The economics are bad. Imagine the unit cost is $10 million. This seems realistic, the prototype cost ~$30 million and this airship is made of 40,000 pounds of light weight materials with very manual assembly processes. The cost of capital and depreciation might be $1 million/year. If the cruise speed is maybe 70 MPH, even if electricity and maintenance were free, this will $1.60 per mile. A container ship will be about $.01 per mile in similar cost.
Then looking at energy consumption, a container ship might need 8 HP of power per 40 foot container sailing at 18 mph. This airship has 700 HP per container at 70 mph.
With automated ships, and automated airships, you could do away with most loading/unloading - have the airships load/unload in coastal waters, use ships for the long haul across oceans?
Ideally you'd use windpower (sails) and solar (electricity) for the ships.
Very promising, bringing agile supply chains to a global scale. Plane shipping is cost prohibitive for many goods, while using ships requires large volumes or overhead of middlemen selling sub-container capacity...
With airships, smaller businesses can directly trade over long distances. I'm personally excited by agriculture potential... shipping spoilable heirloom produce straight from farm to markets across the country would be disruptive.
However, a single container ship carrying upward 10,000 containers still offers value at larger scales.
Ships are ridiculously efficient and much easier to police for safe arrival than having only two containers (effectively a truckload) on a device costing a large multiple to operate compared to a truck. I don't think (pun intended) this will fly unless it is high value goods that are not yet high value enough to be flown with a jet.
hi jacquesm,
if you don't mind, i'd like to try an experiment with you. I've seen your name enough times here on HN that I recognize you as a 'regular'. the point-score in your profile indicates people here either love you or you post 100 times a day (or some combination thereof).
Here is the experiment:
Stare very hard at this graph. memorize the trajectory and timeframe.
Keep it open in a tab and come back to later, maybe even several times over the course of a week or month.
For those reading along I mean specifically a few points:
* emissions peak in 2020 (<2 months!)
* emissions are approximately 50% reduced by 2030 (a mere decade!)
* emissions achieve net-zero around 2050 (-5 to -10Gt/yr)
* the entire back half of the century we run -5 to -15Gt/year
The experiment here is simple: try, just try, assuming we will achieve these goals (aka 1.5C). or for arguments sake 80-ish-% of them (2C, just slide everything to the right 5 - 10 years).
What I mean is, assume we succeed in avoiding the worst of the catastrophes. Assume success. Try optimism. Not in a blind way, but in a quantitative mental framing way.
From that place of quantitative optimism, "solve for zero". That is, in all of your thoughts, opinions, comments, actions, causes, votes, etc, ask yourself "is this consistent with solving for zero?"
The point of this experiment is that, in my opinion, the number one hold-up to making meaningful progress on this challenge is people who are trapped in "analysis and debate" mode where they assume the time-horizon is much longer than it is, or they assume the goal is marginal reduction of emissions, rather than zero (and then negative!).
I believe that we, as both a community here on HN and as a global civilization, are in desperate need of quantitative-optimism, rather than dismissive pessimism.
Now after all that typing to tie it back to your post here. We both know airships flying containers are not going to be as cost-efficient as a diesel powered truck or a kerosene fueled jet. That's basically just stating the obvious. But that's also accepting failure.
Please stop accepting failure as the default mental framework with which you engage the topic. For any one person it can seem like reasonable skepticism. But when the majority of a community does it, especially its most vocal members, then the cultural result is one of inaction and delay. Analysis paralysis. Stalling. Stalling on climate change is effectively denial, even if that's not your intent.
Not with the current airships since they are all 'swimming' with helium and we there is by far not enough helium for that on this planet. Hydrogen based would be different story but thats how the first era of the airship ended.
Edit: Also, if there is one type of ship that is going to be replaced by airships, its going to be the cruise ship.
>Also, if there is one type of ship that is going to be replaced by airships, its going to be the cruise ship.
But modern cruise ships are huge and are largely oriented around providing tons of activities. In fact, as far as I know, there's only one ship that is more oriented around providing trans-Atlantic transportation (among other things and only for part of the year).
if you could make it battery-electric and autonomous, then you've solved for global shipping emissions (cuz we don't need the ships anymore).