I read the whole article figuring that the question in the title would be answered. Like you enjoyed the history but was frustrated by the fact that the question was never addressed.
Whenever wires don't make sense, as is the case for aircraft, synthetic liquid fuels can make sense. In a world where the inputs are free, the inefficiency of the process is not relevant.
> Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.
So do care about the environment but many "green" activists do not care at all for the environment: for those it's just another version of communism. They want to crush the notion of the individual: they cannot understand the notion of a free, happy, individual.
They're rather have unhappy people united in communism, living miserably like under the USSR, than having a more advanced, richer, country if more advanced and richer means people are free.
Many don't care a yota about the environment: it's just an excuse to try to remove freedom from others.
"People from minority groups are relatively more often suspected of crimes that are more likely to end in a prison sentence. There is also a higher average number of charges against people from minority groups. On the socio-economic scale, people with an immigration background are more likely to be in vulnerable positions with lower education levels.
"The origin of a suspect influences the outcomes of the criminal proceedings against them. 'This may indicate conscious or unconscious discrimination, which goes against the principle of the rule of law, in which everyone has an equal chance of fair treatment,' the researchers said."
It seems like someone with an immigration background should have to go through an on-boarding period where a new arrival takes part in community service and is immersed with civic-minded people and good citizens rather than just heading straight for the slums to fend for themselves and live among the sorts of people who will be a bad influence on them.
Why should you adjust for socio-economic factors though? Migrants coming to a new country where they score systematically worse on some kind of socio-economic metric, and then systematically committing more crime than the indigenous population, is bad for the indigenous population regardless.
I think, crucially, we cannot do so without damaging the environment even without fossil fuels. In time, presumably environmental concerns will result in sufficient acceleration of depolderization until the Netherlands no longer has such a large environmental damage footprint. Fortunately, they have made strides on this[0] but in time they will hopefully mitigate the terrible damage they have done here.
> those ships would require enormous chemical batteries
In many cases they can't be all that far from land, could one set up a way to run wires?
I also wonder about the possibility for some kind of permanent installation in select places, where small amounts of sediment are continually removed (as opposed to large amounts of sediment occasionally removed). Being permanent means you can hook it up to the grid.
The Netherlands uses the largest and most powerful dredging ship in the world, The Queen of the Netherlands. Each of the dredging pumps are 8,000 horsepower (6 MW) and there are two of them. Even the short-range ship-to-shore connections used by container ships are in the 2 MW range. Running "wires" would be ambitious.
It’s definitely possible, I don’t have an in depth knowledge of ships connected to shore power with cables, but if the distance isn’t too great, it seems possible.
Raising voltage lowers the ampacity to allow for smaller conductors.
6MW at 7200V is only ~500A, 6MW at 13.8kV is only 250A.
There are massive electric powered hydraulic mining machines that operate connected to power cables.
We already have 25kV for rail electrification which move 6MW all over the place, surely at boat speeds making some strange double-pantograph system for shipping could be strung up alongside most of the canals, maybe electric tugs could be used as well as normal shipping?
> surely at boat speeds making some strange double-pantograph system for shipping could be strung up alongside most of the canals, maybe electric tugs could be used as well as normal shipping?
I like it, very similar to how mules used to pull barges thru canals except with electrical cables and a rail pantograph running on distribution lines next to the canal instead of mules and ropes.
For canals, I'd say yes. I mean related, before steam / fossil / etc we'd have a "trekschuit", which was a canal boat pulled by people and / or animals that walked on a path alongside the canals. Wired propulsion, if you will. I can see a system similar to trains/trams but for ships would work.
You do know you can burn stuff that is not dug up from the ground right? From ethanol to sun flower and coconut oil. You can pretty much just pour them in a gas tank and the engine will just work.
Sure you can burn them, doesn't mean you're accomplishing anything from a thermodynamic point of view.
Metric to look at is EROI - Energy Return on Investment. How much energy do you put into growing these crops to get a unit of energy out?
Corn ethanol in the US is stupid because it's a 1.6:1 return at best, often a 1:1. To get a unit of energy out of corn ethanol, you need to put almost a unit in. And that's economic inputs, we know the sunshine is free. Sugarcane is a bit better, but you can only grow it in the tropics.
For reference, solar tends to be something like 4:1 - 10:1, wind is 10:1 +/- onshore or offshore, fracked oil tends to be down around 5:1-8:1, and a saudi well is (or at least used to be) 40:1.
You are looking it from the wrong angle the way I see it.
First there are significant quantities of oils grown used in cooking and discarded, in an often environmentally damaging way.
Reclaiming and burning these adds value to a waste product.
What is the EROI on batteries surely under 1.
These oils can provide energy storage and transmission in applications where electricity is ill suited, jet engines (coconut oil is especially suitable for this) and shipping come to mind.
Once you have a sustainable process, these last holdout areas like dredging (where you can't use batteries or wires) can have relatively terrible EROI as long as they're a small minority of the economy. All aviation and shipping combined is about 6% of final energy, and with major redesigns for shipping it could be as low as 4%. So you'd trade a much better EROI for 96% of the economy for a terrible one that only affects 4%.
EROI is also why we really need to get off of fossil fuels long before we actually literally run out (i.e. now would be great)
As a resource reaches depletion, there are two forces acting on EROI: 1) the increased cost of each unit of energy input, and 2) the reduced yield from that energy input.
The EROI curve bends negative faster than you think by looking at history.
All too often those have bad environmental impacts of their own. Coconut oil ends up being grown in plantains that require clear cutting natural forests. The agricultural process to plant, grow and harvest sunflowers produces significant CO2 just as it does for growing corn for ethanol.
The savings in CO2 emissions for the likes of rapeseed, sunflower etc per MJ of energy is only around 50% compared to diesel. You have to release a lot of CO2 to grow these crops intensively. And that’s before you even consider where the land for these crops come from, potentially chopping down CO2 absorbing rainforests in many sorts of the world.
Biofuel from Used Cooking Oil is worthy considering for sure, but the quantities possible are tiny compared to the petrol/diesel we use.
Electricity generated from wind and solar with some wires to the dredge would be way easier than dredging by hand.
Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.
The historical aspects of this article are a good read though. Very interesting technology.
I read the whole article figuring that the question in the title would be answered. Like you enjoyed the history but was frustrated by the fact that the question was never addressed.
>some wires.
Id look into that statement some more if I were you: There’s much difficulty building houses and starting industry because the net is congested.
As always: if it’s as easy as a random commenter suggests, it’s probably not that easy.
Whenever wires don't make sense, as is the case for aircraft, synthetic liquid fuels can make sense. In a world where the inputs are free, the inefficiency of the process is not relevant.
> Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.
So do care about the environment but many "green" activists do not care at all for the environment: for those it's just another version of communism. They want to crush the notion of the individual: they cannot understand the notion of a free, happy, individual.
They're rather have unhappy people united in communism, living miserably like under the USSR, than having a more advanced, richer, country if more advanced and richer means people are free.
Many don't care a yota about the environment: it's just an excuse to try to remove freedom from others.
I kinda like the idea of using prison labour for environmentally friendly dredging.
But The Netherlands abolish prison slave labour in 2021 so that is no longer possible.
https://nltimes.nl/2025/06/20/ethnicity-definitely-plays-rol...
"People from minority groups are relatively more often suspected of crimes that are more likely to end in a prison sentence. There is also a higher average number of charges against people from minority groups. On the socio-economic scale, people with an immigration background are more likely to be in vulnerable positions with lower education levels.
"The origin of a suspect influences the outcomes of the criminal proceedings against them. 'This may indicate conscious or unconscious discrimination, which goes against the principle of the rule of law, in which everyone has an equal chance of fair treatment,' the researchers said."
It seems like someone with an immigration background should have to go through an on-boarding period where a new arrival takes part in community service and is immersed with civic-minded people and good citizens rather than just heading straight for the slums to fend for themselves and live among the sorts of people who will be a bad influence on them.
How would that lower the rate at which immigrants are suspected of crimes?
If you adjust for socio-economic factors then migrants are just as criminal as the rest of the population.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2621324-percentage-asielmigranten-ver...
Why should you adjust for socio-economic factors though? Migrants coming to a new country where they score systematically worse on some kind of socio-economic metric, and then systematically committing more crime than the indigenous population, is bad for the indigenous population regardless.
I think, crucially, we cannot do so without damaging the environment even without fossil fuels. In time, presumably environmental concerns will result in sufficient acceleration of depolderization until the Netherlands no longer has such a large environmental damage footprint. Fortunately, they have made strides on this[0] but in time they will hopefully mitigate the terrible damage they have done here.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder
> those ships would require enormous chemical batteries
In many cases they can't be all that far from land, could one set up a way to run wires?
I also wonder about the possibility for some kind of permanent installation in select places, where small amounts of sediment are continually removed (as opposed to large amounts of sediment occasionally removed). Being permanent means you can hook it up to the grid.
The Netherlands uses the largest and most powerful dredging ship in the world, The Queen of the Netherlands. Each of the dredging pumps are 8,000 horsepower (6 MW) and there are two of them. Even the short-range ship-to-shore connections used by container ships are in the 2 MW range. Running "wires" would be ambitious.
Those giant bucket wheel excavators are also electrically powered, by cables. And they use up to 16 MW, so I wouldn't call it completely unrealistic.
Of course running them over some dirt is easier than through possibly moving water, but still.
> Running "wires" would be ambitious.
It’s definitely possible, I don’t have an in depth knowledge of ships connected to shore power with cables, but if the distance isn’t too great, it seems possible.
Raising voltage lowers the ampacity to allow for smaller conductors.
6MW at 7200V is only ~500A, 6MW at 13.8kV is only 250A.
There are massive electric powered hydraulic mining machines that operate connected to power cables.
We already have 25kV for rail electrification which move 6MW all over the place, surely at boat speeds making some strange double-pantograph system for shipping could be strung up alongside most of the canals, maybe electric tugs could be used as well as normal shipping?
High speed trains can be over 16MW on 25kV AC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_374 (16MW)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_Series_Shinkansen (18MW)
> surely at boat speeds making some strange double-pantograph system for shipping could be strung up alongside most of the canals, maybe electric tugs could be used as well as normal shipping?
I like it, very similar to how mules used to pull barges thru canals except with electrical cables and a rail pantograph running on distribution lines next to the canal instead of mules and ropes.
For canals, I'd say yes. I mean related, before steam / fossil / etc we'd have a "trekschuit", which was a canal boat pulled by people and / or animals that walked on a path alongside the canals. Wired propulsion, if you will. I can see a system similar to trains/trams but for ships would work.
Reminded me of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-1Af96gYVI
"The insane plan to dam the North Sea."
You do know you can burn stuff that is not dug up from the ground right? From ethanol to sun flower and coconut oil. You can pretty much just pour them in a gas tank and the engine will just work.
Sure you can burn them, doesn't mean you're accomplishing anything from a thermodynamic point of view.
Metric to look at is EROI - Energy Return on Investment. How much energy do you put into growing these crops to get a unit of energy out?
Corn ethanol in the US is stupid because it's a 1.6:1 return at best, often a 1:1. To get a unit of energy out of corn ethanol, you need to put almost a unit in. And that's economic inputs, we know the sunshine is free. Sugarcane is a bit better, but you can only grow it in the tropics.
For reference, solar tends to be something like 4:1 - 10:1, wind is 10:1 +/- onshore or offshore, fracked oil tends to be down around 5:1-8:1, and a saudi well is (or at least used to be) 40:1.
You are looking it from the wrong angle the way I see it.
First there are significant quantities of oils grown used in cooking and discarded, in an often environmentally damaging way.
Reclaiming and burning these adds value to a waste product.
What is the EROI on batteries surely under 1.
These oils can provide energy storage and transmission in applications where electricity is ill suited, jet engines (coconut oil is especially suitable for this) and shipping come to mind.
Once you have a sustainable process, these last holdout areas like dredging (where you can't use batteries or wires) can have relatively terrible EROI as long as they're a small minority of the economy. All aviation and shipping combined is about 6% of final energy, and with major redesigns for shipping it could be as low as 4%. So you'd trade a much better EROI for 96% of the economy for a terrible one that only affects 4%.
EROI is also why we really need to get off of fossil fuels long before we actually literally run out (i.e. now would be great)
As a resource reaches depletion, there are two forces acting on EROI: 1) the increased cost of each unit of energy input, and 2) the reduced yield from that energy input.
The EROI curve bends negative faster than you think by looking at history.
All too often those have bad environmental impacts of their own. Coconut oil ends up being grown in plantains that require clear cutting natural forests. The agricultural process to plant, grow and harvest sunflowers produces significant CO2 just as it does for growing corn for ethanol.
I don't think anyone grows extra coconuts for fuel. It's processed from the waste after the more profitable parts are extracted.
Good point, liquid and gas fuels will continue to be important into the future where energy density is needed, fuel cells could be a good option also.
Depending on the engine, perhaps. But this still releases CO2. This is not about supply limitations.
These are carbon neutral as they remove atmospheric CO2 when the plant matter is grown
The savings in CO2 emissions for the likes of rapeseed, sunflower etc per MJ of energy is only around 50% compared to diesel. You have to release a lot of CO2 to grow these crops intensively. And that’s before you even consider where the land for these crops come from, potentially chopping down CO2 absorbing rainforests in many sorts of the world.
Biofuel from Used Cooking Oil is worthy considering for sure, but the quantities possible are tiny compared to the petrol/diesel we use.