The First Battery-Powered Tanker is Coming to Tokyo
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/batteries-storage/first-battery-powered-tanker-coming-to-tokyo14 Feb 2021
A new ship powered only by lithium-ion batteries is coming to Japan’s coastline. The 60-meter-long tanker will be the first all-electric vessel of its kind when it launches in Tokyo Bay next year, its developers say.
The “e5†tanker is the latest in a small but growing fleet of vessels that use batteries for propulsion or onboard electricity use. As the global shipping industry works to curb carbon dioxide emissions and eliminate air pollution, shipbuilders and cargo owners are increasingly moving to electrify the freighters, tankers, and other vessels that move goods across the water.
Tokyo-based Asahi Tanker will own and operate the e5 vessel—which, ironically, will carry marine diesel fuels to refill the tanks of other cargo ships in the Bay. The 3.5-megawatt-hour (MWh) energy storage system is about the size of 40 Tesla Model S battery packs. That’s enough capacity to propel the ship for “many hours†before needing to plug into a shoreside charging station, said Sean Puchalski of Corvus Energy, the company supplying the batteries.
Corvus, which has offices in Norway and Canada, has put batteries in nearly 400 ships, roughly a quarter of which are fully electric, he said. Most of these are passenger and car ferries plying the Norwegian fjords, where ship operators face tight restrictions on emissions of CO2 and toxic air pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides....
