it for the new arctic shipping route between Europe and China. That trip is estimated to take about 30 days, so you could fly a crew back to China, have them pilot a ship a second ship to port and dead head the empty or partially loaded ship (5 days to spare) back to the port of origin. I’m sure I probably missed something here though. In these scenarios I usually end up finding I need a wormhole or temporal distortion to actually make them work the way I though they would. 
I am pretty sure cruise ships use the same fuel, bunker fuel, new engines can use different types of fuel, but bunker fuel is the cheapest and not always available in every port.
Isn’t this the same ship that Wal-Mart uses, in fact don’t they have more than one ship of this same type?
I think I already made that observation, as your quote plainly shows. My only point was that they’re hyping how environmently friendly the ship is, which by comparison isn’t completely misleading. But when you consider what they’re burning, and yes, what ALL ships of this type are burning, it’s a little ridiculous.
From an Encyclopedia Galactica entry on the history of the first half of the 21st century:
Compares very favourably to air freight.
Now granted, that quote is from 4 years ago and if things have improved such that these new engines won’t be that dirty (I haven’t looked at the Maersk site), I’ll be happy to see those specific citations. But that fact of the matter is that doesn’t apply to the existing fleet and likely won’t for a couple of generations to come.
That quote goes on to include
Couldn’t edit since I get a blank window.
These vessels aren’t actually the biggest ships in the world, they are just the biggest in one dimension (length). The largest tankers and bulkersare wider and can carry a much, much greater weight of cargo (over double).
Maybe but you haven’t made good that point. I suspect you are asking yourself the wrong question. You need to ask yourself: “if these containers were carried some other way, how much pollution then?”.
This is wrong. What they actually mean is they can unload 30 containers per hour per crane. They could have quite a number of cranes working the ship. The record apparentlyis 734 container movements in an hour, set using nine cranes simultaneously. So if you work on say five cranes that’s five days to load or unload the whole ship. But bear in mind these ships almost never load and unload the whole lot in one go. They are carrying from multiple ports, picking up and dropping off along the way. So they would almost never take the whole five days.
Not to be rude, but I don’t think I need to be asking myself anything. Bunker fuel is, without doubt or equivocation, the nastiest shit short of plutonium that you can burn. :smack:
edit: you do realize I’m joking about burning plutonium - right?
It may be nasty shit but the question is whether it would be more or less polluting to burn far, far more shit that is somewhat less nasty. It isn’t the no brainer you assume.
Further, if bunkers aren’t burnt then that means in order to operate ships you have to burn something less nasty, like say diesel or gasoline or kerosene. So that means a whole heckava lot more of those need to be produced. All of which involves more drilling, more transportation and more refining.
In short, have you worked it all, all the way through, to arrive at a considered conclusion as to what the alternatives to the current fuel would entail? Of have you just said “bunkers bad, get rid of bunker burning, end of problem?”