CNN reports that the British startup Drift Energy wants to build boats equipped with underwater turbines that will make hydrogen. These sailboats, it is claimed, would be the first ever class of mobile renewable energy.
Mobile renewable energy craft capable of producing hydrogen have however been reported previously on these pages, here, here, here, here, and here.
Drift Energy claims their modern, high-performance sailing vessels would cruise the world’s Tradewinds harvesting energy from underwater turbines that, with the aid of on-board megawatt class electrolyzers would produce and store gigawatts of green hydrogen. Artificial Intelligence routing algorithms would keep these “yachts” in optimum weather conditions ready to deliver the hydrogen energy carrier to ports.
The CNN report says, wind power has been rising significantly in recent years, and now accounts for about 8% of the world’s energy production and by the end of the decade, it will be the second-largest renewable source after solar, having surpassed hydropower, according to the International Energy Agency.
Per the following, a given area of the tropical ocean surface has 93% more energy potentials than the 7% of wind energy generated by the Energy Island conceived by the British architect, Dominic Michaels per the following.
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Two of the problems associated with these islands are they produce 19% of their energy using 81% of their ocean real-estate and are stationary. With the result in areas like the Gulf of Mexico they are marginally, seasonally, able to produce energy two-thirds of the time.
The following graphic however, shows a hydrogen producing, mobile renewable energy vessel capable of seeking out the highest surface sea temperatures in order to convert them to useful work and which strips the costly ocean real-estate down to a bare minimum.
A month ago a team from the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, in a paper Mitigating anthropogenic climate change with aqueous green energy concluded, reaching net zero emissions and limiting global warming to 2 °C requires the widespread introduction of technology-based solutions to draw down existing atmospheric levels and future emissions of CO2. One such approach is direct air CO2 capture and storage (DACCS), a readily available, yet energy-intensive process. The combination of DACCS and ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) allows for independently powered carbon capture plants to inject concentrated carbon into deep marine sediments where storage is generally safe and permanent. OTEC is a form of electricity production that exploits the temperature difference between deep and shallow ocean waters and can power DACCS on floating platforms at a price competitive with coal-generated electricity. Here we highlight the scale of the challenge facing society. We show that a safe and sustainable level of OTEC-generated electricity powering DACCS for 70 years could result in up to a 35% decrease in the relative global mean temperature warming compared to a business-as-usual emissions scenario.
They concluded that between 30,700 to 33,000 OTEC 90 megawatt OTEC plants costing in the range of USD 15 to 69 trillion, would bring about this CO2 draw down that would reduce global mean temperature by 35% in 70 years,
They based their conclusions on the basis of the potential of conventional OTEC with its efficiency of only about 3%. Whereas Thermodynamic Geoengineering platforms like the one above are 7.6% efficient and can produce 2.5 times more surface cooling energy and hydrogen at 50 to 70% of the cost. Thirty-one thousand, 1-gigawatt, TG plants, at a cost of USD 2 trillion a year, for the next 226 year, would reduce the global surface to the preindustrial level, while producing 50% more energy than we are currently deriving from fossil fuels, which are receiving USD 7 trillion in subsidies annually, and would reduce atmospheric CO2 levels by 4 gigatons a year without the cost of DACCS..
At the end of 226 years, the global surface temperature would be maintained by recycling the heat we have already added to the oceans 12 more times.
By using half measures to address the energy and environment problems, it is any wonder a large swath of the public are becoming more and more incensed.
