British Columbia Shows Norway How To Decarbonize Ferries – CleanTechnica

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Moving people and vehicles across short distances is a no-brainer for batteries and electric motors. The only problem, as with most electrification of transportation, is getting electricity at sufficient power levels to the point of charging. British Columbia has a very obvious and straightforward strategy for its ferries.

British Columbia has an extensive ferry network, with BC Ferries operating a fleet of 41 vessels serving 47 destinations along the province’s coastline. Additionally, the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure oversees 14 inland ferry routes, providing vital links across rivers and lakes at no cost to users. These inland ferries are operated under contract by various private sector companies.

Norway’s ferry network is larger than that of British Columbia, reflecting its reliance on ferries to navigate its numerous fjords and islands. The Scandinavian country operates around 180 ferries across 112 routes. Fjord1 manages 81 vessels, with 60% already electrified, while Torghatten runs 92 ferries across 59 connections, transporting over 8 million passengers annually. Norled runs 80 vessels, including the sole operating hydrogen ferry in the country as well as the first battery powered ferry in the country.

With all of those electrified ferries in Norway, how is it possible to say that BC is showing Norway what to do? Let’s start by looking at BC Ferries’ Application to the British Columbia Ferries Commissioner Pursuant to Section 55 (2) of the Coastal Ferry Act For the New Major Vessels Project of December 13, 2024.

“The NMVs’ [new major vessels] length and weight will be compatible with BC Ferries’ standardized major berths, and will meet the following requirements:

• Diesel-battery hybrid power plants, ready for future all-electric operation pending on-shore infrastructure and additional batteries;

• Compatible with 100 percent biodiesel (“B100”), and flexible with other diesel forms and blends”

Let’s tear apart that strategy. It’s incrementalist and accepting of reality. It acknowledges that the end state is fully electric ferries. It acknowledges that it can’t put big enough electrical connections fast enough to leap straight to fully electric ferries. It accepts that it’s going to do as much with hybrid as it can, need to be able to burn fossil fuels and be compatible with the other major maritime decarbonization lever, biofuels.

What’s not part of the repowering strategy? Liquid natural gas, ammonia and hydrogen. Let’s start with LNG.

“Vessels using LNG would not be successful in meeting the Company’s future GHG targets, as tank-to-wake emissions would be negatively impacted by methane slip.”

So true. The International Council on Clean Transportation’s FUMES — Fugitive and Unburnt Methane Emissions from Ships — study found very high emissions from LNG engines of various types after monitoring several for two years. LNG was sold as a low-emissions fuel with 30% reductions of greenhouse gas emissions compared to bunker fuel. However, with the slippage of methane, it’s actually higher emissions than just burning bunker fuel. I’m not a fan of the ICCT’s European road freight study’s treatment of hydrogen or indeed a lot of its studies that include hydrogen, but FUMES is rock solid. BC Ferries paid attention.

BC Ferries also realized that carbon taxes on LNG would make it more expensive, which is something Canada’s transit agencies and the deeply conflicted transit ‘think’ tank CUTRIC aren’t accounting for yet. As a result, it wouldn’t have a cost advantage over an actually low-carbon solution, which is battery-electric.

That BC Ferries had to explicitly rule out LNG is likely due to a few things. The first is that LNG has become a common fuel for ferries and passengers ships, not just LNG tankers, over the past 25 years. Organizations really thought they were doing climate-positive things. BC converted several of its ferries to also be able to burn LNG in 2018 with this in mind. The second, of course, is that it stinks a lot less than the smoke from burning bunker fuel, so it was less unpleasant for paying passengers. Batteries, of course, stink a lot less than burnt LNG.

But BC has a big LNG lobby. Fortis BC pushes its products wherever it can and pretends that its homeopathic and unscalable amounts of biomethane are a climate solution. It fights against all of the sensible things being done for electrification and removal of gas connections for buildings. It undoubtedly lobbied hard for LNG engines for the ships. BC has three LNG shipping terminals under development in the vain hopes of decades of export of the fossil fuel to Asia. Innumerable politicians have been suckered into the LNG vortex in the province and it’s warped debates about a rather large number of things, including electricity supply and demand as one LNG facility consumes as much electricity as a couple of the local cities combined.

Undoubtedly the authors and reviewers of the document all agreed that they had to make an explicit statement about why LNG wasn’t being considered.

It’s not a surprise that they didn’t bother to list the reasons why ammonia was out of the running. As I’ve heard from multiple sources, ship crew know what fuel they are running as soon as they walk into the enclosed engine room because they can smell it. Ammonia is highly toxic as a vapor and turns into an incredibly caustic gas when exposed to water, the natural element of ships, then turns into something which is just bad for human and wildlife health. It’s remarkable to me that it continues to be put forward as a shipping fuel by people who aren’t directly employed as PR flaks by the ammonia industry association.

Similarly, the application didn’t bother to count the ways why hydrogen made no sense, including high leakage, high global warming potential, high cost, unreliable drive trains and unreliable refueling systems. Instead, this:

“The study determined that the only two viable technology pathways for the NMV to achieve a zero-emissions future were single-fuel engines (i.e., diesel) and dual-fuel engines (i.e., diesel and natural gas). BC Ferries studied both technology pathways extensively and evaluated key considerations, such as energy security (including such factors as environmental acceptability and affordability), costs (including energy affordability and conversion to all-electric operation) and safety. Based on the analysis, BC Ferries selected single-fuel diesel engines as the preferred technology enabling ULSD and B100, combined with sufficient shipboard battery capacity for immediate hybrid use, and expandable for future all-electric operation.”

Basically, this is a summary of the bleedingly obvious, that batteries and biofuels are the path forward, and that for inland and nearshore shipping, biofuels are a stopgap measure.

Inquiring minds will be wondering why BC is showing Norway what to do when Fjord1 is running around 50 electric ferries. Let’s wind back to hydrogen. BC didn’t even bother to justify in the application why hydrogen was dead in the water. That’s possibly because BC has perpetual money loser Ballard — $1.3 million since 2000 with no profitable years ever — and the failed Whistler hydrogen bus trial locally, and so is more likely to know what doesn’t work.

What is Norway’s track record?

• Beffen Hydrogen Ferry: Abandoned in 2016. High costs, limited infrastructure, and systemic challenges made it unsustainable.
• MF Hydra ferry: Operational but inefficient. Emits twice the greenhouse gases of the diesel ferry it replaced, 40 times that of an electric ferry and costs ten times more in energy compared to battery-electric ferries.
• Vestfjorden Hydrogen Ferries: In development. Hugely expensive project ($276M per vessel) that will waste electricity and face high greenhouse gas emissions.
• Viking Neptune Cruise Ship: Experimental. Features a small hydrogen fuel cell for auxiliary systems but offers no substantial benefits over batteries.
• With Orca Bulk Carrier: Delayed. Hydrogen use remains unfeasible due to lack of refueling infrastructure.
• Finnøy Hydrogen Ferry: Unconverted. Still runs on biodiesel as hydrogen plans stall due to economic and technical barriers.
• Havila Voyages Hybrid Cruise Ships: Planned transition. Likely to adopt larger batteries instead of hydrogen by 2030.
• Ulstein SX190 Offshore Vessel: Conceptual. No construction or trials.
• Østensjø Rederi Offshore Wind Service Vessel: No progress. Hydrogen infrastructure challenges prevent the vessel from moving forward.
• Hydrogen Viking Yacht: Deteriorating. Efforts to retrofit Gaddafi’s former yacht into a hydrogen vessel have stalled.
• Maritime focused fuel cell firm TECO bankrupt amid financial strain, regulatory delays, and funding challenges.

Yes, at some point a large subset of Norway’s maritime community decided that hydrogen was the bomb, and not in the blow things up and create chaos way. They leaned into hydrogen instead of focusing on batteries and biofuels. A lot of time and money was wasted. A lot of hydrogen fanbois from outside of Norway pointed to the single hydrogen ferry and hydrogen plans and assumed that there was a lot of there there.

Let’s return to what rarely gets mentioned. Fjord1 manages 81 vessels, with 60% already electrified. One hydrogen ferry from Norled, while the larger operator, Fjord1, quietly gets on with batteries.

So why is BC getting the credit over Norway? Well, mostly because they aren’t wasting any time on hydrogen at all. While Norway is out in front with electrification, a remarkable amount of time, money, and talent has been wasted on considering the dead end of hydrogen for maritime transportation. It’s an economic dead end and straightforward work with simple spreadsheet models makes that clear.

Then there’s the global warming problem. Hydrogen has three challenges when it comes to making the planet hotter. The first is that current hydrogen manufacturing as an industrial feedstock is a global warming problem on the scale of all of aviation globally. The second is that ignoring that, hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas that prevents high global warming potential methane from breaking down in the atmosphere, meaning hydrogen has 13-37 times carbon dioxide’s global warming potential, per the latest big study published in Nature recently. The third is that hydrogen, as the smallest diatomic molecule in the universe, one that has to be stored at extreme temperatures or pressures, leaks 1% or more per touch point in the supply chain. Hydrogen is a greenhouse gas and using it for transportation makes it a much worse global warming problem.

I’ve read multiple governmental and peer-reviewed reports of real world results. A hydrogen refueling station in California was leaking up to 35% of the hydrogen pumped into it, and after multiple remediations over a couple of years they got it down to 2% to 10%. A small hydrogen facility in Europe that made and delivered hydrogen at the same spot was leaking 2% to 4%. The US DOE concluded that in the best possible case, delivering liquid hydrogen to very large refueling stations would see 2% leakage, mostly due to boil-off, while small deliveries would see 10%. Hydrogen supply chains for transportation will have 7-8 handling points in the value chain, so leakage rates of 10% on average are highly likely. If it’s made at docks, leakage rates will also be high because it’s small scale, not industrial scale with constant maintenance.

In my case studies of hydrogen for transit vehicles including buses and ferries, the degree of greenhouse gas emissions varied from 15 to 16 times as high as battery-electric buses in Winnipeg, to 90% of the emissions of diesel buses in Mississauga and Brampton, and double that of diesel and 40 times that of battery-electric for the MF Hydra ferry in Norway, where the hydrogen is trucked in from 1,300 kilometers south. It’s really not a climate solution. If hydrogen actually becomes a big transportation fuel, it’s another big climate problem, and hydrogen is already a climate problem on the scale of all of aviation.

Then there’s the price of hydrogen for transportation. It’s always going to be more expensive. The best case price of hydrogen that is delivered today is gray hydrogen in Germany. It’s made in a central, industrial-scale steam reformation system and hence is as cheap to make as hydrogen gets. It’s put in pipelines to large industrial consumers with long-term volume contracts, hence has the lowest possible distribution costs. It still costs industrial consumers €6-€8 per kilogram, or roughly €0.21 per kWh or €58 per GJ of heat energy. All delivered green hydrogen will always be more expensive than that, usually much more expensive. All hydrogen for transportation will be much more expensive, as well as much less efficient than just using the electricity directly.

BC has dodged hydrogen for its ferry fleet entirely while Norway has wasted a lot of time and money on hydrogen for waterborne transportation. BC not even bothering to explain why it dismissed it is the right response. Norway’s high emissions, expensive to operate hydrogen ferry and lengthy list of maritime hydrogen projects makes it clear it’s wasted too much time and money on an obvious dead end.

It’s worth comparing and contrasting BC Ferries’ strategy to the one Rish Ghatikar and I are laying out in a series of articles for US freight trucking electrification. In that series, aimed at very large corporations with hundreds or thousands of depots or truck stops and engineering, procurement, and construction firms which specialize in providing services to them, we argue for incrementally scaling microgrids with solar and buffering batteries. The diagnosis of freight trucking in the US leads to that approach with smaller numbers of electric trucks in early years and larger later, as well as a good opportunity for lots of rooftop and canopy solar.

Ferry terminals have some of the same opportunities, but the challenge is that ferries are singular large-scale energy consumers, and they need all the energy immediately. They still have the challenge of slow to deploy large-scale grid connections, sharing that challenge with the United States due to utilities across the continent having been in operational efficiency and maintenance mode for decades, so not having the human and organizational capacity for rapid change. They do have lots of flat rooftops and have very large vehicle waiting areas that could be covered with solar canopies.

However, the microgrid strategy for truck stops is a means of getting a lot of electric trucks rolling before the grid connection can be upgraded and to reduce the size of the grid upgrade required. It still requires a big grid upgrade for the final incremental scaling to fully electric fleets. Ferry terminals don’t have interim stages like that.

BC Ferries’ Spirit-class vessels, the largest in the company’s fleet, measure 167.5 meters in length and 32.9 meters in width, with a displacement of approximately 11,681 tonnes. Designed to accommodate up to 2,100 passengers and crew, along with 358 vehicles, these ferries primarily serve the busy Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay route, 44 kilometers one way. It’s not open seas, as Vancouver Island shelters the route from the Pacific, but it’s not exactly a sheltered pond in a park either. Every trip one takes consumes about 4,200 liters of fuel. Accounting for efficiency of the drivetrains, that’s about 21 MWh of electricity for an electric ferry. They are only docked for 45 minutes at turnaround, so that’s serious amounts of electricity that have to flow in a very short period of time. Tswassen terminal has five ferry docks that see overlapping ferries arriving and departing from 7:00 AM to 10:30 PM every single day. That makes a truck stop requirement look like a walk in the park by comparison.

All this is to say that ferry terminals can build lots of solar and put in buffering batteries, but they need the big grid connection for fully electric larger ferries regardless. Hybrid battery-electric and biofuel ferries enable lowered emissions immediately and when the big grid connection arrives, shifting to fully electric.

Speaking as a resident of BC and someone who has used the ferries a lot, arriving at them on motorcycles, cars, bus coaches, and transit buses over the years, I’m very pleased that BC Ferries has arrived at the right strategy for decarbonizing its fleet. Other ferry operators globally should compare notes.