Mitsubishi Corporation and Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha (NYK) have launched a startup accelerator programme designed to promote efforts to decarbonise.
MC and NYK will team up with Startupbootcamp Australia (SBC Australia), a branch of one of the largest Europe-origin accelerators Startupbootcamp Group.
Deadline for applications is August 2 with a first demo day of the finalists set for December.
Why satisfied with Carbon Neutral and Zero Carbon? How about Carbon NEGATIVE?
We need to change our too simplified perspectives and think more holistic. In the field of maritime propulsion, for example, everybody is now talking about “ZERO EMISSION”, not considering that hydrogen and ammonia will require huge amounts of green electric energy, that will need to be drawn from other portfolios (households, electric cars, industry), where we also still have not yet enough green energy production.
One ton of liquid nitrogen requires 55 MWh of green energy to produce. Greening the shipping industry will, therefore, require 4-500,000 large windmills or hundreds of square kilometers of solar. Where to build them? And what about the carbon footprint to produce them (steel, transport, installation), and the production plants, storage, as well as the port infrastructure??
So thinking more holistic – agriculture is even much worse than shipping, providing almost 10% of greenhouse gases in the world. Agricultural burning is a huge problem that is addressed by UNEP and CCAC (https://www.ccacoalition.org/en/activity/open-agricultural-burning; https://www.ccacoalition.org/en/news/india-burning-here%E2%80%99s-how-stop-it) By greening the agricultural industry, I think we cannot only make the shipping industry zero carbon but even carbon negative. The CO2 coming out of your ships’ stacks can be well balanced at another point of the supply chain.
I have done a back-of-the-envelope calculation: For example, 23 million tons of rice straw incinerated in India’s Punjab produce 34 million tons of CO2 plus an enormous amount of harmful substances in the smoke. We have a conversion method to produce clean-burning, renewable, carbon-neutral diesel from lignocellulosic biomass like the rice straw in Punjab, sugarcane trash in Florida, or wheat stubble in Chile, or… and has been positively vetted by the industry for application in ship diesel engines.
Converting the rice straw into our fuel we yield approximately 6 million tons of fuel oil, which produces 19 million tons of CO2 when burned in an engine. So where is the difference of 15 million tons of CO2 going? Our process has a side product, bio-bitumen. The CO2 is stored as solid carbon in the bitumen for hundreds of years is not only a valuable source of revenue but can potentially even yield carbon credits. We are providing fuel production with automatic carbon sequestration, so to say. So from a holistic point of view, our fuel is carbon negative – even better than zero-emission and without $3.4 trillion investment and a large number of stranded assets.