The 18′ foiling catamaran seen recently flying over the waves off the coast of Essex in the UK, was a small boat testing a very big concept. As it flew during the two-hour sea trial, the boat drove an underwater turbine that generated electricity which then used electrolysis to split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.
During the test run, the generator filled a six-liter storage tank with clean, green hydrogen; the only by-product was oxygen, which was vented. The boat actually produced so much electricity that, if the tank had been bigger, it could have made 60 liters of hydrogen.
Drift Energy, the British startup behind the project, claims that the foiling sailboat is the first in the world to generate clean hydrogen using just the power of the wind while under sail.
“This is a real breakthrough in the creation of a new renewable energy class—which is both mobile, scalable, and anti-fragile,” Drift Energy’s CEO Ben Medland said in a statement. “We are thrilled to have produced the world’s first green hydrogen from a hydrofoil sailboat in the waters off Brightlingsea.”
Drift Energy says it is aiming to trial the technology on a 130-foot yacht within a year. A vessel that size would be capable of producing in excess of 55,000 gallons of hydrogen per hour.
The company teamed up with AI firm Faculty to plot routes around the Atlantic with the best winds. The algorithm also uses weather forecasts and sea conditions to adjust the course in real-time.
Overall, Drift envisions a fleet of hydrogen-generating sailing ships using advanced weather routing to maximize efficiency, delivering green hydrogen to ports around the world.
Drift claims that its technology provides multiple advantages over existing classes of renewable energy; that it is viable in more places; produces more power, more of the time; is simpler to maintain, and may be up to 10x quicker to implement.
Whether the concept will prove to be practical remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the scope of the project vision is indeed impressive.
Thanks to David Rye for contributing to this post.
Why not use the system to produce hydrogen on commercial vessels that could then use the hydrogen to power the engines?
I wonder how much this would cut their dinosaur juice consumption.
They could even add Flettner rotors to help.
I fear this looks and sounds better than it really is.
To get 1 kilo of H2 from the electrolysis of seawater you would need a 44hp engine running for 1 hour.
Do a set of rather small sails on the foiler shown produce anything like this? Doubtful. Scale that up to the wild claims made, how big is the foiler? How heavy? Will it actually foil at the weight?
Also, how are they measuring the produced H2? Kilo/pound/ bucket/gallon? Only weight will give a true answer. They don’t give this anywhere. Then, of course, all the added weight will prevent the boat from foiling at all. All looks a bit dodgy. Sadly.
Use this kinetic energy to charge conventional storage batteries, 80% round trip.
Hydrogen fuel cell’s round trip is:
Round-trip efficiency is the percentage of electricity retrieved after being stored. The technology to convert power to hydrogen and back to power has a round-trip efficiency of 18%-46%, according to data that Flora presented from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and scientific journal Nature Energy.Jun 24, 2021
https://www.spglobal.com › hydrog…
Hydrogen technology faces efficiency disadvantage in power storage race – S&P Global
I wonder what the optimum speed is for a boat using wind power to generate hydrogen, by way of using the boat’s motion to drive a water turbine? Also interesting to know whether they are producing the hydrogen in gaseous form or whether they are cooling it to liquid.
There is a French project to develop hydrogen producing boats propelled by wind, where rotor sails (Flettner Rotors) are used and the ships are unmanned computer controlled drones.
Presumably they need to over-canvass the vessel to keep up the speed? (and hope the generating plant doesn’t unexpectedly shut down).