What if your car made its own fuel as you drove down the road? That’s sort of what Energy Observer does. It runs on hydrogen but it doesn’t have to stop at a filling station; it makes the hydrogen itself.

The project is a joint effort between a naval architecture team and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). The hull was originally a racing boat but now it’s a floating laboratory that sails the world testing innovative energy technologies. The goal is to perfect these technologies and move us all towards a more sustainable future.

Unlike your lab at school, this one moves. A lot. It set sail in 2017 and will spend 6 years sailing around the world, propelled only by renewable energy. Each year it will stop at the shipyard for data analysis and systems upgrades before heading back out to sea. Most recently, it traded in its vertical wind turbines for a new kind of wind propeller that reduces energy consumption, but increases both energy production and sailing speed.

If global shipping were a country it would rank sixth in greenhouse gas emissions. The technologies developed on the Energy Observer could be used to cut down on the fuel consumption and pollution of commercial shipping. It isn’t the first vehicle to cross oceans using renewable energy; Several boats and planes have circumnavigated the planet using solar power, and there are new ones being developed. But as the saying goes, competition breeds innovation.

As you’ll see in the video, the Energy Observer is quite innovative indeed.

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