Proposals should propose a storage technology which will be able to go beyond the state of art for on-board hydrogen storage with respect to the amount of energy stored, the space occupied per MWh of stored chemical energy, and the reduced shipping space (passengers/vehicles/containers), moving closer to current fuels properties and bunkering rates.

A complete fuel infrastructure should be described, including solutions to refuelling logistics, but not including the supply of hydrogen itself, nor taking into account whether the hydrogen supplied is used in fuel cells of different types, internal combustion engines, or gas turbines.

Proposals should also:

• Provide a realistic design study for storage tank integration into a marine or inland waterway vessel;
• Provide the design of a potential hydrogen supply chain for at least one real operational case of fossil fuel replacement, such as one or more daily ferry routes (mainland to islands or mainland to mainland), or one point to point transport line, or one multi point ferry or transport route (serviced daily or weekly);
• Provide cost estimates of the levelised cost of fuel supply, including cost of fuel storage;
• Provide cost estimates of the fuel infrastructure and storage CAPEX, and the operations OPEX (excluding the cost of hydrogen purchase);
• Provide an energy balance and LCA of the total fuel system (excluding hydrogen production), including potential uses of hydrogen in different propulsion systems;
• Address any safety measures and mitigation strategies;
• Provide an Approval in Principle by a certification body;
• Describe the scale-up to larger marine vessels, as well as the spill-over to road, off-road and rail applications (including scale-down, if applicable).

The following activities are out of scope for this topic:

• Technology and design developments concerning tank swap and mobile tank concepts;
• compression and liquefaction technologies;
• technologies which produce the hydrogen, such as electrolysers or ammonia synthesis;
• technologies that use the hydrogen, such as fuel cells, gas turbines, or internal combustion engines;
• technologies only aimed at terrestrial heavy-duty utilisation.