Could We Dredge the Netherlands Without Fossil Fuels?
The Netherlands dredges 30-35 million cubic meters of mud annually to keep its waterways navigable, a task now performed by oil-powered ships consuming up to 3,000 liters per hour. But before fossil fuels, the Dutch relied on manual labor, animal power, wind, and tides, using ingenious tools like dredge bags, dredge mills, and wind-powered scratchers. This article explores these pre-industrial techniques and asks whether a fossil-free future for dredging is possible, even estimating how many people would be needed to do it by hand again.
At low tide, the sluice gates of the basin were opened and the scratcher was pushed through the harbour with great force as the iron teeth scraped across the bottom.
- an_account
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.
- BigTTYGothGF
> 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.
- arjie
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.
- amelius
Reminded me of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-1Af96gYVI
"The insane plan to dam the North Sea."
- throwawayffffas
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.