€10m funding for ammonia fuel cell project

The ShipFC project will see an offshore vessel, Viking Energy, which is owned and operated by Eidesvik and on contract to energy major Equinor, have a large 2MW ammonia fuel cell retrofitted in late 2023, allowing it to sail solely on the clean fuel for up to 3,000 hours annually. As such, the project will demonstrate that long-range zero-emission voyages with high power on larger ships is possible.

“We see projects such as the ShipFC conversion to use ammonia on a high-powered marine fuel cell as an important step in finding the right sustainable and clean solutions in the future,” said senior vice president for joint operations support in Equinor, Cecilie Rønning.

Delivering power safely

A 100kW fuel cell will be scaled up to 2MW. The project aims to ensure that a large fuel cell can deliver total electric power to shipboards systems safely and effectively.

The fuel cell will be tested on land in a parallel project and development and construction will be undertaken by Prototech. The ship-side ammonia system will be supplied by Wärtsilä. Crop nutrition company Yara has been contracted to supply the green ammonia.

The ShipFC project is run by a consortium of 14 European companies and institutions, co-ordinated by the Norwegian cluster organisation NCE Maritime CleanTech. It has been awarded backing from the EU’s research and innovation programme Horizon 2020 under its Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU).

By Rebecca Jeffrey