HIGHGREENCRAFT: Soluciones técnicas para la sostenibilidad de los High Speed Crafts en el marco de la U.E.

High Speed Crafts (HSC) have been presented as a desirable solution for short sea shipping, not only to ensure inter-island connectivity but also to articulate intermodal chains. However, their activity is being highly questioned in the EU because they result in being highly pollutant in terms of carbon intensity (Carbon Intensity Indicator-CII-gCO2/nautical mile and transported tonnage) due to their operative pattern (high speed and long hoteling times in port) and technical features (high propulsion power requirements and low cargo capacity ratios). Consequently, these vessels result to be rather incompatible with the European Green Deals aims.

Since 2023, vessels are classified according to their CII score, so when they do not achieve an environmental sufficiency rating, they must offer a plan to obtain it. This fact, along with the maritime transport’s inclusion in the European Market Based Measures (MBM) score: EU-ETS and Fuel-EU, which will come into force in 2024 and 2025, respectively, creates a real challenge for the survival of this maritime traffic pattern. This project attempts to identify technical solutions for the HSCs retrofitting not only to comply with the normative, but also to achieve a whole environmental optimization beyond the ship, by ensuring its economic feasibility from the shipowners perspective by including also solutions from the port and social standpoint.

In such a way, this project aims to continue the line of work initiated in the projects PID2020-119639RB-I00: Port-city binomial and maritime passenger traffic, ferries and cruises, by coping with the sustainability challenge and Renewable Energy and Hydrogen (2021-2025: Project co-financed by the Government of the Canary Islands and the Complementary R&D&I Plan for Renewable Energy and Hydrogen of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. EU Next Generation Funds) where not only major difficulties were identified for the environmental compliance by HSC (Tank to Wake emissions), but also the need to consider emerging solutions based on alternative fuels (such as green H2) and renewable energies uniquely focused on board electricity generation due to their current technological maturity.

The current project aims to go further by including the port contribution to the mitigation systems performance that were proposed for the ships. In such a way, whole environmental assessments (Well to Wake -WtW- emissions) can be carried out along with socio-economic analyses of the resulting MBM. To this end, mathematical models will be developed to simulate, on the one hand, the polluting impact of HSC modified with emerging technologies by considering the port contribution (Well to Tank -WtT- emissions) and, on the other hand, the monetary effect of their MBM. Thus, finding solutions to minimize WtT will be also an implicit objective, in such a way, the project will tackle the opportunity of having intra-port renewable generation parks with capacity of supplying the fuels or the green energy required by the technological solutions identified for the HSCs fleet. Since MBM have been identified as a key incentive for the HSCs decarbonization, the project analyzes their current architecture in terms of proportionality and suitability to HSC when they are modified with emerging technologies in order to improve their acceptation. Likewise, the social NPV will be used to analyze the consequences of the MBM exemptions to HSC in the outermost zones of the EU.