Estimating hydrogen usage of a Crew Transport Vessel fleet for Offshore Windfarm maintenance

Abstract

This paper presents an estimate for the mass of hydrogen that would be needed to power the current fleet of Crew Transport Vessels (CTVs) used for maintaining the German offshore wind farms and how this demand may be geographically distributed. The estimate is based on a calculation of the marine diesel oil consumption of the current fleet, which is further employed for estimating the current emissions of these activities. Based on the predicted price of hydrogen, bunkering the CTV fleet with hydrogen may become economically advantageous in the future. Moreover, using hydrogen may reduce CO2 emissions. Results have been obtained by using vessel position data, weather data, and diesel consumption estimates. As a shortcoming, certain effects are excluded from the current estimate. However, this work presents an approach that can be improved and used for estimating hydrogen consumption in future scenarios. In these scenarios, a vessel type and parameters can be set. While here the challenge was to create a generic model that can be applied to multiple types of vessels.