Dear @Casual Navigation, I spotted a small mistake at 4:39. It is not Hydrolysis but Electrolysis. The animation clearly shows water molecules breaking apart because electricity passes through them. This is called Electrolysis. Hydrolysis is totally different.
A college friend of mine is involved with trying to clean out the invasive species in Lake Erie. He said that many of them are naturally salt water species that just like this video says, have no natural predators.. So I told him that humans are going to have to become their predators in the Great Lakes.
Dude I found freaking little crabs in lake Erie once. I guess someone was using them as bait and let them go or something. Not sure how long they lived but it was weird seeing them crawling on submerged rocks. Also stepped on a waterlogged corpse once as well, near Sandusky. Wild place, never went near it again after that 🤣
It's crazy how one of the great lakes has a literal "death trap" in the connecting river that kills any fish that tries to go from the river into the lakes because they're trying keep out any of those invasive carp species that jump out of the water when startled.. they can't have those carp enter the great lakes. It would be a disaster.
Eh the same argument could be said for the likes of the Asian Carp in the US rivers especially since they are actually edible too. Market the buggers as food and the commercial incentive to go out there and harvest them will put a check on their population. This is likely to be more effective than some environmental scheme trying to do it, if you can turn the invasive species into a resource that can be used somehow. That way you end up with a self sustaining concerted effort to go and harvest the resource which will likely work better in the long run. Besides which if one has to spend resources fixing a screwup might as well try to produce some value from what would otherwise be a loss of productivity.
@@benmcreynolds8581 i first i thought you meant Niagra Falls but then i remembered that Lake Michigan (i think) has a connection to the Mississippi where the reversed the course of a river and they have a bunch of fish traps to keep undesirable species out of the lakes. And the most effective way of keeping most of these species in check is definitely to put a profit motive on killing them (like marketing aisan carp as a food source) as well as having the DEC equivalent do consistent government sponsored measures like selective poisons and fish killers/fences. Although i do remember laughing a little when they tried to purge the Eurasian Milfoil (invasive sea weed) from one of the lakes in our area bit they were doing nothing the the lake upstream of lake they were cleaning when both lakes had very problematic levels of the stuff. (It spreads with both "seeds" and just having bits of the "plant" sprout roots so all the debris & seeds from upstream were feeding the downstream population) Eventually they introduced an aquatic moth and the milfoil levels are becoming less of an issue. I assume the do other regular work like blankets to kill the weed beds as well as the "natural" solution of introducing the moths to eat it.
@@seraphina985 You cant really do that though. Yes, you'll have people going out and removing them for profit, but thats like some country tried dto erreadicate a snake species, which resulted in people breeding them so they can kill and sell them, which made the problem way worse.
I have no connection to shipping outside of fandoms 😅, but your videos are really interesting. I basically binged your whole channel this week. And just as there is no video left, this one appears. 😂
@@CasualNavigation CasNav I randomly ended up here quite some time ago from a random suggested video because I watched Chief Makoi and that was that. Watched every video at least 2 times. My only complaint? You don't upload daily!
The best method is to get ballast water from pretreated shore supply and pump out to post treatment shore tanks. Fill as you discharge cargo and pump out as you load cargo. Treatment is much easier done ashore and you can reuse ballast water many times. It is an international industry issue that the IMO is working on. Testing is also part of the solution.
An interesting point, that actually would make sense - especially as like you say the water could be re-used, transferred to another ship. But for that matter, you could similarly have ballast blocks be carried by empty ships from port to port, re-used on the next empty. Flaw with that is probably that cargo tends to move in one direction, and hence ballast (whether solid concrete blocks or water) would need to move in the other. If equal ballast were moving in each direction, then equal cargo would be as well, and cargo is more profitable. So we have to assume ballast is moving in one direction. As for whether processing ballast water (either pre- or post-journey) on land is better than on a ship, I'm not so sure it would really matter that much. Ships are almost like cities or factories, have all manner of onboard facilities capable of doing stuff like this. I'm not sure it being on the ship would be more expensive than having it on shore, and would allow more flexibility as they would be less reliant on shore infrastructure. The only advantage of it being on shore is that the space and weight of it wouldn't be on the ship - though I'm guessing what he described here isn't all that much size/weight relative to a ship - and a given factory would be able to serve numerous ships as they come through rather than being on each ship used only once per voyage. But I get the sense most of these methods run gradually over the course of the voyage rather than all at once, so it's smaller and active a larger portion of the time.
@@quillmaurer6563 All onboard ballast treatment plans require dumping ballast into the water at the dock. That means dumping salt water from the ocean at the dock which could be up a river or some other ecosystem that will be harmed just by the chemical composition of the water. Again, the best way to deal with ballast water is to not dump it in the water but to pump it into a shore side tank for treatment, testing and reuse. More docks have this service as time goes on.
I really appreciated this one. Before getting into hydrography, I got my degree in environmental biology so this topic is near an dear to my heart. Thanks for sharing!
@@faderabraham556 I wouldn't say bragging, but sure if you insist :) It was an amazing experience and helped me get an awesome job which I love. To each their own I guess, hope you do well in your field of choice!
We use fresh water for drilling and frack operations. Because we transfer so much water from many locations we have to track all sources and verify there aren't any zebra muscles. It is a pain in the ass and is just one invasive that we have to watch for in the Marcellus and Utica shale.
As always - love the non deck related videos; as a deck officer, I love seeing navigation videos but learning more about the speccy engineering stuff on ships is really enjoyable! Now I can start posing questions to the Engineers about our ballast water standards and see how much they about the new conventions!
^^^ Retired engineer. US ships have been exchanging ballast water for over 20 years. We were doing that without installing any new equipment due to new regulations that came out back then. I can't tell you about the latest developments since I'm no longer sailing.
It started with navigation, but over time it has become fun to cover all sorts of topics about ships. I did consider renaming a while ago, but I think it is nice to have a nod to where the channel started.
@@CasualNavigation the navigation videos are great. I've recommended your Colregs channel to all the upcoming cadets I've interacted with. Taking the legalese from Colregs into layman English is critically important - I've seen many a junior officer in a simulator be able to quote Rule 15 to me verbatim and still try tell me that the sailing vessel on the port bow is the give way vessel while crossing! 🤣
Man, do you ever think about how you sort of stumbled on a very cool niche that was drastically underserved on RUclips? I feel like your channel may explode someday when you reach a critical mass of videos and even a single video gets the algorithm boost. Your audience is both people that know NOTHING about ships and navigation but find this new information they can't find elsewhere, and people actually whose job or hobby is on the sea or sea-adjacent who know some of this stuff but gets a kick out of you talking about it when few other channels do. I wish you the best man, you deserve it.
Thanks Tinil0. I was just lucky that the topic I love has turned out to be popular on RUclips. Back when I started, I noticed there were plenty of other channels already, but none of them did the style that I wanted. They were either quite dry educational videos or factually inaccurate entertainment videos. This channel came about as a way of combining both, trying to make learning real topics a little more fun.
@@CasualNavigation You knocked it out of the park, or an equivalent idiom that works as well for non-Americans. Your vision perfectly matches what your channel is and I hope it pays dividends into the future!
I’m offended on behalf of the content maker as you used the word ‘man’ without knowing if this is acceptable to them. Ridiculous?? Yes. Obviously. That’s the world we live in. 😂😂😂
There's a type of giant woodlouse within Blyth Harbour (Northern England) that lives within the wood of the various jettys. It arrived via cargo ships. The woodlouse creates tunnels through the timber of jettys. I know about them because I used to work in the fishing fleet from that port. We had to be careful at night when mooring because those louse could give a nasty bite.
Love this! You should also do a video on the NPDES vessel discharge permits ships have to adhere to. I’m in the US EPA’s NPDES program and these permits are really, really interesting and quite complicated, but serve a crucial role for dealing with things like treated sewage generated onboard. Even military vessels have to adhere to them, both in port and at sea.
Here in the UK we used to have a thriving red squirrel population but sadly the invasive grey squirrel killed most of them off. Crazy to think how much humans destroy the natural world.
It’s not just in ballast, of course; I work on shore in roro shipping, and one of my main tasks is helping to administer the results of our in-voyage searches for halyomorpha halys, the brown marmorated stink bug. Australia and New Zealand *really* don’t want any of those little buggers getting in, which means insects getting on board can lead to expensive delays, diversions and fumigation.
Damn, makes you wonder if any deep ocean habitats have suffered similar fates. They're not easy to see so we might not even notice them getting destroyed.
@@Alucard-gt1zf But other deep ocean organisms can. I'm talking about the possibility that we took a deep ocean creature from one part of the earth and introduced it to a similar environment from somewhere else.
It really is a shame that zebra mussels are not recommended for human consumption. Can you imagine having such an abundance of cheap shellfish available? Nom nom nom.
I remember seeing a kids science show in the 80’s (like 3-2-1, Contact) and they showed how damaging the zebra muscle was to the environment and to ports.
I like this channel because I can learn stuff from it while the videos are on the shorter side (5 to 10 minutes long) and I don’t need to read a lot of subtitles. I don’t remember what video of yours I first saw (in the past couple of years or so), but I probably subscribed soon after I watched it. Also, I didn’t know how invasive species in lakes and rivers even got to the US until I saw this video. Keep up the good videos👍
Zebra mussels cleared the life out of the lake my cottage was on (Great Lake tributaries) its been about 15 years since the “peak” and it’s starting to come back
Anyone else a little concerned about the 63% and wondering why this is giving them flashbacks of time constants and natural logs? Great video by the way!
Unfortunately shipping industry is some of the most corrupt shit on earth, they contribute 60% of all waste in oceans and then tell you it's because you're using plastic straws. Seaspiracy is a great documentary on netflix. Edit.: fishing industry is the worst, not sure if there even is something called shipping industry
It's because the aviation industry isn't profitable, simply selling tickets or shipping goods for air travel doesn't cover what it takes to fly the airplane and have a reservation at hubs for your aircraft. That's why the air industry is more focused on fuel efficiency and how far a plane can fly and glide. It is far more affordable to put people and goods on ships than it is an airplane, however the speed of a plane much exceeds the need for affordability.
@@nallid7357 it's one of those industries that would not exist without state subsidies and constant bail out packages one should question if it's really worth keeping them around with all the trouble they cause maybe just buy them up and operate them state owned
I remember my uncle telling me about this in the 80s that there were Bilgewater processes usually limited to ejecting bilge water “out at sea“ rather than in Portage
i can remember when i was a child, that some Asian Jellyfish got into the Baltic Sea, i just saied i saw some "new kind of Jellyfish" and everyone thought i wasnt serious, but funnily as far as i know they dont even change anything around them, what people were obviously afraid of when they found more and more of them.
Love your videos and learning about things I wouldn’t have other wise thought about. Regarding ballast water contamination would it be possible to have a treated store of water at the ports that could be pumped in as the ships unloaded to avoid refitting ships to fit the new D2 standards? It wouldn’t be cheap to add such facilities to the ports but it would make it easier to have companies comply with environmental acts and standards. Once again, love the videos!
Declorination of watter is very easy. Just let the watter sit in a well ventilated tank for a bit (how long the bit is depends on the volume of watter).
How about not to drop ballast waters? What if ships had some kind of storage tanks for ballast waters in port to take or leave their water for another ships?
What about constantly changing the ballast water. From departure all the way along. So it is always washed thru with "local" water,with local species in it...
Great video. If I can recommend something for another video. Can you please have it on the topic of navigation. Differences between now and 100 years ago. Similarities/benefits of each. Even how Indigenous, like of the island peoples navigation.
As for the corrossion issue - chlorination might also be an issue since chlorine is more potent oxidizer than oxygen itself - the corrosion product (in case of steel tanks) is not rust (iron oxides) but iron(II,III) chlorides which are water-soluble. Corrossion is a big issue in water electrolysis generally, especially around electrodes and the electrodes themselves (these are usually made from corrossion-resistant materials - like zinc, carbon, lead oxides, platinum etc.)
But why haven't they simply considered treating ballast water as fuel? Each port has a number of tanks on shore for ballast water that is pumped in and out of ships as needed. Then ships can fill/empty said water as necessary in deep water as per D1. But only fill/empty at port once over shallower waters through lines going to storage tanks. Any necessity to empty water from the ports storage (beyond the need to fill ships with it) will of course necessitate treatment of the water. So ports will have to manage their storage levels. They don't have to worry about running out of water, they can just fill with shore water. But they have to consider the implications of getting rid of water as it is contaminated and needs treatment.
Hi Casual Navigation! I love your videos. I'm a massive bookworm so I'm wondering if there are any books on some of the topics in your videos that you would recommend? Love the channel Thanks !
Thanks Michal. Unfortunately I don't have any personal book recommendations as most of the topics come from official IMO publications. You could check those out, but they are all quite boring legal text books.
Large sections of Manhattan is composed of the remains of East London, brought back across as ballast since the ships were deadheading back across the Atlantic.
Zebra mussels are an absolute scourge to the Great Lakes. I grew up on the lakes in the late 80's and early 90's when their populations were exploding. At it's peak, every hard surface was absolutely encrusted with them, their shells washed up in piles on beaches and were like walking on broken glass. Many cities that used the lakes for water supply had interruptions to their intake pipes. They absolutely changed the ecology of the Great Lakes. They're still infesting new inland lakes every year, especially in Minnesota. Lake Mille Lacs was infested and walleye populations, the cornerstone of a vibrant recreational fishing industry there have crashed, while more sight based fish like Musky and Smallmouth Bass have exploded. And then there's sea lampreys, gobies, and Eurasian milfoil, all ballast hitchhikers that have all had their turn wrecking the Great Lakes and nearby watersheds.
I love seeing new videos from you, they are so informative and have got me interested in a subject I never would have guessed I'd have been interested in. They are also very pleasant viewing.
What about salination (as in Dead Sea level or higher)... making ballast water so salty nothing lives, pump the high-salt water through the whole system, re-hydrate/balance before discharge. I know that saltwater is heavier than freshwater.. and that's as far as my science goes... could/would it work?
Great video as always! I did have one qusetion, once a ship has been brought up to D2 standards do the Ballast Water Exchange/flow through requirements still apply? Or can they go back to discharging when/wherever they want to?
The purpose of D2 to set physical limits to the number/size of organisms, so whether you achieve that through treatment / exchange / taking fresh water, it doesn't matter. You just have to ensure your discharge is in compliance.
Man, using ballast water as coolant sounds like a very elegant solution, maybe if the ballast tank are coated with something it would be balanced long term (?
There's a very easy and non-costly solution to this: Make the ships dump their entite ballast tanks (1 at a time) when they're X distance away from the port where their ballasts were loaded. X depends on studies. X would be determined by the closest location that doesn't have the invasive species, but maybe 2x as far away so they have little chance of surviving when dumped. Example would be: you take on water ballast in Los Angeles. You get 50miles away from the coast. Say you have 10 tanks. You dump ballast tank 1, and ballast tank 10. You then dump tank 2 and refill 1 simultaneously (giving them the max amount of empty-tank time). You keep doing this until all your tanks have dumped their destructive invasive species, and refilled with water in an area that doesn't contain those species. (Keep in mind a species isn't negative just because it's invasive. Its only negative when it causes damage.)
1 it should require the removal of ALL SPECIES PROTECTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT SHOULD BE HELD TO SUCH STANDARDS IM SORRY BUT COMMON IS IT REALLY TO MUCH TO ASK FOR THAT I MEAN COMMON!!! Anyways also because even if you try your still going to removal all species your still going to have some left over on accident so you should BE REQUIRED TO ADD ALL POSSIBLE METHODS of eliminating the species that come out of the ballast water!
Another great video, love the animations. Bearing in mind the huge quantities of water to be filtered on a regular basis (~30000m3 per operation on a 150000t dwt bulker?), it would be interesting to know of the disposal rules for all the crud caught in the 1st stage filters, not much point filtering it out to then 'hoy it over the wall'. I expect the early retrofit systems, like others before them, will be very labour intensive and only be fitted to meet the minimum legal requirements rather than be of benefit to the world. But hey, we have to start somewhere!
I suspect the filtered material can be tossed overboard if you do is in the water you just filtered (litterally putting it back where you got it) or can be properly disposed of in a port facility where it is presumably burned or dehydrated and shipped to a landfill far from water ways. 1 important note behind the theory of the deep water exchange is that salt amd fresh water are very different at the cellular level. Fresh water has a low mineral concentration so it will rush across cell membranes to equalize solute density, so fresh water critters need to be constantly pumping out water from themselves. Salt water by contrast has much higher solute densities so it doesn't rush across cell membranes simce the pressure is already equal or even reversed. The end result is salt water microbes dumped in fresh water die to over hydration and pop like balloons, and fresh water microbes dumped into salt water get dehydrated and die shriveled up like raisins. For a land comparison its like planting a cactus in the Everglades and a cattail in the Mojave, you just don't expect them to live very long. Of course larger animals are better at surviving getting dumped im the wrong body of water salinity wise bit even then its usually only really big fish like salmon or bull sharks that can live in either.
This may be me just being a rookie, but what about fine mesh screens on the intakes, it would stop a large majority of major species from getting in the tanks?
You can't really fit it to the intake, at least not as fine as you need them. At the required fine sizes, they are very restrictive to the water flow and a much larger surface area is needed. You probably need about 50 times the pipe cross section as a filter surface, maybe more if you catch too much stuff and it frequently blocks the filter.
how about increasing or decreasing pressure in the tanks? I know at certain pressure it can crush micro organisms, and in very low pressure even the water will turn to gas and the cell walls would be ripped apart. I think these may be way less energy efficient, but I wanted to mention them since you didn't mention them.
What about continually pumping water throughout a ships journey so the tanks is always filled with semi-local water? If they realized the cost savings of anti-fouling, maybe they could introduce a similar concept to the interior of ballast tanks and using the engine heat to boil. What about having permanent weights aboard with an adjustable air inflation system to offset the weight, deflate to increase the weight.
The pumping water through idea is pretty much what he described as the "flow-through" method, at around 3:25. Problem is that unless the tank is completely emptied, you'll never be able to 100% exchange the water, assuming it all mixes some little remnant - and potentially some organisms - will remain. Anti-fowling I don't think would work if you're carrying an actual mass of water. Anti-fowling prevents sea life attaching to the exterior of the ship, and anything outside not attached will drift away. When actually carrying a bunch of water, things could be floating in it rather than adhering to the insides of the tank. The adjustable air inflation idea - sounds like you're thinking of a semi-rigid inflatable (basically a giant RHIB, Rigid-Hull Inflatable Boat) or something, where part of the ship's buoyancy when fully loaded is provided by inflated pontoons? An interesting idea I suppose, but I'd worry there would be several problems. The less optimally shaped and less rigid inflated portions would be less hydrodynamically efficient. They would also wear out over time and be costly to replace/maintain. Same goes for the air compressor systems needed to inflate them, extra complexity. And if it fails when the ship is heavily laden the ship would lose critical buoyancy and could sink. I don't know a ton about the smaller RHIB, but the sense I get is they have some durability and performance advantages in certain circumstances, but their performance (speed per horsepower at a given size) and maintenance costs are higher than an equivalent conventional boat. On a small scale, in some circumstances, the advantages outweigh this, but I have a hard time seeing that on a large scale.
Given organisms have the habit of self replication exponentially does reducing nuber of imported organisms really do anything? One a viable population takes hold there's nothing that can be done.
Tbh, I figured they'd use tanks at ports to receive the ballast, so no organisms got into the local environment. But maybe that was too costly and inflexible?
Zebra mussels were probably a problem in the Great Lakes already, but suddenly in the 80s and 90s they became a sort of cause celebre- every news segment seemed to have an item on this problem and our generalized apparent impotence to deal with it.
If the Zebra Mussel is a fresh water species, how come it survived in a salt water envitonment? Specialist vessals put paid to free or cheap ballast cargos that could make a tidy profit elsewhere such as mining waste rock used for roads and guarno for fertiliser manufacture.
From the thumbnail I thought the US was paying $500m/year to maintain some old boat from the American Revolution era. An invasive species makes way more sense.
I wonder how effective it would be to use the CO2 from the engines as a form of deoxination. I mean if 30 ppm is enough to kill off anything in a fishtank then 60ppm (~110mg/m^3) should be adequate for a bilgetank right? Additionally if you heated (via the engine) the water before releasing it into the ocean can have a further pasturizing effect.
co2 would be difficult to extract from the other exhaust gases, co2 being only about 12% of the exhausted gases emitted. Also increasing the co2 causes the ph of the water to decrease, meaning the water becoming acidic which would definitely not be good for inhibiting corrosion and would need to have ph adjusted before being released back into the sea water probably. Chlorine makes most sense, its cheap and or can be made from sea water onboard and will burn off into the atmosphere by exposure to sunlight.
How much is the volume of those ballast tanks? I know it would be very naive to think that nobody haven't considered that but isn't it possible to fill those tanks with fresh water from the outside? Is it too slow to fill? Maybe too expensive? Sorry for the stupid questions but I am just curious what is the reason not to be done. I am sure there is reason(s) but I'm just wondering what it is. PS: Another great and interesting video even for someone like me who doesn't have any interest about ships, sea etc! Good job!
The regular ballast tanks of a vessel have a capacity between several thousend liter up to several million liters of water. Depending on the sice of the ship. To fill them with fresh water would take way to long and would be very expensive. This comes from the point that most of the ballast water is taken or discharged during cargo operation to maintain the stability of the vessel. If you would need until they are filled with fresh water cargo operations would need to be stopped. Speaking about this there are normally tanks which are filled with fresh water and this are the "heeling tanks" this is a pair of tanks on both sides of the vessel which are used to compensate the heel from left to right in port. But as the water in these tanke is only transfered between them they are not relevant for this topic (as you dont discharge the water into the sea).
@@TheNereus1992 I see. Well the capacity of the tanks exceeded my expectations. So in that case it makes total sense to not waste clean water just to throw it into the ocean later on. Thanks for the answer! :)
@@CasualNavigation thanks for the response. Like I mentioned in reply to TheNereus1992, with such massive capacity it makes sense. I just thought the tanks have much smaller volume. Maybe 100-200 cubic meters at most, but now I understand they considerably bigger.
Sooo... basically the idea behind moving the water treatment work aboard the ship is to transfer the /time/ it takes to the time the ship is in transit?
Why not use a medium intensity irradiation of the water as it's fed through a pipe. The radiation source is a sealed isotope cannister that has water running around it. The radiation does not kill but just sterilizes the life forms from reproducing. It's done in the agricultural industry and food processing industries so why not shipping? When the radiation source is no longer needed it still remains sealed in it's cannister when it's removed to be sent off to the radioisotope recycling center. Even city waste water is irradiated with no residual effects on the water itself at municipal sewage treatment treatment centers.
Could it be more cost effective to install ballast supplies in the ports, rather than retrofitting every single ship? Have some big tanks on land that go through a water treatment process, and are made safe that the ships must sup from to start with. Having known good water when they reach the next port should let them dump it with minimal concern.
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Dear @Casual Navigation,
I spotted a small mistake at 4:39. It is not Hydrolysis but Electrolysis. The animation clearly shows water molecules breaking apart because electricity passes through them. This is called Electrolysis. Hydrolysis is totally different.
Thanks Eleftherios. I meant to add a note about that bit - you are right!
A college friend of mine is involved with trying to clean out the invasive species in Lake Erie. He said that many of them are naturally salt water species that just like this video says, have no natural predators.. So I told him that humans are going to have to become their predators in the Great Lakes.
Dude I found freaking little crabs in lake Erie once. I guess someone was using them as bait and let them go or something. Not sure how long they lived but it was weird seeing them crawling on submerged rocks. Also stepped on a waterlogged corpse once as well, near Sandusky. Wild place, never went near it again after that 🤣
It's crazy how one of the great lakes has a literal "death trap" in the connecting river that kills any fish that tries to go from the river into the lakes because they're trying keep out any of those invasive carp species that jump out of the water when startled.. they can't have those carp enter the great lakes. It would be a disaster.
Eh the same argument could be said for the likes of the Asian Carp in the US rivers especially since they are actually edible too. Market the buggers as food and the commercial incentive to go out there and harvest them will put a check on their population. This is likely to be more effective than some environmental scheme trying to do it, if you can turn the invasive species into a resource that can be used somehow. That way you end up with a self sustaining concerted effort to go and harvest the resource which will likely work better in the long run. Besides which if one has to spend resources fixing a screwup might as well try to produce some value from what would otherwise be a loss of productivity.
@@benmcreynolds8581 i first i thought you meant Niagra Falls but then i remembered that Lake Michigan (i think) has a connection to the Mississippi where the reversed the course of a river and they have a bunch of fish traps to keep undesirable species out of the lakes.
And the most effective way of keeping most of these species in check is definitely to put a profit motive on killing them (like marketing aisan carp as a food source) as well as having the DEC equivalent do consistent government sponsored measures like selective poisons and fish killers/fences.
Although i do remember laughing a little when they tried to purge the Eurasian Milfoil (invasive sea weed) from one of the lakes in our area bit they were doing nothing the the lake upstream of lake they were cleaning when both lakes had very problematic levels of the stuff. (It spreads with both "seeds" and just having bits of the "plant" sprout roots so all the debris & seeds from upstream were feeding the downstream population) Eventually they introduced an aquatic moth and the milfoil levels are becoming less of an issue. I assume the do other regular work like blankets to kill the weed beds as well as the "natural" solution of introducing the moths to eat it.
@@seraphina985 You cant really do that though. Yes, you'll have people going out and removing them for profit, but thats like some country tried dto erreadicate a snake species, which resulted in people breeding them so they can kill and sell them, which made the problem way worse.
Can we all take a moment to appreciate the work this man is doing to educate us about ships. Man thank you very much!
I have no connection to shipping outside of fandoms 😅, but your videos are really interesting. I basically binged your whole channel this week. And just as there is no video left, this one appears. 😂
Thanks Mr. X. I'm glad you enjoyed the channel.
@@CasualNavigation Mr X, I think you mean homer.
@@CasualNavigation CasNav I randomly ended up here quite some time ago from a random suggested video because I watched Chief Makoi and that was that. Watched every video at least 2 times. My only complaint? You don't upload daily!
@@jeffreyhill1011 I wish I could!
Wow I independently wrote a very similar comment. Goes to show how well this channel resonates with people.
The best method is to get ballast water from pretreated shore supply and pump out to post treatment shore tanks. Fill as you discharge cargo and pump out as you load cargo. Treatment is much easier done ashore and you can reuse ballast water many times. It is an international industry issue that the IMO is working on. Testing is also part of the solution.
An interesting point, that actually would make sense - especially as like you say the water could be re-used, transferred to another ship. But for that matter, you could similarly have ballast blocks be carried by empty ships from port to port, re-used on the next empty. Flaw with that is probably that cargo tends to move in one direction, and hence ballast (whether solid concrete blocks or water) would need to move in the other. If equal ballast were moving in each direction, then equal cargo would be as well, and cargo is more profitable. So we have to assume ballast is moving in one direction.
As for whether processing ballast water (either pre- or post-journey) on land is better than on a ship, I'm not so sure it would really matter that much. Ships are almost like cities or factories, have all manner of onboard facilities capable of doing stuff like this. I'm not sure it being on the ship would be more expensive than having it on shore, and would allow more flexibility as they would be less reliant on shore infrastructure. The only advantage of it being on shore is that the space and weight of it wouldn't be on the ship - though I'm guessing what he described here isn't all that much size/weight relative to a ship - and a given factory would be able to serve numerous ships as they come through rather than being on each ship used only once per voyage. But I get the sense most of these methods run gradually over the course of the voyage rather than all at once, so it's smaller and active a larger portion of the time.
@@quillmaurer6563 All onboard ballast treatment plans require dumping ballast into the water at the dock. That means dumping salt water from the ocean at the dock which could be up a river or some other ecosystem that will be harmed just by the chemical composition of the water. Again, the best way to deal with ballast water is to not dump it in the water but to pump it into a shore side tank for treatment, testing and reuse. More docks have this service as time goes on.
I'm a biologist & absolutely love all your videos, but it would be super cool to see more of these biology themed ones!
Thanks Calluna. These biology themed ones are fun. My background is Physics, but its nice to explore the other sciences as well.
I really appreciated this one. Before getting into hydrography, I got my degree in environmental biology so this topic is near an dear to my heart. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks Bailey. I've been wanting to do this one for years (since I did the original antifouling one). Its a fascinating topic!
Damn, you really braggin on youtube about a useless degree?
@@faderabraham556 I wouldn't say bragging, but sure if you insist :) It was an amazing experience and helped me get an awesome job which I love. To each their own I guess, hope you do well in your field of choice!
@@baileywright1656 its really obvious, but it isnt really a flex so i dont care at all. Just so obvious you try to ”sneak it into conversation” lol
@@baileywright1656 very well said! *applauds* Environmental biology is so cool, it's a shame we only have one life to live and learn!
We use fresh water for drilling and frack operations. Because we transfer so much water from many locations we have to track all sources and verify there aren't any zebra muscles. It is a pain in the ass and is just one invasive that we have to watch for in the Marcellus and Utica shale.
As always - love the non deck related videos; as a deck officer, I love seeing navigation videos but learning more about the speccy engineering stuff on ships is really enjoyable!
Now I can start posing questions to the Engineers about our ballast water standards and see how much they about the new conventions!
^^^ Retired engineer. US ships have been exchanging ballast water for over 20 years. We were doing that without installing any new equipment due to new regulations that came out back then. I can't tell you about the latest developments since I'm no longer sailing.
Despite the name, most of this video's channels are about technical functions of a ship rather than the navigational and seafaring crew aspects.
It started with navigation, but over time it has become fun to cover all sorts of topics about ships. I did consider renaming a while ago, but I think it is nice to have a nod to where the channel started.
@@CasualNavigation the navigation videos are great. I've recommended your Colregs channel to all the upcoming cadets I've interacted with. Taking the legalese from Colregs into layman English is critically important - I've seen many a junior officer in a simulator be able to quote Rule 15 to me verbatim and still try tell me that the sailing vessel on the port bow is the give way vessel while crossing! 🤣
Man, do you ever think about how you sort of stumbled on a very cool niche that was drastically underserved on RUclips? I feel like your channel may explode someday when you reach a critical mass of videos and even a single video gets the algorithm boost. Your audience is both people that know NOTHING about ships and navigation but find this new information they can't find elsewhere, and people actually whose job or hobby is on the sea or sea-adjacent who know some of this stuff but gets a kick out of you talking about it when few other channels do.
I wish you the best man, you deserve it.
Thanks Tinil0. I was just lucky that the topic I love has turned out to be popular on RUclips. Back when I started, I noticed there were plenty of other channels already, but none of them did the style that I wanted. They were either quite dry educational videos or factually inaccurate entertainment videos. This channel came about as a way of combining both, trying to make learning real topics a little more fun.
@@CasualNavigation You knocked it out of the park, or an equivalent idiom that works as well for non-Americans. Your vision perfectly matches what your channel is and I hope it pays dividends into the future!
I’m offended on behalf of the content maker as you used the word ‘man’ without knowing if this is acceptable to them.
Ridiculous??
Yes. Obviously. That’s the world we live in.
😂😂😂
Love your videos. It's great learning about a completely new industry and all the challenges there are.
Thanks JiKimbo
@@paddor new to me. I'm not a merchant sailor
There's a type of giant woodlouse within Blyth Harbour (Northern England) that lives within the wood of the various jettys. It arrived via cargo ships. The woodlouse creates tunnels through the timber of jettys. I know about them because I used to work in the fishing fleet from that port. We had to be careful at night when mooring because those louse could give a nasty bite.
Love this! You should also do a video on the NPDES vessel discharge permits ships have to adhere to. I’m in the US EPA’s NPDES program and these permits are really, really interesting and quite complicated, but serve a crucial role for dealing with things like treated sewage generated onboard. Even military vessels have to adhere to them, both in port and at sea.
I hadn't heard of the NPDES acronym before, but I'll go and check it out.
What do nuclear subs doo?
I work in the industry and am always learning from these videos!! awesome channel
Very interesting. Had no idea about the amount of effort being put into reducing the chances of introducing invasive species. Thanks for this video.
This video helped me in my exam. About how ships deal with invasive species in ballast water.
Thank you for making this.
We talked about stuff like this a week ago in one of my college classes actually. Funny how now it's a video on this channel. Love your work.
That's good timing!
Here in the UK we used to have a thriving red squirrel population but sadly the invasive grey squirrel killed most of them off. Crazy to think how much humans destroy the natural world.
Funny. I've heard hear in Canada the red squirrels are the aggressive ones that chase the grey squirrels away.
this is so interesting! I had never thought about this, but yeah, it makes sense. keep up the good work!
It’s not just in ballast, of course; I work on shore in roro shipping, and one of my main tasks is helping to administer the results of our in-voyage searches for halyomorpha halys, the brown marmorated stink bug. Australia and New Zealand *really* don’t want any of those little buggers getting in, which means insects getting on board can lead to expensive delays, diversions and fumigation.
I hadn't realised regular insects were an issue too, but that makes complete sense!
Video length, upload frequency, and quality of content are good enough for me to subscribe.
That dying fish animation killed me 😂
Damn, makes you wonder if any deep ocean habitats have suffered similar fates. They're not easy to see so we might not even notice them getting destroyed.
None
No surface organism will be able to survive in deep water pressure
@@Alucard-gt1zf But other deep ocean organisms can. I'm talking about the possibility that we took a deep ocean creature from one part of the earth and introduced it to a similar environment from somewhere else.
You have to be very specilized to be able to survive deep oceans
I have no connection to the marine space but somehow your videos are like top tier for me, I’ll watch them immediately no matter what.
It really is a shame that zebra mussels are not recommended for human consumption. Can you imagine having such an abundance of cheap shellfish available? Nom nom nom.
I remember seeing a kids science show in the 80’s (like 3-2-1, Contact) and they showed how damaging the zebra muscle was to the environment and to ports.
I like this channel because I can learn stuff from it while the videos are on the shorter side (5 to 10 minutes long) and I don’t need to read a lot of subtitles. I don’t remember what video of yours I first saw (in the past couple of years or so), but I probably subscribed soon after I watched it.
Also, I didn’t know how invasive species in lakes and rivers even got to the US until I saw this video.
Keep up the good videos👍
Zebra mussels cleared the life out of the lake my cottage was on (Great Lake tributaries) its been about 15 years since the “peak” and it’s starting to come back
Great topic!
Anyone else a little concerned about the 63% and wondering why this is giving them flashbacks of time constants and natural logs?
Great video by the way!
I knew I wasn't alone...
I really like that the shipping industry is actually doing this
aviation would never do anything that would hurt their bottom line
Unfortunately shipping industry is some of the most corrupt shit on earth, they contribute 60% of all waste in oceans and then tell you it's because you're using plastic straws.
Seaspiracy is a great documentary on netflix.
Edit.: fishing industry is the worst, not sure if there even is something called shipping industry
@@ninoski4043 oh shit
I didn't know that
also they are the ones that spill oil all the time
@@ninoski4043 80% of waste plastic in the oceans comes from China and Africa.
It's because the aviation industry isn't profitable, simply selling tickets or shipping goods for air travel doesn't cover what it takes to fly the airplane and have a reservation at hubs for your aircraft. That's why the air industry is more focused on fuel efficiency and how far a plane can fly and glide. It is far more affordable to put people and goods on ships than it is an airplane, however the speed of a plane much exceeds the need for affordability.
@@nallid7357 it's one of those industries that would not exist without state subsidies and constant bail out packages
one should question if it's really worth keeping them around with all the trouble they cause
maybe just buy them up and operate them state owned
I thought this was one of the most interesting videos you've done! Thanks for doing this channel :)
Thanks Max!
Amazingly well made video like usual.
Thanks Stank!
I remember my uncle telling me about this in the 80s that there were Bilgewater processes usually limited to ejecting bilge water “out at sea“ rather than in Portage
This channel is a gem
i can remember when i was a child, that some Asian Jellyfish got into the Baltic Sea, i just saied i saw some "new kind of Jellyfish" and everyone thought i wasnt serious, but funnily as far as i know they dont even change anything around them, what people were obviously afraid of when they found more and more of them.
Love your videos and learning about things I wouldn’t have other wise thought about.
Regarding ballast water contamination would it be possible to have a treated store of water at the ports that could be pumped in as the ships unloaded to avoid refitting ships to fit the new D2 standards? It wouldn’t be cheap to add such facilities to the ports but it would make it easier to have companies comply with environmental acts and standards.
Once again, love the videos!
I've once worked in a shipping port
Never knew there was so many thing to ships
Ur channel has made my brain a little bit bigget
love your videos man, thank you for the knowledge
Declorination of watter is very easy. Just let the watter sit in a well ventilated tank for a bit (how long the bit is depends on the volume of watter).
*water*
In Venice (and nearby) the local shellfish (few years ago) have been taken over.
How about not to drop ballast waters?
What if ships had some kind of storage tanks for ballast waters in port to take or leave their water for another ships?
What about constantly changing the ballast water. From departure all the way along.
So it is always washed thru with "local" water,with local species in it...
Great video. If I can recommend something for another video. Can you please have it on the topic of navigation. Differences between now and 100 years ago. Similarities/benefits of each. Even how Indigenous, like of the island peoples navigation.
As for the corrossion issue - chlorination might also be an issue since chlorine is more potent oxidizer than oxygen itself - the corrosion product (in case of steel tanks) is not rust (iron oxides) but iron(II,III) chlorides which are water-soluble.
Corrossion is a big issue in water electrolysis generally, especially around electrodes and the electrodes themselves (these are usually made from corrossion-resistant materials - like zinc, carbon, lead oxides, platinum etc.)
But why haven't they simply considered treating ballast water as fuel?
Each port has a number of tanks on shore for ballast water that is pumped in and out of ships as needed.
Then ships can fill/empty said water as necessary in deep water as per D1. But only fill/empty at port once over shallower waters through lines going to storage tanks.
Any necessity to empty water from the ports storage (beyond the need to fill ships with it) will of course necessitate treatment of the water. So ports will have to manage their storage levels.
They don't have to worry about running out of water, they can just fill with shore water. But they have to consider the implications of getting rid of water as it is contaminated and needs treatment.
Hi Casual Navigation! I love your videos. I'm a massive bookworm so I'm wondering if there are any books on some of the topics in your videos that you would recommend?
Love the channel
Thanks !
Thanks Michal. Unfortunately I don't have any personal book recommendations as most of the topics come from official IMO publications. You could check those out, but they are all quite boring legal text books.
@@CasualNavigation Np. Thanks for the reply. I'll just stick to your channel then 😜
Im in chicago and that has been a plague to local waterways. Its hard to describe how big an issue this is.
Large sections of Manhattan is composed of the remains of East London, brought back across as ballast since the ships were deadheading back across the Atlantic.
Zebra mussels are an absolute scourge to the Great Lakes. I grew up on the lakes in the late 80's and early 90's when their populations were exploding. At it's peak, every hard surface was absolutely encrusted with them, their shells washed up in piles on beaches and were like walking on broken glass. Many cities that used the lakes for water supply had interruptions to their intake pipes. They absolutely changed the ecology of the Great Lakes. They're still infesting new inland lakes every year, especially in Minnesota. Lake Mille Lacs was infested and walleye populations, the cornerstone of a vibrant recreational fishing industry there have crashed, while more sight based fish like Musky and Smallmouth Bass have exploded. And then there's sea lampreys, gobies, and Eurasian milfoil, all ballast hitchhikers that have all had their turn wrecking the Great Lakes and nearby watersheds.
How about radiation during ballast intake and release? Or is there any regulations about carring radioactive items at sea?
I love seeing new videos from you, they are so informative and have got me interested in a subject I never would have guessed I'd have been interested in. They are also very pleasant viewing.
Thanks Ben. I'm really happy to have introduced you to the industry.
What about salination (as in Dead Sea level or higher)... making ballast water so salty nothing lives, pump the high-salt water through the whole system, re-hydrate/balance before discharge.
I know that saltwater is heavier than freshwater.. and that's as far as my science goes... could/would it work?
What about earthworms in america how many are invasive.
I know the answer but billions dont.
Great video as always! I did have one qusetion, once a ship has been brought up to D2 standards do the Ballast Water Exchange/flow through requirements still apply? Or can they go back to discharging when/wherever they want to?
The purpose of D2 to set physical limits to the number/size of organisms, so whether you achieve that through treatment / exchange / taking fresh water, it doesn't matter. You just have to ensure your discharge is in compliance.
Man, using ballast water as coolant sounds like a very elegant solution, maybe if the ballast tank are coated with something it would be balanced long term (?
There's a very easy and non-costly solution to this:
Make the ships dump their entite ballast tanks (1 at a time) when they're X distance away from the port where their ballasts were loaded. X depends on studies. X would be determined by the closest location that doesn't have the invasive species, but maybe 2x as far away so they have little chance of surviving when dumped.
Example would be: you take on water ballast in Los Angeles.
You get 50miles away from the coast. Say you have 10 tanks. You dump ballast tank 1, and ballast tank 10. You then dump tank 2 and refill 1 simultaneously (giving them the max amount of empty-tank time).
You keep doing this until all your tanks have dumped their destructive invasive species, and refilled with water in an area that doesn't contain those species. (Keep in mind a species isn't negative just because it's invasive. Its only negative when it causes damage.)
Why not have ships connect to ballast water pumps at dock to enable exchange and have the contaminated water be treated on land at the port?
Awesome information ty
Correction: Production of chlorine from salt by electricity is electrolysis, not hydrolysis.
1 it should require the removal of ALL SPECIES PROTECTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT SHOULD BE HELD TO SUCH STANDARDS IM SORRY BUT COMMON IS IT REALLY TO MUCH TO ASK FOR THAT I MEAN COMMON!!! Anyways also because even if you try your still going to removal all species your still going to have some left over on accident so you should BE REQUIRED TO ADD ALL POSSIBLE METHODS of eliminating the species that come out of the ballast water!
Can they make ballast water filters to do it's best to keep animals out and only bring water in?
I wonder if they could use gamma rays to sterilize the ballast tanks? It's already used to sterilize food and produce for longer shelf life.
another one of those vids i didn't know i wanted to watch
Why not put mesh filters over the opening of whatever pump hose thing to bring in water for the ballasts
Can you make a video on how large the problem is with ships that discarde waste illegally in the ocean?
I'm not sure about the illegal waste part, but I definitely want to cover different ship discharges.
I looked at the title and I was like hold up, wait a minute, something ain’t right
Another great video, love the animations. Bearing in mind the huge quantities of water to be filtered on a regular basis (~30000m3 per operation on a 150000t dwt bulker?), it would be interesting to know of the disposal rules for all the crud caught in the 1st stage filters, not much point filtering it out to then 'hoy it over the wall'. I expect the early retrofit systems, like others before them, will be very labour intensive and only be fitted to meet the minimum legal requirements rather than be of benefit to the world. But hey, we have to start somewhere!
I suspect the filtered material can be tossed overboard if you do is in the water you just filtered (litterally putting it back where you got it) or can be properly disposed of in a port facility where it is presumably burned or dehydrated and shipped to a landfill far from water ways.
1 important note behind the theory of the deep water exchange is that salt amd fresh water are very different at the cellular level. Fresh water has a low mineral concentration so it will rush across cell membranes to equalize solute density, so fresh water critters need to be constantly pumping out water from themselves. Salt water by contrast has much higher solute densities so it doesn't rush across cell membranes simce the pressure is already equal or even reversed. The end result is salt water microbes dumped in fresh water die to over hydration and pop like balloons, and fresh water microbes dumped into salt water get dehydrated and die shriveled up like raisins. For a land comparison its like planting a cactus in the Everglades and a cattail in the Mojave, you just don't expect them to live very long. Of course larger animals are better at surviving getting dumped im the wrong body of water salinity wise bit even then its usually only really big fish like salmon or bull sharks that can live in either.
Fascinating stuff!
Great post my friend. ⛵️
Cheers Gef.
This may be me just being a rookie, but what about fine mesh screens on the intakes, it would stop a large majority of major species from getting in the tanks?
You can't really fit it to the intake, at least not as fine as you need them. At the required fine sizes, they are very restrictive to the water flow and a much larger surface area is needed. You probably need about 50 times the pipe cross section as a filter surface, maybe more if you catch too much stuff and it frequently blocks the filter.
I love how it started with “why are ships bottoms red” now I watch every video like I understand ships😂
It's a bit like "Closing the barn door after the animals have gotten out" now .
why dont you use ozon? it will be corrosive as well, but arent ballasts painted inside?
how about increasing or decreasing pressure in the tanks? I know at certain pressure it can crush micro organisms, and in very low pressure even the water will turn to gas and the cell walls would be ripped apart. I think these may be way less energy efficient, but I wanted to mention them since you didn't mention them.
Would you make a video about corrosion and the anti corosion tech that is used on ships? Anodes and such
i'm just sitting here wondering why adding a filter/screen at the intake isn't an option?
What about continually pumping water throughout a ships journey so the tanks is always filled with semi-local water?
If they realized the cost savings of anti-fouling, maybe they could introduce a similar concept to the interior of ballast tanks and using the engine heat to boil.
What about having permanent weights aboard with an adjustable air inflation system to offset the weight, deflate to increase the weight.
The pumping water through idea is pretty much what he described as the "flow-through" method, at around 3:25. Problem is that unless the tank is completely emptied, you'll never be able to 100% exchange the water, assuming it all mixes some little remnant - and potentially some organisms - will remain.
Anti-fowling I don't think would work if you're carrying an actual mass of water. Anti-fowling prevents sea life attaching to the exterior of the ship, and anything outside not attached will drift away. When actually carrying a bunch of water, things could be floating in it rather than adhering to the insides of the tank.
The adjustable air inflation idea - sounds like you're thinking of a semi-rigid inflatable (basically a giant RHIB, Rigid-Hull Inflatable Boat) or something, where part of the ship's buoyancy when fully loaded is provided by inflated pontoons? An interesting idea I suppose, but I'd worry there would be several problems. The less optimally shaped and less rigid inflated portions would be less hydrodynamically efficient. They would also wear out over time and be costly to replace/maintain. Same goes for the air compressor systems needed to inflate them, extra complexity. And if it fails when the ship is heavily laden the ship would lose critical buoyancy and could sink. I don't know a ton about the smaller RHIB, but the sense I get is they have some durability and performance advantages in certain circumstances, but their performance (speed per horsepower at a given size) and maintenance costs are higher than an equivalent conventional boat. On a small scale, in some circumstances, the advantages outweigh this, but I have a hard time seeing that on a large scale.
am suprised they dont spray a ned liner type protecter on the inside of there holds
i like your biblically accurate microorganisms
Can't you boil the water in the heat of the engine when your discharging the water?
id love to read more into this!
could someone link some good reading material for this?
Given organisms have the habit of self replication exponentially does reducing nuber of imported organisms really do anything? One a viable population takes hold there's nothing that can be done.
Tbh, I figured they'd use tanks at ports to receive the ballast, so no organisms got into the local environment.
But maybe that was too costly and inflexible?
What would the ports then do with the water?
Ships need massive amounts of water for ballast. It also needs to be loaded or discharged as quickly as the cargo is moved.
Zebra mussels were probably a problem in the Great Lakes already, but suddenly in the 80s and 90s they became a sort of cause celebre- every news segment seemed to have an item on this problem and our generalized apparent impotence to deal with it.
Finding Nemo would’ve been a wayyy longer movie if he got caught in a cargo ships ballast tank lmaoo
If the Zebra Mussel is a fresh water species, how come it survived in a salt water envitonment? Specialist vessals put paid to free or cheap ballast cargos that could make a tidy profit elsewhere such as mining waste rock used for roads and guarno for fertiliser manufacture.
I propose, use a filter/net to capture the animals, and use them for other needs.
I always wondered how long it would take to equalize if we introduced everything everywhere.
Romanian here, didn’t know the Black Sea had those. Quite interesting
From the thumbnail I thought the US was paying $500m/year to maintain some old boat from the American Revolution era. An invasive species makes way more sense.
well maybe
Surely chlorination would corrode the ballast tanks like nothing else?
How about have all the treatment methods at once?
Is it possible to have all of them done in one ship ?
I wonder how effective it would be to use the CO2 from the engines as a form of deoxination. I mean if 30 ppm is enough to kill off anything in a fishtank then 60ppm (~110mg/m^3) should be adequate for a bilgetank right? Additionally if you heated (via the engine) the water before releasing it into the ocean can have a further pasturizing effect.
co2 would be difficult to extract from the other exhaust gases, co2 being only about 12% of the exhausted gases emitted. Also increasing the co2 causes the ph of the water to decrease, meaning the water becoming acidic which would definitely not be good for inhibiting corrosion and would need to have ph adjusted before being released back into the sea water probably.
Chlorine makes most sense, its cheap and or can be made from sea water onboard and will burn off into the atmosphere by exposure to sunlight.
How much is the volume of those ballast tanks?
I know it would be very naive to think that nobody haven't considered that but isn't it possible to fill those tanks with fresh water from the outside?
Is it too slow to fill? Maybe too expensive?
Sorry for the stupid questions but I am just curious what is the reason not to be done. I am sure there is reason(s) but I'm just wondering what it is.
PS: Another great and interesting video even for someone like me who doesn't have any interest about ships, sea etc! Good job!
The regular ballast tanks of a vessel have a capacity between several thousend liter up to several million liters of water. Depending on the sice of the ship. To fill them with fresh water would take way to long and would be very expensive. This comes from the point that most of the ballast water is taken or discharged during cargo operation to maintain the stability of the vessel. If you would need until they are filled with fresh water cargo operations would need to be stopped. Speaking about this there are normally tanks which are filled with fresh water and this are the "heeling tanks" this is a pair of tanks on both sides of the vessel which are used to compensate the heel from left to right in port. But as the water in these tanke is only transfered between them they are not relevant for this topic (as you dont discharge the water into the sea).
@@TheNereus1992 I see. Well the capacity of the tanks exceeded my expectations. So in that case it makes total sense to not waste clean water just to throw it into the ocean later on. Thanks for the answer! :)
Ships can take thousands of tons of water ballast, so it would be very expensive and demanding on local infrastructure to use fresh water instead.
@@CasualNavigation thanks for the response. Like I mentioned in reply to TheNereus1992, with such massive capacity it makes sense.
I just thought the tanks have much smaller volume. Maybe 100-200 cubic meters at most, but now I understand they considerably bigger.
Sooo... basically the idea behind moving the water treatment work aboard the ship is to transfer the /time/ it takes to the time the ship is in transit?
It almost feels like these large ships are big mechanical organisms. A big floating organism towing our goods around the world.
Why not use a medium intensity irradiation of the water as it's fed through a pipe. The radiation source is a sealed isotope cannister that has water running around it. The radiation does not kill but just sterilizes the life forms from reproducing. It's done in the agricultural industry and food processing industries so why not shipping? When the radiation source is no longer needed it still remains sealed in it's cannister when it's removed to be sent off to the radioisotope recycling center. Even city waste water is irradiated with no residual effects on the water itself at municipal sewage treatment treatment centers.
Could it be more cost effective to install ballast supplies in the ports, rather than retrofitting every single ship? Have some big tanks on land that go through a water treatment process, and are made safe that the ships must sup from to start with. Having known good water when they reach the next port should let them dump it with minimal concern.
It might be, but the port would only do it if there was a commercial reason (profit) for them doing so.
TIL you can get, by ship, from the ocean to the Caspian Sea.