New e-fuels project to make international shipping climate neutral

That is how much cargo the bulk carrier from TOPIC Fleet which is used as the case study in the new EU project GAMMA, can carry across the world’s oceans. Ocean freight transport requires large amounts of fuel, mainly made up of fossil fuels today. With the GAMMA innovation project, which began in January 2024, a wide range of partners are now working to change that.

This is according to Kjartan Due Nielsen, Innovation Manager at Icelandic engineering company Verkís, which is leading the GAMMA project.

“On behalf of the entire group of partners, I can say that we are proud and grateful that the European Commission has chosen to support the GAMMA project and efforts to convert international shipping in a greener direction. We will retrofit a bulk carrier with highly innovative technologies and during a demonstration campaign we will prove that it is possible to replace auxiliary generators with a new fuel system that runs on e-fuels. After proof of concept in GAMMA the next step would be to replace the main engines of a ship for a full energy transition. All in all, the project is very visionary, and could be a green game changer for shipping in the future,” says Kjartan Due Nielsen.

Today, long-distance maritime transport supports 80-90 per cent of all global trade. Therefore, there will be considerable potential for climate-beneficial reductions in converting ocean-going transportation to green fuels. The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has set a goal for the maritime sector to reduce the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions to around net-zero by 2050. The five-year GAMMA project will contribute to this, say representatives from the start-up company Aurelia, which specialises in the concept design of climate-friendly vessels.

An innovative fuel system will be installed. Ammonia and green methanol will be bunkered on-to the ship and then converted into hydrogen with cracker and reformer technologies. The hydrogen will be purified and then converted into electricity with a fuel cell, which will be providing electric energy to the vessel and thus replacing the use of the auxiliary generators running on fossil fuel.

In addition to that, the partners have gone further, since part of the energy necessary to convert to hydrogen will be supplied by renewable energy, in this case PV panels, which will be installed on the hatch covers of the bulk carrier. Fraunhofer Institute provides the conversion technology, Amnis Pura the purifying and the fuel cell is provided by Ballard Power Systems Europe, meanwhile PV panels will be provided by Italian company Solbian.

“We have several decades of experience from innovation within green fuels, and therefore look forward to contributing to GAMMA with our research to convert e-fuels to hydrogen and look forward to bringing the new green technologies in the project forward….,” says Dr Gunther Kolb, Head of Division Energy, Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems.

The shipping industry will need to adapt fast to new IMO rules as most existing commercial vessels run on conventional fossil fuels. This means the ships will not be commercially nor technically competitive by 2030 if investment in new ships or retrofitting with greener technologies will not take place. 

The Gamma project began in January 2024 and will run for five years.  Gamma stands for Green Ammonia and Biomethanol fuel MAritime Vessels and involves 16 partners from Europe: Verkís (Iceland), ANT Topic (Italy), Fraunhofer (Germany), Aurelia (Netherlands), Ballard (Denmark), Sea Green Engineering (Italy), Energy Cluster Denmark (Denmark), SINTEF (Norway), Solbian (Italy), Amethyste (France), Elkon Elektrik (Turkey), Politecnico di Milano (Italy), ARM Engineering (France), RINA (Germany), Amnis Pura (Portugal) and Dotcom (Italy).