I think this will just boil down to “can a steel mill be profitable in Germany without fossile power”. I would agree that as a German this woukd be of great interest to achieve. But for comparison, Norway does not have steel mills, and I know many metal furnaces were shut down just few years ago, even with basically free power.
Whether Oceanergy can deliver the cheapest energy remains to be seen. I would bet against it but that doesnt mean it’s not worth trying.
People have wasted money on worse ideas. By the way, I’ve heard that chains of carbon atoms make a great scaffold to store hydrogen atoms as fuel! 
Maybe if kites pulling ships in the first place isn’t working out, they could use bunker fuel (leftover sludge from oil refining) to run the ship, and pull the water turbine through the ocean to create electricity, to electrolyze H2O, and create hydrogen, then use more fossil fuels, or some of the hydrogen, to compress the remaining hydrogen, and see how much fossil-fuel energy they could waste pretending to save the planet. Maybe they could think of some further unnecessary wasteful steps they could add, to really squander more resources!
Great big long cables to plentiful solar are viable and going ahead
The weird thing about global warming derangement syndrome is that otherwise seemingly-intelligent people somehow forget how to do elementary school arithmetic. Hydrogen remains the poorest means of energy storage commonly considered. Hydrogen ruins steel pipes and containers. Costs too much to compress and pump. Now of course it’s said to be a greenhouse gas so any leak defeats the purpose. By every relevant measure, it is a terrible idea to use hydrogen for basic general energy needs. What is wrong with these people advocating hydrogen? As noted previously, just ask Elon Musk. He seems relatively intelligent.
3 GW, €3.5 billion cable to carry solar and wind power from Egypt to Greece under the Mediterranean Sea
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y009gl/3_gw_35_billion_cable_to_carry_solar_and_wind/
F**k. I have had this idea for many years without doing anything about it. I guess my idea was not that novel after all… Or maybe it was prior to their patent application in 2019…
Darn! I thought I had invented undersea cables too! I wonder how many other people had the same “invention”?
I was talking about OCEANERGY’s kite powred electro fuel produsing foil ship. Not subsea cables. I have been thinking about just this concept for many years (long before their patent in 2019), but it looks like the ship has sailed (even if i had a slightly different approach for the same concept). But to be honest it does not look like OCEANERGY has come much further than filing the patent either. They only have some animations and no working prototypes from what i have seen.
Oh - I was wondering what you were talking about…
Yeah, probably a lot of people had similar ideas, because that’s all the stuff floating around out there now in the gadgets and clean energy buzz. Kite-powered ships, hydrofoil boats, producing hydrogen as fuel. The only thing missing is “3-D printing”! Maybe the hydrofoils are the enabling key? Only thing is, the whole thing may be misguided. First of all, hydrogen is about the worst form of energy storage ever imagined - you get maybe 12% of the energy back that you put in. Imagine charging your phone to get back a 12% charge! Have a nice day with that, right? But that is the reality of electrolysis, compression or liquefaction, and recovery - the losses multiply til you have almost nothing left. It just sounds “scientific” so tech people are attracted to the idea, without knowing the details. As with global warming - all you need to know is one scientific fact to “understand” it. Same thing with hydrogen as fuel - you know water is H2O, so now you think you are a genius and have solved the other single-fact genius understanding, global warming. The whole thing only took two facts to solve. But that is without knowing any details of any of it. When the details are included, the story falls apart. Also, many shippers have indicated that refueling a ship at sea is not fast or safe, not at all practical to stick to a schedule, and unlikely to become a part of shipping.
Both me and their patent say “electro fuel”. Not just limited to Hydrogen.
Electro-fuel is a new term for me - did not even notice it. Seems like the most popular “electro-fuels” are coal, natural gas, and diesel - fuels most commonly used to generate electricity.
So besides hydrogen, what “electro-fuel” do you have in mind to create using wind power on a ship?
Electro fuels is not fuels used to generate electricity, it’s the other way around: Fuels that can be made using electricity to make a chemical fuel using some commonly available substances like water, nitrogen, CO2 etc. So fuels (or more accurately energy carriers) like hydrogen, ammonia, methane, methanol, and so on. That can be made with the Sabatier process, or the Haber-Bosch process, and electrolysis.
Yeah I know, I was just kidding - sort of. I sort of knew you didn’t mean coal, but you DO mean natgas (methane), which aligns with what I think are the future of hydrocarbons: They are now “sustainable” with recent discoveries such as more methane clathrates on the bottom of the oceans than all the known oil, coal, and natgas combined. Actually that’s old news by now, but people are typically stuck in thinking based on what was known 50 years ago. You know - peak oil, we’re about to run out so panic now before its all gone? Like most people still think animal fats are bad for you and you should substitute vegetable oil. Meanwhile that was misinformation from Procter & Gamble to promote their partially-hydrogenated vegetable oils like Crisco™ by funding the American Heart Association with the caveat they had to discredit animal fats and promote vegetable oils, an idea that was disproven long ago. Still, 120 years later, the average “scientist” still thinks they should eat lean cuts of meat - by now it’s “grandfathered in” as unquestionable “knowledge” and most people don;t question it. Same with peak oil. Most people still think oil is scarce and we;re about to run out - and have no trouble advocating drilling restrictions, never quite putting together the fact that if we were really about to run out, there would be no reason to restrict drilling. And the real reason drilling ever gets restricted is to keep prices high. As mandated by the opil companmies who fund the environmental movement…
If you buy synthetic motor oil for your car, it comes from natural gas, not petroleum oil. I buy special fuel for my chainsaw that costs 4x as much for a gallon, but runs perfect and smells good. Even the exhaust smells good.
Today’s fuels are very low-grade, simple cuts of fractional distillation. Fred Flintstone industrial chemistry. I think future hydrocarbon fuels will be more highly-refined and clean-burning, and we may short-circuit the 100 million-year payback on CO2 lost to the oceans by harvesting the more recently-deposited methane clathrates on the ocean floor, recycling hydrocarbons from various waste streams, etc. Beyond that, I’ll be very surprised if we ever see ammonia widely adopted as a fuel. That just smacks of desperation to me. I can;t imagine dealing with the fumes. I think if ammonia could serve well as a fuel, we’d have seen some ammonia-powered vehicles over the years - I never have - have you? Why not? Maybe it sucks!
Ammonia is widely discussed as the future fuel of the shipping industry. As it is carbon free, easy to store compared to hydrogen (because it is liquid at relatively low pressures or temperatures), and it can be used in normal piston ICE engines with relatively easy modifications, or in solid oxide fuel cells, or even in gas turbines with a correctly designed burners. And the fumes is not really a problem considering we have been making, transporting and using the stuff by the tones ever since fertilizers was invented. LNG ships can be repurposed to transport it. The technology to make sure it does not leak like double wall tanks and pipes is in common use and is not at all a problem. And it is not that dangerous any way. You can smell it long before it is in any dangerously toxic concentrations for humanes in the air. If it does leak on a ship however it will be a catastrophe for the fish that is nearby as it is highly toxic even in small concentrations for marine life.
But yes electro-methane would be easier to adopt to, but then you will have to get the CO2 from somewhere. Getting it from the low concentrations in the atmosphere is not going to be viable.
Yeah I’ve read about it a thousand times by now. Sounds retarded. When you get a little more life experience you might start to get a flavor of the kind of things that really happen, versus the kind of crap that idiots go on endlessly about. Its like having a sense of smell - you can’t always describe it but there is no mistaking the smell. Ammonia running engines is a fantastic global warming talking point - that’s about it. Show me anyone running a vehicle on ammonia.
Produced hydrogen could be used in sustainable aviation.
An example with a discussion on Sign Up | LinkedIn and a document then websites:
On https://hydrogen.aero/product/:
Regional Aircraft
Our first product is a conversion kit for existing regional aircraft, starting with the ATR72 and the De Havilland Canada Dash-8, to fly on hydrogen. This consists of a fuel cell electric powertrain that replaces the existing turboprop engines. It also accommodates, in the rear of the fuselage, our proprietary, lightweight, modular hydrogen capsules that are transported from green hydrogen production sites to the airport and loaded directly into the aircraft using the existing intermodal freight network and cargo handling equipment. By providing both an aircraft conversion solution for the existing fleet and a fuel services offering directly to regional airlines, we will be in passenger service with zero emissions by 2025 and in cargo service shortly thereafter.
So OCEANERGY could perhaps be available to these planes, by supplying airports with hydrogen.
Hydrogen: the least-efficient form of energy storage known to mankind.
In my previous post, I am not taking sides for or against hydrogen, having provided a link on Linkedin showing contrasting positions.
I would also like to quote Dave Santos:
Hydrogen: most abundant element, most-efficient by power-to-mass, cleanest fuel.
Jet Fuel: transitional kerosene fuel due to unsustainable CO2 emissions.
Bravo to Universal Hydrogen for historic transport-scale H2 maiden-flight!
By 2030 short-haul H2 and electric transport aviation will be in regular operation.