Royal Caribbean Cruises will do biodiesel
There are few ways to travel that are less kind to the environment than a cruise (or to people, if you agree with David Foster Wallace in his essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again). Still, there's a bit of recent good news from the Royal Caribbean Cruise line: the company will use 18 million gallons of biodiesel from Imperium Renewables starting in 2008. The relationship will kick off this year with 15 million gallons going to the cruise ships.
Royal Caribbean's Securities and Exchange Commission filing says, in part, "We believe this is the single-largest long-term biodiesel sales contract to an end user in the U.S." IR is building a huge biodiesel plant in Grays Harbor, Washington, and Royal Caribbean Cruises had a 7 percent stake in the plant. Imperium will buy that seven percent.
[Source: The Seattle Times]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
RD 12:32PM (8/18/2008)
So now it is August 2008, Royal Carribean sells its stake in Emporium and cancels the biodiesel contract. Why? Are the technical problems of biodiesel outweighing the advantages or is it the cost?
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Joseph 8:41PM (8/05/2007)
Whoa, that's alot of biodiesel!
Does anyone know how much fuel the biodiesel replaces?
By 50% maybe?
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GoodCheer 9:48AM (8/06/2007)
To the best of my knowledge biodiesel is almost exactly as energetic as refined petroleum diesel. (This was corroborated on Mythbusters, who ran an old Benz on filtered used frier oil with only a 10% loss in mileage).
That suggests it should replace the existing fuel source at about 1:1.
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Tim 10:07AM (8/06/2007)
This is an excellent way to demonstrate to other "shipping" companies that biodiesel is superior to petrodiesel especially in a nautical environment because biodiesel is less polluting than even table sugar when spilled into the environment. This will also serve to ramp-up production thus allowing economies of scale to reduce renewable fuel prices to other consumers. It also makes this industry appear more environmental friendly which should increase their sales.
Hopefully, other shippers will follow suit. All in all, a win-win-win.
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