Hydrogen-Electric powered boat! Can we get this on our new sailboat? | EP 204 

Really smart.... we still are to far.... 😥 I hope in the future...

I was going mention Uma then saw this comment. Dan and Kika's set up does have limitations, however. Their electric drive can only be used at full speed for a couple hours. At only 3 Kn I think it can last for 5 or 6 hours. But imagine a dead calm where you have to fight a 3 Kn current to get someplace 6 kilometers away. They do have a gasoline powered outboard for their dinghy (Coco) so in an emergency they could probably tow Uma with her.

I was just about to make the same comment!

They (Uma) do pollute in other ways. They got fed up with their composting toilet and now their sewage dumps straight out, even at dock.

There's also silent power yachts making solely solar powered craft. They seem to be doing exceedingly well. and the 60 only has 17Kw of solar too. So I can't see how 35Kw on this thing isn't enough... Well I can begin to see why... All the tech on board probably.

@@HandyC generating the hydrogen gas is a huge power suck. It takes almost twice the amount of energy to produce one unit of hydrogen power. The solar and wind farms needed to supply ships with “green hydrogen” would be a massive and expensive undertaking. I don’t see it happening any time soon.

Good afternoon sir, can I ask where to find out about the hydrogen extraction technology you are using?

There’s another yacht maker named Aquone which does solar and hydrogen. Not sure when their first boat will be produced though.

Question is not, can it be done. Question is, what are you willing to give up? Electric cars are not new. In the early days of cars, they were there with Model T. But the negatives sides were more than the positive ones. Now companies like Tesla proved, an electric car can be exiting and have a decent range. So the average boat owner don’t want to compromise too much for electric drive systems and deal with the problems around it. The average boat owner is not a full time RU-vidr that sails. More often they use the boat maybe 2-4 weeks in a year. Then they want to go places and don’t wait for perfect weather to go. I agree, hydrogen is a good direction compared to battery only. That’s why I invested in different hydrogen related startups. I also ordered a truck with hydrogen cell. Also Sunreef with their eco line went electric/hybrid.

VPLP & PI Superyachts has a "blue box" on their Dragoship 25 concept build which has been available for a long time ("I'veheard of a Superyacht", really?). It seems boats powered by the wind only makes sense to have diesel engines. Makes little sense. Also, this is a sailboat through the use of the advanced wing sails and in his explanation on the power needs piece he failed to mention it. In fact, he goes on to speak of sailboats as if they were in a different category. What the.... You might want to research your material a bit better

Wow, you know nothing is "all green" depending on how you look at it. Referencing a house? Even a PassivHaus rating requires the use of many "technologies/methods" to achieve. The Energy Observer demonstrates this reality by using wind (wingsails, wind turbines, or their kite), hydro (props & engines as generators or the system being discussed), sun (solar panels), energy storage (batteries & fuel cells). Y'all reference people who have tried batteries and solar and may chose against wind (which tends to happen around Cloud development or sailing) because of the noise, hydro (because they might lose some average speed or its current design limitations with add ons). No single system is going to solve all your needs and if you need a plethora of TVs, A/C, Refrigerators, Dishwasher, Washing Machine running 24/7 maybe one should consider living on land and not talk energy efficiency anyways because your not going to survive off the grid either. P.S. I have my land place in some foot hills with no city utilities and have a small water trailer to get even that. Life can have indulgences but simplicity is where it's at. I've seen some true live-a-boards on the RU-vid scene and you see their plants-a-growing on their boat!!!

@Aus L 😇 I'm on the side of expectations in that so many of the comments talk about this "one" technology as if it is supposed to be the "bread & butter", the magic pill or why batteries/electric won't work and I should have made it its own post as it wasn't meant for a specific response (I was lazy). Personally, I'm not sure I'm Comfortable with something holding that much pressure and I come from the Biomedical Equipment Engineering Technology side of fixing things and some time spent in Manufacturing (some places just don't have room for things to go boom) 😱. But the ability to concentrate that much energy with minimal weight penalty sure looks tempting. I'm in the planning/prepping phase looking at what project boat i want to chose while finalizing my budget and would prefer a performance cruiser (trimaran if I'm lucky), solar, lithium, electric engines, and hydro regeneration. And in place of the wind generator i would use a sealed vibrational generator to eliminate that blade noise. Oh yeah, and a it would be a Ketch Rig for several reasons unless those wing sail things become a lot cheaper. Fun discussion. Enjoy!!!

Remember the Hindenburg!!!!

Interesting comment Tom. I asked about fire/explosion and they pointed out the compartment where hydrogen is stored is open to the air on the stern side. And since it’s so light it will disperse up.

It's amazing that this was not brought up by the hydrogen boat folks. It looks like this boat (or are there more than one?) has multiple masts for its "wing-like" sails. Plus being soooo electric a lightening strike would surely do lots of damage. And since a lightening strike can be (literally) explosive, then hydrogen tanks could be ruptured during such a strike. It's not hard to imagine that boat being in a million pieces after a lightening strike! Scott W PS - I bet no one is allowed to smoke on that boat!

@@scyz2807 They've talked about it in other interviews. Like mentioned in the previous reply, they mount the hydrogen vessels outside of the boat (though covered) in a position where any venting hydrogen can more easily disperse, and away from the sails in case it does ignite. The hydrogen itself in the tanks is not explosive, it's only once combined with oxygen that it becomes explosive, however the saturation level at which it becomes explosive is quite low, so a leak could be a huge fire risk, but at the pressures that hydrogen has to be stored at, there is basically zero risk of the tank exploding. You could get one hell of a flame thrower at the leak point, but the flame would not travel back into the vessel simply because the lack of oxygen would prevent that, along with the several thousand lbs of pressure preventing oxygen from entering and mixing with the hydrogen. The biggest risk is a slow leak that goes undetected that allows hydrogen to collect and mix to a flammable level, which is why EO stores the hydrogen externally. Fuel cell cars (Toyota Mirai being the most prominent) also face this same risk, but even higher with a much greater risk of collision damage to the storage vessel, and I don't believe that any of those have blown up, or even resulted in a catastrophic fire (technically putting them above battery electric vehicles for safety, but that's irrelevant). Hydrogen transportation is not new either. The vast majority of hydrogen is transported on trucks and even in the event of accidents, the equipment has safety components and factors specifically to address the dangers which have decades of safe real world use. Hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cell technology actually has an incredible track record of safe and effective use going back half a century (spacecraft have used hydrogen fuel cells for power since the Gemini program, iirc). The biggest hurdle to hydrogen is twofold right now 1. Production - Currently almost all hydrogen is "brown"/"Grey" hydrogen that is produced from fossil fuels and releases quite a lot of CO2, and therefore is not *really* green. Next is "Blue" hydrogen which is much less impactful, capturing the produced CO2, however it is much less cost effective, as the extra process of capturing and dealing with the CO2 is complicated and expensive.I believe that hydrogen produced via electrolysis, but using non-renewable power source to do so is considered "blue". Then we have "Green" which electrolysis powered by renewable power, this is the only truly eco-friendly source, and consequently most costly method of getting hydrogen. 2. Efficiency - It takes roughly 55kw of power to purify, electrolyze, and compress 1kg of hydrogen right now. At 100% efficiency 1kg of hydrogen stores around 33kw of power, so even if fuel cells were perfectly efficient it would only come out to around 60% efficiency. Unfortunately the best fuel cells are around 55% efficient, meaning you can extract a bit over 18kw from 1kg of hydrogen. This can be increased by utilizing the waste heat for something, however many applications simply don't have enough need for that much heat (imagine 150 100watt incandescent light bulbs running at the same time. You could bake a cake with that), so there are limits depending on your application. That leaves us at a final efficiency of a system around 33%. Technically speaking this is actually more efficient than gasoline or diesel, particularly when you account for the production side of the equation, as gasoline and diesel engines are only about 30-40% efficient at extracting energy from dino squeezings, but still not ideal, particularly for an application like a boat that might need to produce its own hydrogen such as is the case with EO. EO is unique in that they can fit an amount of solar production massive enough to make this efficiency loss workable simply by having far more than enough solar power generation and using the excess to produce hydrogen for deep storage. In a practical, real world "normal person" use case, such as a cruising boat, fitting enough solar to power a boat without electric motors can be quite challenging, and fitting enough to have meaningful excess that can be used to produce hydrogen means that the boat has to be designed specifically for that goal. Catamarans are the best cruising platform for that simply because they have so much more real estate available for solar panels, so these will be the first consumer level self-producing hydrogen boats we see. I myself have spent the last 8 months of my live working on designing one, and wish I had the many millions of dollars it would take to go from napkin sketches and playing around in fusion 360 to factory turning the industry on its head. If I wont the lottery this would be what I would do with it.

@@FlesHBoX Thank you for your reply. I want to be an one of the first crew members on your Hydrogen powered Cat after you win that lottery 😁👍 I was a High Voltage Test Technician, now retired and looking for warmer weather than Upstate New York.

@@FlesHBoX Thanks for all the information.

A fuel cell is roughly 50% efficient in converting the energy potential of hydrogen into electricity; this number can be tweaked but increases in efficiency carry the penalties of cost, size and complexity. I'm not sure what the efficiency of converting electricity into hydrogen night be but any physicist or engineer will tell you that nothing happens for free.

What I find more interesting in this comment is the use of plural in solutions. Nowadays combustion engines is the go-to solution but it seems that tomorrow solutions are going to be a lot more tailor-made to the types of vessel and their applications. Hybridisation of all sorts, mixing multiple energy sources is quite likely.

@@jean-jacqueslavigne3109 indeed. I don't have any connections with those who designed or are sailing the boat but breakthroughs in engineering are rarely the result of just one factor. Solar panels are getting better, as are motors, electronics and management controls. I believe all of these factors together will yield the hoped for revolution in yachting.

@@ttystikkrocks1042 exactly. There is more innovation now than in the last 120 years, undoubtedly. So many options, angles to look at. Even for non-sail vessels, propulsion and power are no longer a consideration limited to below the deck - FYI we are completing the design of a non-sail research vessel (Earth 300)- and we even looking at way to generate power -and reducing power requirements- through the paint etc

Yes I think Jimmy Cornell has one of those and is going to get a second for his Elcano catamaran. I agree with you Dave it could be a game-changer

Another interesting thing about solar boats are the thin rigid sails that give little shading. These don't seem to have solar panels on themselves like other boats I have seen like the Solar Sailor but this boat also used a kite-like downwind sail at one time to avoid shading the panels.

Glad you enjoyed it 😅

@@DistantShoresTV You folks never disappoint.

There seems to be two possible paths for hydrogen. The dirty path, which is often behind some hydrogen projects. That's remodeling the oil industry: drilling to gas/diesel fuel changed to oil drilling to conversion to hydrogen, the second path as represented by the Energy Observer and explained by Paul near the end is stationary solar/wind power generating so much surplus energy that it can be used for electrolysis to extract the hydrogen from water. The first path does almost nothing for global warming but reduces pollution at the vehicle (boat in this case), the second path is carbon net zero.... I think like what happened to electric cars 110 years ago: the gas cars were so immediately superior (gas was cheap and range was much much greater) they didn't have a chance. I think they had a range of 10 miles. Right now electric cars - like my Tesla - are so economically superior to the hydrogen option, hydrogen will either be only a niche somewhere, or it will have to wait for the massive overproduction of alternative source electricity or it may simply never happen. The best take away from this video is that 62 kg of Hydrogen = 14 tons of batteries. As Tesla conquers the world, that relationship won't change, but perhaps someday the economics of producing and distributing hydrogen may.

Not only the production of hydrogen is a problem, the storage is one too. Hydrogen is the smallest element we know. So, no tank is able to hold all of the hydrogen you fill in it. Some hydrogen will defund through the material of which the tank is made of and is lost.

@Keith M Today electrolysis has an efficiency of about 70% to 80%. So, 20% to 30% loss is about what you mentioned what the system can save... Do the math - these systems are not economically...

@Keith M I've looked into HHO extensively. The laws of thermodynamics says it wont work. Every person who claims to have created an HHO system that works, has failed to show a working product when challenged. In other words, I don't believe you. Since I have extensively reviewed the claims for myself, and since it is my experience that those who believe perpetual motion (by way of HHO, or any other means) cannot be persuaded that their viewpoint is wrong, I feel it is a waste of my time to comment on any further demonstrably false arguments you might have. I wont be discussing this any further.

When the ship is docked in a harbor (which is most of the time) that’s when hydrogen production is valuable. When you leave the dock, you could have a full tank.

Thanks for your comment, Mad Rabbit. You may be right but the experiments are interesting and who knows where they may lead.

Wow David please let us know how the Silent works! Their hybrid idea seems like a good solution for today's existing technology!

And the hydrogen production plants. And the electricity production plants to power the hydrogen plants. And the hydrogen transport infrastructure.

Compressing the hydrogen up above 300bar I think is part of the quite complex production system. I didn’t know about the leak problem. Theirs seems to be working well

Sealing hydrogen has been done for a long time but boat life serves its challenges. Electrolysis strips the oxygen and hydrogen apart, the bond between them is very strong and takes a lot of electricity to break it. Hence why it takes a while to recharge the tanks. Btw is awesome they can do that on a boat and compress it down into the tanks at 300 bar. Wicked.

Looks like they’re using a Hundested Prop which has had a great reputation fir years and would work will for regeneration. Thanks for pointing that out Thomas

@@DistantShoresTV Baltic S/Y Canova of course a 20-40 mill. 142ft boat lol... Has a 400kw permanent magnetic electric propulsion. Ave. trials were 27kw at 16 knots 35kw at 20 knots, fast boat lol... not sure how it would work on 50 @ 10knots???

Nice Rauf! Did you find enough space onboard to recharge your batteries via solar power?

@@DistantShoresTV We have 4 X 200 amp batteries wired in series for 48-volt propulsion in engine compartment, charging on prop-regeneration when sailing at 5 knots. Our house bank has 475 Watts of solar, nest on bimini and dodger, eventually storing energy in 2 X 300 amp batteries wired in parallel for 600 amps of electrical storage. Rain Finger has enough space onboard for this system.

I think solar energy might be enough for 3-5 knots max by electric power only. On their ocean crossing they were also adding in wind power via the automatic sails they have. If you are willing to go so slow perhaps it would work. I would want to go faster :-) as a sailor we mainly achieve 6-7 average on our longer ocean passages so I guess I hoped for that.

You are totally right. This is the future, and the future is almost now. Arcona, if i’m not mistaken have soft, foldable solar panels on their sails. EPFZ in zurich is developing in partnership with a startup, solar cells that can be laid on building walls like paint. Dinosor fuel should soon be where it belongs. In the past.

I read some where. I think it was the University of wis That they were working on solar cloth.

??? I don't really understand what you mean by that. Probably some kind of "perpetual motion"-thing? Even with a very efficient system (60% efficiency fuel cells, 80% efficiency electrolyzer), you would have to spend 2 liters of hydrogen to produce 1 liter of fresh hydrogen. I suppose, 3 liters of hydrogen for 1 liter of new hydrogen would be more realistic. No, you can't use hydrogen to get more hydrogen in total.

Actually Hydrogen isn't explosive unless combined with oxygen in the right proportions.

OceanVolt seem to be providing a very integrated solution. Hydrogen is bit further off for boats I think.

I got a price from Ocean Volt for a 40 ft sailboat. It’s almost 100k. You have to couple it with a diesel generator for safety. With an hydro generator and a wind generator, you’re in business. I know a boat equipped like that. His diesel tank is enough for many years. Less emissions in the air.

The tanks can hold up to 62 kg of hydrogen. Let's assume sunny days and no other energy consumption, just electrolysis and compression: Then it should take roughly 4 weeks/1 month. With solar energy only (from 21 kWp solar).

The silent yachts have enough for cruising 5 knots for 24 hours so around 120nm without hitting the generator. If you go with the bigger battery banks you can go further. newatlas.com/silent-55-solar-powered-ocean-going-catamaran/60207/

@@Cadaverine1990 and one has the kite option to "sail" the boat as well.

I wish I had filmed that also Keith! They do have a bunch of videos on their YT channel such as this one on maintenance (turn on CC) :-) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cAvIC4IAdEs.html

@@DistantShoresTV Thank you

It's a methanol fuel cell though (if I remember right), not hydrogen.

@@TheCowpowah Yes, methanol, Efoy www.my-efoy.com/en/