Mark Wray, our Ecosystem Director, Maritime & Ports, will Chair the panel session titled ‘Targeting Net Zero – Opportunities and Challenges’ on Day 1 (11:45-12:30), with panellists from Frazer-Nash Consultancy, Serco, Ricardo and OREC.
Also on Day 1, Richard Wigley, our SME Innovation Support Team Lead, will deliver a presentation as part of  the session titled ‘Sustainable Business Model Innovation’ from 14:30.

On Day 2, Justin Anderson, Director of Digital Twin Hub, will join the Innovation Exchange session from 11:45 to deliver a ‘lightning talk’.

Finally, on Day 3 of the event, Service Designers Trusha Oza and Eleanor Pile will host a workshop on inclusive innovation, from 12:50; and Mark Wray will Chair a panel on Disruptive Technology and How can it positively impact our Ports.

The Maritime & Ports Ecosystem team, as well as the Delivery team, will engage in a variety of activity over the course of LISW23.

The maritime industries come together through Maritime UK to make progress on key areas of shared interest. Maritime UK’s national priorities are innovation, people, competitiveness, regional growth and the environment.

Connected Places Catapult follows Port Skills and Safety, which were the latest organisation to join the national umbrella body in December 2021. Maritime UK’s objectives are to champion and work to enable a thriving maritime sector. It does this through a combination of industry coordination and campaigning coupled with its programmes in each priority area.

The Catapult has been growing its impact in the maritime sector over recent years, and sees formalising its partnership with Maritime UK as an excellent way to continue working with the sector, scaling impact and bringing expertise from across multiple other markets in the UK and globally.

The Catapult offers multi-disciplinary, systems-focussed support to the great challenges and opportunities facing global communities today, from decarbonisation of infrastructure and transport to the digitalisation of future cities. In the maritime sector, the Catapult has worked closely with industry, innovators, academia and government to deliver key work such as the UK Ports of the Future Blueprint, the Freeports Playbook, the recently announced Moving on the Mersey initiative and more, including four recent Clean Maritime Demonstrator Competition projects. The Catapult supports industry to understand the potential value of new technologies, better targeting investment and building on cross-sector experience whilst accelerating innovative solutions to market, working together with larger technology organisations, SMEs and academia.

As part of Maritime UK Week in October, the Catapult will be running two events.

On 12 October the ‘Innovation in Freeports – Driving investment through freeport innovation’ event will be held jointly between Connected Places Catapult, Innovate UK KTN and Maritime UK. This event will bring together leaders from across UK freeports and the wider ecosystem focused on delivering their mission, to share experiences, make new connections and hear global perspectives on successful freeports.

On 14 October Connected Places Catapult, with its partners Portsmouth City Council and Hampshire County Council, will host a Connections Cafe ‘How marine and maritime deliver growth: cross-sector opportunities’. The event will focus on key challenges faced within the industry and identify opportunities driving innovation and prosperity. It aims to encourage collaboration from complementary sectors, ranging from industry to academia, and understand the benefits for those in marine and maritime.  This is an open event – register here.

Read more about joining Maritime UK as a member here.

Read more about Connected Places Catapult’s work here.

The Maritime Accelerator is a new challenge-led, 6-month accelerator programme powered by Connected Places Catapult.

The Catapult will select up to 10 SMEs to join the programme where they will receive support from a consortium of industry, government, academic and regulatory partners on the trial and testing of disruptive innovations.

This application support webinar will cover the programme challenges and guidance on the application process.

Through a focus on new and emerging challenges within the maritime ecosystem, Connected Places Catapult will work alongside partners to ensure that the programme tackles significant sector challenges and de-risks innovation in the marketplace. Partners include Port of Tyne, National Oceanographic Centre, National Shipbuilding Office, Plymouth University, DP World and others to be announced.

To find more about the programme, including how to apply, visit our application page.

So attention has now turned to the maritime transportation sector, hence the discussions around this important sector at COP26 and beyond due to our increasing appetite for consumer goods, foodstuffs and produce from around the world.

To date the government has formed a strategy to a) reduce emissions within the maritime sector and b) at the same time convert our ports into areas of ‘green opportunity’ as hubs that produce energy for the wider economy.

Governments, academia, and ecological bodies have come together to form a strategy of action to reduce carbon dioxide globally.

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has set a target to halve 2008 emission levels by 2050.

The strategies in place to reduce these emission levels are through:

• increasing electrification of ports and port handling processes, and
• the adoption of future fuels for example LNG (liquified natural gas), hydrogen or ammonia

Globally we all need to ‘come together as one’ to decarbonise shipping and ports, thus ensuring we meet our target for maritime CO₂ reduction.

The United Kingdom is ideally positioned to lead the way in maritime carbon and CO2 reduction. Due to the UK being the home of the IMO, having direct access to regulators and the other bodies listed above. Though we must not forget the United Kingdom has always been a pioneering and seafaring nation when it comes to shipping. This has stemmed from the pioneering days of the seventeenth century exploration, the creation of the commonwealth and through to the present.

There are over 100 ports are operating around the UK that process over 95% of UK trade. Thus, the time is right now for us to take the lead and lead by example in decarbonising our ports. ‘First mover’ opportunities within this sector allow us to build a significant competitive advantage.

For example:

• The governments ‘Build Back Better’ strategy places the UK in the ideal position for our Ports to be among one of the first countries in the G20 to achieve net-zero.
• The use of offshore wind farms to generate ‘clean energy’ in turn to supply the local logistics and warehousing sector with electricity.

Ports are a complex mix of internal processes and wider stakeholder interactions that present significant challenges and opportunities in terms of reaching our national net-zero targets. Today our ports incorporate a broad range of infrastructure ranging from dockside facilities built in the Victorian era to highly automated cargo processing equipment. Therefore, what is the upshot and what is needed to achieve net-zero within our ports? Here are a few examples:

• Adoption of ‘clean fuels’ e.g., Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) or Hydrogen. It has been noted that a green hydrogen industry could generate £320bn for the UK economy by 2050 and would support over 120,000 jobs within Freeports nationally.
• Offshore renewable energy – the UK has the largest installed offshore wind capacity in Europe. This creates significant opportunity for our ports in the wind supply chain, for example, manufacturing, maintenance, and servicing. Plus, the added benefit of supplying energy to connected stakeholders (warehousing and logistics hubs).
• IT (Information Technology) integration and ‘The Cloud’ – streamlining goods handling processes and reducing the number of goods movements within the port, saving time and energy consumed by loaders, forklift trucks and Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs)

1. Shell is developing a hydrogen hub through the Port of Rotterdam and the Hollandse Kust windfarm. Aiming to start production in 2023 it is expected to produce up to 60,000kg of hydrogen daily. This would in turn fuel 2,300 hydrogen-powered goods vehicles per day.
2. The Port of Amsterdam is also involved in a green hydrogen project with Tata Steel and Nouryon, with the aim to create a 100MW hydrogen plant using energy generated by offshore wind.
3. The Port of Aberdeen, Scotland is an accredited EcoPort and is playing a leading role in the region’s transition to a hydrogen economy, through the creation of an Energy Transition Zone. The Port of Aberdeen ETZ has primarily focused on renewables and their links to the wider transport network including hydrogen-fuelled buses and heavy goods vehicle fleets.

This article is a summary of a full feature article which you can read in our Net Zero Places Innovation Brief.

Global shipping depends on similar cargo handling facilities, repair yards and a ready supply of spare parts to keep breakdowns to a minimum. Therefore, how do we even start to change a whole system, made up of millions of moving parts that the world relies on?

CPC in partnership with Maritime UK, hosted the International Maritime Hub, bringing together innovators from across the globe working on the challenges of maritime decarbonisation. Here are the outcomes of their deliberations, though in reality the challenges the sector faces are continuous and solutions are unable to be found in one week.

The Department for Transport, Knowledge Transfer Network and Maritime UK hosted a session bringing together representatives from many of the projects in the recent Clean Maritime Demonstrator Competition, funded by the Department for Transport and delivered in partnership with Innovate UK. This was pivotal as a starting point for discussion.

Connected Places is pleased to be working with industry and academic partners in four of these successful projects, based at ports across the UK including Portsmouth International Port, PD Ports, Aberdeen Harbour and the Port of Tyne.

As part of the Prime Minister’s Ten Point Plan (announced in March 2020) to position the UK at the forefront of green shipbuilding and maritime technology, the Clean Maritime Demonstration Competition (CMDC) is a £20m investment from the government alongside a further £10m from industry to reduce emissions from the maritime sector. The programme is supporting 55 projects across the UK. Government funding has been utilised to support early-stage research relating to clean maritime. The programme will be used to support the research, design and development of zero-emission technology and infrastructure solutions for maritime and to accelerate decarbonisation in the sector.

Key speakers on the day:

• Robert Courts MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Maritime, spoke about the importance of making our transition to net-zero an economic opportunity for the UK.
• David Tozer, Head of Maritime and Land Transport at Innovate UK shared more on the high levels of engagement from industry.
• John Hutchison, Head of Maritime, Department for International trade outlined the support available to businesses and innovators

Five Clean Maritime Projects projects were showcased:

1. Electric charging infrastructure – Portsmouth Harbour
2. Hydrogen fuelled survey vessels – by Acua Marine
3. Clean energy offshore service vessels – Bibby Marine
4. Feasibility of electric port operations – Port of Belfast
5. Vertically Integrated ‘cloud based’ port operations – General Electric & Teeside University

Technology has always influenced the way the UK undertakes trade and the twenty-first century is no different from the sixteenth. The following organisations presented the impacts of new technology within the maritime sector:

Compagnie Maritime Belge (CMB), a Belgian shipping company, showcased an impressive range of hydrogen-powered innovations. These included hydrogen-powered heavy goods vehicles, floating hydrogen refuelling stations, multi-modal hydrogen refuelling hubs and hydrogen survey vessels.

BAE Systems, Varuna Marine Services and Lloyd’s Register, with a special introduction from Paul Little, founding Principal and CEO of The City of Glasgow College. Delivered thought-provoking presentations in the regard to the future of clean maritime. These ranged from the circular economy (shipbuilding in a modular format and decommissioning) to the handling of new propulsion systems, ways of working and regulatory aspects.

Whilst these challenges may seem vast in their complexity, much progress has been made in recent years and throughout COP26. As a result, the future for clean maritime looks promising.

Connected Places Catapult is pleased to see not only the progress at COP26 but also the work already ongoing in the UK with the Government’s support to accelerate our transition to a greener maritime and ports sector. We look forward to sharing more about our own work, together with our partners across industry and academia over the coming months.

To find out more about our Clean Maritime activities, simply click here.

A Freeport is defined as either a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) or a Free Trade Zone (FTZ). SEZs are geographical e.g., a region that covers all industrial and service sectors. An SEZ has beneficial tax, tariff and duty on goods and services. SEZs have differing commerce rules from the rest of the country. FTZs are known as ‘commercial-free zones’. Commonly they are fenced in, offer duty-free areas, warehousing and storage for goods transiting the UK.

Freeports have the potential to be powerful engines of regional growth, by attracting foreign direct investment and stimulating innovation and collaboration.

As part of the Government’s UK’s strategic objectives, Freeports have been devised to:

• Build Back Better – Freeports have the potential to be powerful engines of regional growth, by attracting foreign direct investment and stimulating innovation and collaboration.
• Levelling Up – To address regional inequalities for example ‘the North-South divide’ by providing opportunities not just in the South East by supporting regional economic growth nationally. As a UK government initiative ‘levelling up’ is a cross Whitehall departmental plan to implement better links with regional partners and decentralise power from the South East. The UK government has set up a £4.8 billion fund for regional infrastructure projects. Support is provided by the Department for Transport, Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government together with the treasury.
• Transition to Net Zero – Investment of £12 billion as an ‘enabler’ to facilitate industry, business and, transportation to plan for a ‘greener economy’

The majority of UK maritime ports and airports have an international outlook and global presence and this becomes even more important in the case of Freeports. UK Freeports have the opportunity to build a strong global position by building on the UK’s key relevant characteristics:

• attractive investment ground;
• a global reputation as a good place to do business;
• a robust platform for innovation; and
• ease of access to import and export markets.

The UK is in a extremely good position to take advantage and become a global player when implementing Freeports.

The benefits of locating in a Freeport are many:

• customs, reduced tariffs e.g. VAT,
• stamp Duty Land Tax;
• enhanced Structures and Building Allowance; and
• enhanced Capital Allowances.