Fuel cell technology to help clean up shipping

By Wojciech Moskwa

OSLO (Reuters) - A group of north European companies aims to show how fuel cells can clean up ship engines, which now use filthy fuels such as oil refinery residues and can spew out hundreds of times more pollutants than automobiles.

The companies plan to install a clean fuel-cell engine aboard a supply ship in 2008 and believe that a large share of the marine world will follow suit within 25 years.

"Green" engines for ships will gain footing in the fiercely competitive global shipping industry, they say, as technology advances and relatively lax environmental norms toughen.

"Stricter regulations coupled with policies favoring green solutions will in future years more than compensate for the higher initial investment costs of fuel cells," Tomas Tronstad, who heads the cross-industry fuel cell project for Norwegian ship classifier Det Norske Veritas (DNV), told Reuters.

"We hope that in a decade there will be many similar projects around the world and in a quarter century a large part of the marine world could be on fuel cells," Tronstad said.

Iceland already plans to convert its entire fishing fleet to hydrogen fuel cell engines as part of its environmental drive.

The shipping industry says it is more green than other modes of transport considering the huge amount of trade that ships carry, although the heavy fuel used in shipping emits 700 times more sulphur dioxide than diesel exhausts from road vehicles.

DNV estimates that fuel cells -- which generate electric power from a chemical process instead of combustion like regular engines -- now cost about six times more than diesel generators.