EU Project SEASTARS: Sustainable Emission Abatement Strategies and Technologies for Advanced Revolution Ships

By 2030, the SEASTARS project aims to cut emissions compared to 2008 levels and improve energy efficiency by 20% compared to 2022 benchmarks. The project focuses on eight vessel designs — 4 retrofits and 4 newbuilds — covering inland, short-sea, and high-seas shipping.

The project aims at incorporating different technical efficiency measures directly related to the vessel’s hydrodynamic, by propeller-hull optimization and air lubrication implementation, the vessel’s machinery, by selecting different innovative technologies such as fuel cells, electric motors, integrated solar panels, sails and electrochemical storage systems, and the vessel’s Energy, by exploring different alternative fuels such as biofuels, hydrogen, methanol, LNG, ammonia and different energy treatment systems like fuel preparation, fuel reforming, cold ironing, pre-combustion and post-combustion Carbone Capture Storage (CCS).

Through the use of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and a phased assembly-to-order approach, SEASTARS will help shipowners not only to evaluate the vessel’s emission reduction and efficiency enhancement but also to generate appropriate action-time plans for the decarbonization process and to quantify the related investment decisions, so to adapt their fleet to be always in line with the imposed regulation. Emission reduction and efficiency improvement technologies are designed as modules that can be added, scaled up or replaced in phases over time into a ship that is designed in a flexible and traceable way, enabling decreasing emissions progressively while maintaining a reasonable investment risk, controlled by the shipowners.

The SEASTARS consortium consists of 19 participants and 5 associated partners from 5 EU countries, Liberia and United Kingdom. Partners are ship owners, ship design consultancy companies, research institutes, universities and innovative technology providers.