A Lithium fire battery in a cruise ship in the middle of the Pacific would be a truly unique experience.

The future of shipping is ammonia. It has, pretty much, all the attributes of fossil fuels but being NH4 it doesn't produce an earth warming byproduct.

I support this idea but I stopped reading when the costs factored included the social costs of CO2 emissions. which I'm sure are important, but shipping operates on the actual cost of fuel and equipment, until CO2 tax is in that aren't we just making up economics?

They're also factoring in the value of the batteries second life, which seems at best, speculative.

ships should be electric, they're filthy to be around with 24/7 diesel generators running even on the quayside. if ship electrification prompted better port facilities of shore side hookup just that would be a win.

Wow, this is a really good paper. Supplementary info is really great too- they get into details down to floating charging port stations as part of the infrastructure. Surprising how much demand is from tugboats. I have questions about how you'd safely hook up 5 MW connections, but it's definitely solvable.

> The researchers analyzed US-flagged ships less than 1,000 gross tonnage, which includes primarily passenger ships and three types of tugboats.

This is the buried lede. They are excluding basically all cargo shipping.

- Very little of the shipping industry is US-flagged. Most commercial ships sail under flags of convenience such as Panama and Libera, because of their reduced regulations and costs.

- Nobody carries cargo any distance in vessels of less than 1000 gross tons, because that scale would be uneconomical to operate. Modern seagoing cargo ships have about one crew member per 8000 tons of cargo.