Sails do however require masts, and retrofitting existing cargo ships with sturdy masts might not be feasible.

https://nh3fuelassociation.org/comparisons/

Too slow. Time is money.

I wonder if we could not turn all our water reactors into thorium reactors. If you lined the walls with ceramic it would keep the steel from reacting I believe. There are many castable high temperature materials that could work.

That’s something that’s widely repeated across the media, and even in some SAE and IMechE papers, but it’s simply not true. Given the politicization and fund-mongering usually driving those papers, it might be termed “a lie.”

Hydrogen and oxygen, burned together, will do as described. But air is mostly nitrogen, and hydrogen and air burn down to, among other things, a class of compounds known as “oxides of nitrogen”, which are not just EPA-regulated pollutants, but the big wazoo; NOx was what was responsible for the brown and yellow smog some cities used to be covered with. And it’s a real bastard to deal with; it forms at low-ish temperatures and pressures, and it took the 3-way catalysts to do much about it. And now the EPA is going after the Diesels, which formerly got a free pass, but also make it as part of the combustion process. Hydrogen burns hotter than either, and makes proportionally *more* NOx than hydrocarbon fuels; it burns “clean” in places like California for the some reason Diesels used to; legislative decree, not chemistry.

The chemistry of hydrogen combustion is covered in Glassman’s Combustion, which is the bible for people who want to kill things with fire.

There really isn’t a good way to store or transport hydrogen, period. Every single alternative falls down on the amount of waste you get from leaks, and how it tends to break down the containers it is stored in.

If,however, you put it into a benzene ring, guess what? Easily stored, easily handled with existing infrastructure, and much more energy-dense than anything else we have at the present time.

TBH, I think the IC engine has a lot of life in it, and the eventual advent of man-made low-pollution hydrocarbon fuels will keep them around for a long, long time. Do it right, and there won’t be any really significant pollution, because all that’s going to be in the fuel will be carbon and hydrogen. Hell, you could probably sell it as a way to get carbon out of the atmosphere, if you played your cards right.

All that’s really needed is cheap electricity, which you could get from things like thorium reactors, or fusion. Only thing missing is the will, and the common sense to guide us.

Electric and anything fueled by hydrogen are a huge waste of time, due to lack of energy density with anything we can make, and storage issues.

Hydrogen lifting gas, while not actually safer than helium, is probably negligibly less safe.