Energy Transition Path

Recently, IMO has agreed to reduce the CO2-emissions of shipping by 40% in 2030 and even further by 2050. This raises tremendous challenges related to the energy transition as ships which are currently designed will still be around after these transitions.

Even though much research efforts focus on the characteristics of new fuels for shipping, these efforts aim at the more distant future of 2030-2050. Ships built in the next 5-10 years will not be able to take action on this, as the technologies are not yet available. How ships should be designed with such uncertainty in future fuels is an open question. Ships are complex integrated systems of systems, where the change of one parameter will invariably result in changes to others.

The aim of this work package is to design ships that can adapt to completely new energy systems in the future, without the design becoming too rigid in the considered futures, or too expensive to be economically viable now.