Denmark to Feed Ships With Veggies to Cut Down on Fossil Fuel

With humanity slowly but imminently running out of fossil fuel, Danish researchers are all set to develop a new technique that will allow ship engines to run on plants.

The project "Biomass for the 21st Century," which united some of Denmark's leading research and development institutions and industry heavyweights (such as Mærsk, Novozymes and Dong Energy), aims at replacing vanishing fossil fuels with their organic counterparts.

After four years of work, scientists from the University of Copenhagen and the Technical University of Denmark are reportedly close to patenting a chemical that can transform organic molecules existing in plants and algae into diesel oil. Potentially, this technology should be able to feed diesel engines with biomass, once it is developed to a sufficiently high level of efficiency.

"The greatest thing about a ship engine is that it can 'eat' almost anything," Claus Felby of the University of Copenhagen's Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, told the Danish scientific newspaper Videnskab.

According to Felby, the trick is to ensure that heated biomass turns into oil rather than coal, which is guaranteed by using ethanol.

Whereas the patent for the new method is expected to arrive in around two months' time, vegetable-powered cruise ships are still a dream for the distant future, Felby admitted.

"The problem is the scale, as we need around 2,000 tons of fuel to be able to test it in giant ship engines. And that costs a fortune," Felby told the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

The professor and his research team have been unlucky with current fossil fuel price trends. Today, oil costs only about half of what it used to be. This has greatly undermined interest for biofuels. On the other hand, the inevitable perspective of running out of oil at some time in the future has spurred major companies into searching for alternative solutions. Lastly, Denmark is one of the countries which has voiced the most support for reducing carbon emissions.

Of late, Denmark has been working hard on green solutions. In 2014, a Danish-Iraqi research team from the University of Southern Denmark and the University of Baghdad developed a new technique that allowed biofuel production without costly enzymes, Videnskab reported.

Curiously enough, even biofuels have been criticized as "not green enough" in comparison with wind and solar power. Besides, according to Professor Jørgen Eivind Olesen from Aarhus University, the Danish scientific world's infatuation with biofuels rests mainly on the fact that biomass remains exempt from energy taxes, while everything else, including renewable energy, is taxed.