Building shipyard capacity is valuable. The emerging fossil-heavy orderbook raises questions about costs and independent customers. TFIE Strategy Briefing.
South Korea’s Hanwha Group owns the Philadelphia shipyard that has become a centerpiece of Washington’s attempt to rebuild American commercial shipbuilding. Its Hanwha Ocean and Hanwha Systems subsidiaries acquired the US yard in December 2024. The investment creates and sustains American production capacity and jobs while transferring shipbuilding expertise, technology … [continued]
Illustrative coastal bulk carrier at a Norwegian-style industrial quay. Illustration: TFIE Strategy Briefing; not a GMI vessel or terminal.
Norwegian shipping company GMI Group is moving ahead with four hydrogen-electric bulk carriers for coastal freight. In October 2026, PowerCell confirmed a follow-up order that brings the program to 24 marine fuel-cell units with 5.4 MW of combined installed capacity. The first two ships, rated at 4,000 deadweight tonnes, are … [continued]
Electric mobile harbour cranes can handle a changing cargo mix. Illustration: TFIE Strategy Briefing.
Katoen Natie has put two all-electric mobile harbour cranes into service at the Port of Antwerp, with four more joining them across three deep-sea multipurpose terminals. The completed fleet will include four 200-tonne cranes and two 150-tonne machines, with paired lifting capacity reaching 400 tonnes. Katoen Natie expects the six … [continued]
Shipping decarbonization presents policymakers with a bewildering range of choices. Batteries, biofuels, methanol, ammonia, hydrogen, wind assistance, shore power, nuclear propulsion and onboard carbon capture all compete for attention, despite serving very different vessel types and operating requirements. Future Cleantech Architects (FCA), a German nonprofit think tank that evaluates climate … [continued]
Electric ships attract attention because the vessel is the visible technology. Put a large battery into an inland cargo vessel, replace the diesel propulsion system with electric motors, and the decarbonization story appears straightforward. Inland shipping looks particularly promising because many vessels travel repeatable routes between known terminals, where large … [continued]
Ports need more investment for bigger ships, resilience and decarbonization just as some of the bulk cargoes that funded them begin to decline.
Ports are being asked to make infrastructure decisions that will last thirty, forty or fifty years while several of the assumptions that paid for their existing infrastructure are changing at the same time. Ships are getting larger, requiring deeper channels, larger cranes and more capable tug fleets. Climate disruption is … [continued]
Tugboats combine brief demands for very high thrust with repeated operation inside the same ports, making their duty cycle unusually well suited to electrification.
Tugboats do not initially look like good candidates for battery propulsion. A harbour tug has to shove, pull and control ships weighing tens or hundreds of thousands of tonnes, sometimes in wind, current and confined channels where losing thrust is not an acceptable outcome. Modern ship-assist tugs consequently carry propulsion … [continued]
DNV says shore power, plug-in hybrids and fully electric ships could materially reduce future shipping fuel demand, but those pathways sit outside the simulation producing its headline 2050 fuel requirement.
DNV’s new Maritime Forecast to 2050 puts a very large number on shipping’s future demand for low-carbon molecules. In its strongest global-regulation scenario, internationally operating ships above 400 gross tonnes require about 185 million tonnes of oil equivalent of low-GHG fuel in 2050, roughly 7.7 to 7.8 exajoules. That implies … [continued]
Falling battery costs push freight toward electricity everywhere, but inherited road, rail and water systems determine where that transition lands.
Battery costs are falling globally, but freight does not begin from a common starting point. China, India, Europe and the United States move domestic cargo through very different combinations of road, rail and water, so cheaper batteries will not produce one standard freight-electrification pathway. Using the best comparable data I … [continued]
Hydrogen gets the lights and cameras, while scalable maritime electrification increasingly depends on the quieter infrastructure of grids, batteries and routine charging.
At the Port of Tilbury on the Thames, GeoPura recently put one of its hydrogen power units on a floating platform and used it to charge a commercial electric vessel. The system delivered 300 kW through five Ballard fuel cells. It was visually irresistible: a barge, hydrogen equipment, a working … [continued]
