Hydrogen Fuel Cells Could Soon Power Seaports

Hydrogen fuel cells are already powering mobile lighting systems, emergency backup systems, and more. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have now found that they may be both technically feasible and commercially attractive as a clean and efficient power source for docked or anchored ships, replacing on-board diesel generators. The Sandia study evaluated a simple fuel cell strategy that consists of mounting a hydrogen-fueled proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell on a floating barge. Supplying a container ship with average power and run times (1.4 megawatts over 48 hours) requires four 40-ft containers, two for the fuel cell and two for hydrogen fuel storage, which could fit on a typical flat-top barge.

Transcript

00:00:00 the reason we're looking at fuel cells in ports is to try to clean up the emissions that come from all of the sources in the port such as ships and other uh Material Handling equipment and other things major ports in some cases have emissions that are is more than half a million cars a day so that's one thing we're trying to reduce as far as environmental benefits go the fuels that

00:00:24 the ships currently use to generate electricity while they're at the dock are very high in Sulfur content so if you can eliminate using that fuel by instead of running those engines plug into a fuel cell that doesn't generate anything then you've reduced all of your uh sulfur emissions so what I'm doing now is putting together a project plan and bringing together some industrial

00:00:46 Partners to demonstrate this fuel cell power supply we're doing this in Honolulu it's going to be a fuel cell and hydrogen together inside of a shipping container it'll be sitting on the dock and powering refrigerated containers and what that does is show that we can operate this fuel cell in a a maritime or Port environment and it can be powering different pieces of

00:01:08 Maritime equipment it's not exactly powering the ship but again that's this just kind of the first step on that [Music] Journey